And yet, when I talk to Young a sense of meditative reason pervades the air, even while the petrol stations are starting to run dry. She is a choreographer who looks to the distant past in order to make sense of the now. We discuss her multi-cultural dance training, our human need for ecological connection, and finding common ground. This conversation has been edited for clarity.

Your dance training was a little unorthodox compared to the path most others in Western Europe might take, tell us a bit about it.

As a kid I was learning in the Carl Orff method of music and dance and improvisation, the grounding in emphasis on music and creativity has fed through my work. I think being a choreographer was nearly inevitable. I was also doing ballet classes which frustrated me because we were never dancing, just repeating exercises. But as I got into my teens, since my mother couldn’t drive, there was nowhere around me in Dublin around me to keep up my training. It wasn’t until I moved to San Francisco that I actually started dancing again.

As I was doing my dance degree, I was waiting to go to a ballet class when I started to hear this amazing sound of drumming, and I looked through the window to see this full gymnasium hall of about sixty dancers and twelve drummers. I had never seen anything like it. It was an Afro-Haitian dance class, and so I signed up for it. It changed my whole trajectory and I never looked back. Most of my teachers in San Francisco were African American so we were being taught dance and its history through that lens. Valerie Watson was my teacher, and she’s very steeped in the Yoruba tradition, so dance for her was more than entertainment. Other teachers would teach us about the African American struggle in America and how dance played a role in that. Dance was political. It was a tool for survival, for building community, for making change, so dance became a really empowering thing. 

I still go a lot to West Africa to train and you see how dance functions in society. It’s not an art on the periphery, it’s integral to how the area works. I guess I’m channeling all of that now in this show, drawing inspiration from those cultures that haven’t lost the centrality of that. 

Your work tends to be quite involved in social issues. Was that intentional following your training?

It wasn’t really a deliberate choice to make socially engaged work, it was organic. When I came back to Ireland in 2005, coming from multicultural San Francisco, I wanted that mixture and I missed that. While I was on a residency in Kerry, I was looking for that vibrancy and colour and that’s how I came into working with asylum seekers and refugees. I knew those beautiful cultures were here and I wanted to engage with it and connect with it. Through that I met Ahmed Lulu who taught us Palestinian dabke and we got to take the show to Palestine. 

Studying all of these different dance cultures made me eventually come back to my own. I never grew up doing Irish dance but then you’re standing there in Rafah being asked by the locals to show some of your own only to realise I didn't have any. Over lockdown I started learning Sean-nós, and part of this show is that journey coming back to Irish culture.