2025 HATCH Recipients
We are pleased to announce the recipients of the Dance Ireland 2025 Hatch Award.
Hatch is a flagship Dance Ireland award, offering seven awards that supports the evolving needs of dance artists across varied practices and career stages within Ireland’s dynamic dance ecology. Rooted in the principle of sustainability, Hatch enables space for creative reflection & process, connection, and artistic resilience.
With three distinct award categories, Hatch is designed to support artists in nurturing their practice, reimagining creative processes, and cultivating meaningful artistic exchange.
Three Dance Ireland Members will receive the Mentoring Award, while another three are awarded the Artistic Research Award. The Creation Award offers one artist an enhanced opportunity to experiment, collaborate, and begin developing a new work, supporting innovation and the growth of ideas that enrich a vibrant, connected, and sustainable dance landscape.
Hatch reflects Dance Ireland’s commitment to deepening connection within and between dance artists and advancing the art form with care, vision and purpose.
Creation Award
Róisín Whelan
Róisín will be working alongside Musical Director Ailbhe Kehoe on a new dance theatre work titled 'Ernie'. Ernie follows the world of one hospice carer and the relationship he develops with his four most beloved patients. They have now all passed away and their urns stand proudly in his living room, as they have no living relatives left to care for them. Ernie’s world revolves around the life lessons they have taught him, the memories they share of old fashioned dance halls and what’s to learn from late September arguments with their partners. Ernie draws upon the themes of illness, grief and loss but through the lens of joy and comedy, looking at how the simplest moments in life are often the most poignant.
'Ernie' is also supported through a Ceist Residency at Dance Cork Firkin Crane. Róisín will be working with writer Darren Donohue on developing text for this new work while in residency in Cork.
Read more about Róisín HERE
Image by Babs Daly
Artistic Research Award
Vivian Brodie Hayes
"Through the Hatch Award, I will have time to examine how movement, environment, and group dynamics can inform one another in both professional and community contexts. I want to develop material for a new trio dance work that can also be used with community groups. I will consider intuition and embodied knowledge and allow space for structure, dialogue and refinement. This work is grounded in time spent in nature as a way of attuning to rhythm, presence, and interconnectedness. My time will include solo movement research both in nature and in the studio, and time with dancers to experiment with the nature of the movement, score-based structures, spatial dynamics, and collaborative composition. I'll lead workshops with a local community group in Wexford to explore how this devised material can shift across different bodies and experiences and hope to learn new perspectives from participants. I will also have conversations with artists to support reflection on authorship, co-creation, and the important beginnings of shaping something open, intentional, and inclusive."
Read more about Vivian HERE
Image by Ailbhe O'Donnell
Lucia Kickham
"Having relocated my practice to my hometown of Enniscorthy in Co.Wexford the question what is my dance here? has surfaced. My practice is now engaging with a very different set of parameters, partly due to my being a new mother, and also because there is a different awareness of and experience with contemporary dance here. With this in mind I want to invite people into conversation with my work and it with them. I will have meetings with local people; both those related to arts work and the wider general public. Dance meetings. I will move and dance and we will talk about dancing and their experience of it and maybe they will also dance. When I say dance, you say…? What is it about dance… that keeps you coming back, that scares you, that prevents you from joining in, that makes you feel joyful?
It’s an experiment. Researching and improvising in conversation through movement and speech."
Read more about Lucia HERE
Image by Irene Occhiato
Jack Philp
Since relocating to Ireland, Jack has been focused on embedding his choreographic practice; merging dance, digital technology, and science, within the local arts ecology. This award from Dance Ireland will support a vital period of reflection, allowing Jack to strengthen connections, build new relationships, and lay the foundations for future work. His creative process, particularly when working with digital forms, is often iterative and conversation-driven; requiring time, space, and collaboration to develop ideas fully.
This opportunity offers the chance to resource that time meaningfully: to explore, test, and shape ideas alongside collaborators, while considering how his work can speak to and contribute to the Irish artistic landscape. Jack brings extensive experience as both artist and facilitator, and sees mentorship as a reciprocal process, supporting early-career artists while also staying connected to emerging perspectives. This award represents a key moment to invest in practice, connection, and the development of sustainable, future-facing work.
Read more about Jack HERE
Hatch Mentoring Award
Patrycja Kwiecień
"I plan to use the HATCH Award to create dedicated time and space to deepen my creative practice. Mentorship sessions will support the development of sustainable creative routines grounded in somatic and yogic practices. I intend to implement and reflect on these approaches between sessions, building a more integrated and responsive process. I will also create a simple documentation system to track ideas, questions, and progress throughout the mentorship, helping integrate new insights into my artistic approach.
This focused time will allow me to explore the intersection of dance, film, and interdisciplinary practices, refining how somatic awareness and embodied exploration inform my creative process. By integrating movement and visual art, I aim to strengthen the foundation of my multidisciplinary approach.
The award will also support access to materials and workshops that will help me further develop a grounded, sustainable foundation for my artistic practice."
Read more about Patrycja HERE
Image credit: Patrycja Konieczna
Rosie Mullin
"Since 2023, I have received three dance residencies from Galway Dance Project and Shawbrook Dance and in 2024, I was a recipient of a Dance Bursary from the Irish Arts Council. These opportunities provided me with the space to experiment with new concepts and construct the foundations of my fi rst full-length work, ‘Obedient Lamb’. In my practice right now I’m interested in how to evolve dance, to make it a shared language for me and the audience, that speaks to people’s lived experiences and invites people in rather than keeping them out. With 12 years of community dance engagement behind me, I recognise my focus and biggest joy has always been in connecting with local communities and exploring how dance can live outside the traditional black box space. This award will give me a reason to focus on my artistic ambitions and receive support from a fellow peer in the curation of my artistic voice."
Read more about Rosie HERE
Image credit: @camaumillee
Martha Tribe
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"I am excited to receive mentorship through the Dance Ireland HATCH Award. As an early career artist I want to understand how to build a sustainable career that continues to simultaneously develop my work as a performer, choreographer and researcher. The overlap of these practices is important to my work as a dance artist and I am keen to learn from the experiences of established artists’ who also value this within their career. I am interested to learn more about the funding landscape in Ireland and producing my own work. This mentorship scheme will allow me to receive tailored advice for my creative and professional interests. I am excited to engage with the other artists on the Hatch Award and learn more about their practices."
Read more about Martha HERE
Image by Neil Hainsworth