All in a day's work: Mary Brady, Artistic Director, Institute for Choreography and Dance, Cork

I whisk the children off to school early and get to my desk by 8.30 a.m. I love this quiet time in the morning after the first chaos abates and before the next begins.

I dispatch with the paperwork quickly - there's too much excitement all around to spend the day stuck at my desk. This building is teeming with life - young dance students bounding in for tuition, choreographers from all over the world working on exciting projects, professional dancers practising for the summer's performances - a walk down the corridor can be exhilarating. The Kirov Ballet principal dancers are here at the moment and the corridors are full of cameras rolling. The building is alive.

As artistic director my raison d'etre is to get all this creativity and electricity out into the community. We are currently preparing for the Fête de la Danse season, a series of French choreographic works which should get local people out for a night of dance. It's not all curtains and greasepaint. The season mixes contemporary, cutting edge dance installations with more traditional performances. We're also putting a new twist to the old set pieces. Our version of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring reworks its central theme, the sacrifice of the virgin maiden to the gods, as the sacrifice that two people must make in a relationship.

The institute has a responsibility to Irish dance too. We are currently preparing our inaugural journal, Choreographic Encounters, with the dance writer in residence, Diana Theodores. Called Dancing on the Edge of Europe, the work will examine Ireland's role in the development of international dance. We have moved relatively slowly in terms of innovation but there is a future for Ireland in the development of dance and this book explores that.

Before lunch I have a meeting with the project team for the preparation of Cork as the cultural capital of Europe. I am deeply ensconced in the process of establishing the role of the dance in the culture of this city. Relating our medium to the outside world is a constant concern of mine.

Art makes sense of the world around us and dance is no different. It has a place in its community. We have a dance programme for older people in association with the Southern Health Board and are creating a local dance production called Safe Harbour, which examines local life through dance. I want to take our dance works out into the city and connect them with sites other than the traditional theatre spaces.

At lunchtime the coffee bar is a riot of interesting people, milling around, discussing their projects. I make a point of getting there for lunch to see what's going on. The institute looks like a French outpost in the middle of Shandon, festooned with flags for the fête.

After lunch I conduct interviews for the appointment of a dancer in residence for a new FÁS Community Training Scheme in dance. This will go a long way towards keeping Irish dance firmly rooted in the community. After the interviews I meet with some local artists looking at developing dance practice and in need of some advice.

I grab a little quiet time in the afternoon to work on our inaugural journal. This is a whole new challenge for me. I'm in virtual contact with contributors from all over the world, pulling in material and editing it for publication. The journal examines the peculiar art of dance writing. The dancer must communicate outside his or her world, and there are ways of expressing dance concepts to a lay audience. This is a unique project in Europe, a valuable tool for choreographic research.

After all that office time I'm dying to get into the studio and work on my own dance projects for a while. I am, after all, originally a dancer. This is wacky job that can take you off in myriad directions. I have to get back to the basics.

At home in the evening I love nothing better than a bit of slow cooking. I don't get too creative; I just stick to quality ingredients, thoughtfully prepared. I care about what goes into my body so I stay away from fast and processed food. I enjoy the slowness of healthy, simple cooking. Slow eating is important too. Every evening the whole family sits down for a meal with no distractions. The French know how to dance - they know how to eat too.

In conversation with Louise Holden