Flora Fauna Project is an artist led collaboration + production company by choreographer Maria Nilsson Waller and multidisciplinary artist Stace Gill (The Sei). Rooted in dance and music, we mainly create work for stage, film and installation, with professional dancers, non professionals and communities.
We are looking for brave, ambitious, new and thought-provoking ways to communicate, engage and connect with our audiences, both on and off stage. We want our work to inspire hope in our audiences and collaborators, that we live in a beautiful world at a pivotal time and we have much influence on the future we set in motion. Flora Fauna Project brings people together, reminding us that we are not alone and there is power in numbers. In all our workwe want to communicate this: There is strength in truth and this prevails when we tune into ourselves honestly. We are all loaded with natural intelligence.
The practice and method of Flora Fauna Project is a unique blend of movement practice and philosophy informed by Maria’s 17 years experience as a dance artist and teacher and Stace’s BA in Montessori Philosophy/Education, a long career as an artist and her daily yoga discipline. We believe that the creative and artistic process gives a space, tools and a language in which we grow to understand ourselves and our world better.
Artistic focus is a super power. All those who joined us so far were directed back to themselves by bringing the imagination into collaboration with the body in a supported and creative space. Explorative, playful and hopeful, our aim is rediscover the world and ourselves again with open minds and alert hearts.
Flora Fauna Project is an non- judgemental space where we inspire and support each other in order to bring out each collaborators full potential. We want to create good examples of fair and constructive working conditions where art and creativity are truly valued and can be unleashed as a powerful force of growth and positive change. This is the ethos in all the work we do.
Honest conversations around current global issues including sustainability, evolution, our relationship to nature and each other are urgent and need to take place in every area of our society, including the arts. Theatres are vital meeting points in our society where new ideas and dreams can be shared, discussed, explored and addressed, shifting our communal direction towards a better world. We include audience conversations in our stage work, and these dialogues, in our experience, have been an important coming together and a space for deep contemplation around themes of societys fear of the wild, natural inteligence, abuse, gender, relationship to nature, to self, to each other, to earth.
We believe we cannot truly save the planet until we love it first, and we cannot love until we know and love ourselves and each other. We cannot bypass the body, this is where we start. What is more trust worthy than nature?
Flora Fauna Project is primarily based in Glendalough, Ireland and Östersund, Sweden. We are Dance Artists in Residence atD-Light Studios, Dublin. We are committed to finding ways to keep our international cultural exchange going, and spend some of our time on tour. Travelling via land and sea, we are looking for sustainble ways to share our work often focusing on rural communities and alternative venues.
Besides D-Light Studios, other partners to date has been: Kulturrådet, Estrad Norr, Project Arts Centre, Dance Ireland, DCC/NEIC, Konstnärsnämnden, The Irish Arts Council, Dans i Örebro Län, Riksteatern Hallunda and Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.