"I see a line, and that makes me move."
Inma Pavon will be Cork City Music Library's first dancer-in-residence in 2023, but her unique brand of contemporary dance is more frequently inspired by drawing, painting and writing than by music.
At the centre of the labyrinth in the grounds of St Fin Barre’s Cathedral on a frosty morning, a small woman, bundled up against the cold, is performing a series of graceful motions.
The movements look something like Tai Chi, but she is dancing her own name. Later, she will scribble four letters, I..N..M..A, in a notebook, to explain how the shapes of the letters are reflected in her dance.
When Maria Inmaculada Moya Pavón was eight, the Casa de la Cultura, a government-funded multidisciplinary arts centre, opened up just 100 metres from where she lived in the Spanish tourist town of Fuengirola.
Inma Pavon, as she is known in Cork, was one of five children: her father a taxi-driver, mostly ferrying tanked-up, lobster-red English and Irish holidaymakers around the seaside resort town. Her mother was a seamstress.
“Casa de la Cultura had everything: music, dance, painting, languages,” Inma tells me. “And it was subsidised by the government. You could enrol in dance very cheap.”
Already an active child who loved basketball, handball and swimming, Inma enrolled in ballet, taking the bus to Madrid annually with all the other girls and their mothers to do grading exams.
Later, in Cork in her early twenties, having moved to Ireland as an Au Pair, Inma would study with Alan Foley in the Firkin Crane, but the strictures of ballet as a dedicated art form were not for her: the style of contemporary dance she has advanced through years of studying, teaching and performing combines elements of martial arts and Tai Chi with a wide variety of different influences.
“For me, ballet was too hard on my feet,” she says. “The pain was impossible. I didn’t want dance to be painful in that way. I do ballet bar in my dance classes because it’s good for you, but I love the combination of a bit of ballet discipline, contemporary floor work which is very like a martial art, a bit of yoga.”
With an MA in Contemporary Dance Performance from the University of Limerick in 2003 under her belt, Inma developed her own choreographic ideas, found herself drawn to creating an alphabet of movements that allow her to write with her body, the movements she was demonstrating to me in the Labyrinth.
The muse
As a regular life model in the Crawford Art College, a frequenter of art galleries, and a collaborator with everyone from poets to circus performers to experimental sound artists, Inma has become a fixture in Cork art circles over the course of the 28 years she’s been living and working in Ireland.
Her weekly nude modelling for the third year students of the Crawford requires being comfortable in her own skin, Inma says, but it comes with perks: she gets to see the artists develop their practice and this in turn becomes a source of inspiration for her.
“When I’m in Spain I always wear a full bikini, I never even go topless,” she says. “But there’s something different about being a subject for art and it’s a really good thing. It makes you very humble: we’re just a body. It puts you back into a state like a baby, very creative.”
“They put all the heaters on for me. I prepare myself with some yoga and stretches, and I have to have something in my mind. I can work through a lot of choreography but it’s also how I started meditating.”
Inma started sitting for the artist Lorraine Cooke while she was studying dance full-time with Mary Gibson in Cork in the late nineties, not long after she came to live in Ireland.
“It was amazing,” she says. “Can you imagine that stillness? For a dancer?”
As the sitter, Inma gets a unique perspective on the process the art students are developing; this immersion in process is something she brings to her own dance practice.
“I see some of them come from first year, into second year, see them develop and the process is so beautiful,” she says. “Some of them think they can’t draw, because they don’t have enough faith in the expression of the line. Some of them think they need to be perfect: you never need to be perfect.” She smiles.
In dance, this tendency to focus on a perfect product bothers her too: it’s not what she hopes to achieve.
“Normally we don’t see the process, we see the final piece,” she says. “But the process itself is a thing. When you see painters sketching, they are putting in lines, bit by bit they are building up something. This sketching, these lines, if you stop to look, is already for me a beautiful piece. And sometimes that’s missing in dance: you work in the studio, and then you show something. But the process is beautiful, just gorgeous. So how to show the process as a final thing?”
She says the desire for the subtle, the genuinely interesting over the flamboyant, is growing as she ages.
“I’m getting older now, 48, so the body is getting a little bit slow,” she says. “But I’m not in an urge to be spectacular, more about curiosity: how can I make a movement that’s more interesting for the viewer, how can we look at the body in a different way, that’s not about the young body and this perfectionist approach. How can I still move in a creative way that’s still interesting for me, for the audience.”
In early 2023, Inma is going to become Cork City Music Library’s first ever dancer in residence. She has plenty planned: regular Saturday dance workshops, open to all; screenings of dance films, collaborations and performances.
Ironically, though, she says she’s not often drawn to choreographing to rhythmic music. “To me, music is there to inspire me,” she says. “I see it as energy: sometimes it’s like a wind pushing me. I can’t choreograph to every note though.”
“I am more drawn by visuals, the idea of drawing. I see a line and that makes me move.”
Libraries and dance may not seem like a natural fit: we think of libraries as silent places. But Inma is a big believer in dance for all, and in taking dance off the stage, out of the studio, away from mirrors.
She’s already been working with Cork City Library Poet in Residence Keith Payne on a series of workshops they call The Body, The Poem, The Body. The library also has a donated collection of dance books to provide inspiration.
“Something I dreamed about was going to the library and closing my eyes and moving around and when your hand touches something, whatever book or CD is there, take it,” she says. “I want to do that. I want to go to shelves where I’ve never been before.”
“All of that inspires me to move. It’s a language, when we move. It communicates a lot. Sometimes, with dance you can express things much more quickly: you can express so much through writing, painting. But the body it communicates quicker, because we all have a body.”
Keep an eye on Cork City Library’s events page and social media for details of Inma Pavon’s programme of dance workshops and events from January to May 2023.