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E DANCE WE MEET JAZMÍN CHIODI OF DUBLIN DANCE FES
TIVAL WORDS John Brereton Scorched Earth, Photo: Luke Murphy What do Selena Gomez, Ang Lee, Cate Blanchett, Tim Burton, Kylie Minogue, George Clooney, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Glass, Rudolf Nureyev, Yohji Yamamoto, William S Burroughs, Dirk Bogarde and Jazmín Chiodi have in common? They are all recipients of the French cultural award, the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, recognizing significant contributions to the arts, literature, or the propagation of these fields and to have significantly contributed to the enrichment of the French cultural inheritance. A nice accolade for sure but you get the sense that while Jazmín Chiodi, the codirector of the Dublin Dance Festival, is suitably honoured – “an incredible acknowledgement to the work that I had done all of these years” – her greatest privilege right now is the cut and thrust of Festival programming, a position she has held since 2021. Jazmín has been living in Ireland for the last twenty years after dancing professionally in France but her personal journey began in Tandil, a small town outside Buenos Aires. “It looks a little bit like Connemara, very rocky and a little bit hilly. It’s where I was born, and then I moved to Buenos Aires city when I was very little. I think my mother understood very quickly when she saw me dancing in the living room every day at the age of five, to music like Tchaikovsky and 15