My name is Janie Doherty. I am an artist from Derry and now I live in Belfast where it is a bit more grey and industrial.
Here is some inside info you might not know and things that are swirling around for me at the moment.
Growing up post troubles, I was very aware that very bad things happened and my family did a good job of explaining it all without being too one sided i think? When I came along, I had missed it although it hung in the air like a bad smell.
My granny Annie Doherty was a tea leaf reader from the Bogside, she was quite famous and looked after the catalogues and helped people get what they needed, she held space for a lot of people in the bogside during the 70’s. My aunt Maureen brought up eight children and lost two sons to the troubles. Her house was always immaculate, even the imperial leather soap never had any suds on it.. I wonder if she was cleaning the soap after each use to keep it looking so perfect? My mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, although you would never know.. She is reliant on pharmaceuticals to keep everything level and she is the most wise and sweet woman you have ever met.
I grew up among women holding it together, putting on brave faces, looking glamorous and hosting dinner parties. It is a beautiful quality that I have inherited and I am great at it. However I am realising that if you keep holding shit together too much, you’ll eventually get bowel cancer or become unwell. The body says no - Gabort Mate.
I have always danced and loved being expressive in all ways. After graduating with a BA Hons in dance in University of Ulster, I joined Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company as an ensemble member for six years and created work, taught on the outreach programme and trained in a deep, authentic way of improvisation coined ‘poetic movement’ by artistic director Steve Batts. It was my most informative years about how movement is read onstage, instantaneous composition and the detail of performance. Through facilitating dance in a variety of halls, rooms and places, I have built up an acute awareness of how to guide groups in an artistic way, dancing through life with thousands of people of different ages and abilities has helped me develop into an empathetic person and i believe that we all just want to be understood and loved for who we are.
I also worked in a bakery for a few years and fell deep into the bakery oven of robust life advice, community gossip, banter as a skill and the warmth of derry women. My home town, my beautiful home place of derry, where the fastest river in europe flows through - closely linked to an extremely high number of suicides from mostly young men who have lost hope. The place is absolutely drenched in historical and political history and the people keep their spirits up to keep going. The charm and wit is so dry, that outsiders often feel they can’t enter into the humour.
I am interested in intertwining my personal life experience with my art in a deeply authentic and realistic way. I am interested in creating empathetic resonance in the audience, I am interested in story telling and sitting around a table airing out problems with friends to de-tangle them in your own mind. A cup of tea is right for all occasions, big and small. I believe our lineage is carried in our bodies, we have embodied our ancestors and intergenerational trauma is passed down through us. It’s the twelve year olds building the bonfires with the same pride and shit they’ve carried on for their Das.
There is no separation for me between who I am at home and who I am onstage. Everything drips out anyway, i can choose to hide it or i can choose to become empowered by the vulnerabilities and strengths that are there… I am attempting to do justice to all the women who have held anything together, at any time of their life. It is local and universal, we all understand that as we all came out of a vagina. Can I create an environment where people feel like they can be settled in their own skin?
I qualified as a sports masseuse, to wring out the flesh in others, to help shift pain, old emotional war wounds and sadness. To help others feel light. I believe our issues are in our tissues and I enjoy wringing it out because we definitely don’t need the amount of shit we are constantly carrying, the shit that is weighing us down. It is a life practice. I am attempting to move towards pleasure and joy in all that I do.