Sometimes we break (again)

Design for performance

In March this year I got to work with junk ensemble again for the first time since Drinking Dust. Another manky disused space transformed into something a little magical, if I do say so myself.

They were reprising Sometimes We Break, a performance they had originally made for the (much cleaner) Tate Britain in 2012. The original version had been designed by Jo Timmins, and made for family audiences – they asked me to take elements of her design and work with them to re-construct the piece in a (literally and figuratively) darker space. We had the use of two connected warehouses on Barrow Street in Dublin, and the performance was part of Mind Your Step, a walking tour-type season of Irish contemporary dance.

Some before and afters:

We had two days to clear the warehouses, install all technical and design elements, and to tech the 20 minute performance. Sarah Jane Shiels managed to light the place beautifully. But all thanks are due to the stalwart Mags Mulvey (our stage manager) and her team, who spent a full day moving all the disgusting junk from the two warehouses into one corner in a bid to make something aesthetically pleasing/not harmful.

Most of my work focused on the set up of five doll house in diorama-type environments:

IETM Bergamo 2015

Other work

Thanks to a Travel and Training grant from the Arts Council, I was able to get to the Spring Plenary of the IETM network in the Italian hilltop city of Bergamo earlier this year. Surprisingly beautiful, seeing as it’s the Ryanair Beauvais of Milan.

A room with a view

A room with a view

This was a very active meeting for me, and not just on the cheese-eating front. Firstly – the small cobbled streets of the old town were great for networking. As well as catching up with lots of old faces, I met lots of new ones too. Great cheese-based meals were had lovely new contacts including Christian Barry of 2b theatre (Nova Scotia), Ravi Jain of Why Not Theatre (Toronto), Kate Denborough of Kage (Melbourne), Riccardo Fazi of MutoImago (Rome), Linda Di Pietro of Terni Festival, and Tim Stitz of Chamber Made Opera (Melbourne) among others.

I was asked to work with Grzegorz Reske, a Polish cultural manager and curator, to facilitate a discussion he’d proposed on retiring – why, when and how to step away from a project or organisation, particularly one that you have built up around yourself. This turned out to be a much more live topic than I’d appreciated, with lots of insightful and honest contributions from Judith Knight of ArtsAdmin, Gavin Quinn of Pan Pan, Fabio Feretti of Association Etre, Chrissie Poulter of TCD and many more.

Two things that still stick in my mind from this session: Massimo Mancini of Teatro Stabile in Cagliari, Sardinia saying that his working rule is to stay 4 years for something that already exists and 7 years for something he’s created himself. And Liz Pugh of Walk The Plank in Salford talking about the need for a funeral at the end of a project – thinking about whether the body is present or not, whether the mourner have a furious wake or whether everyone slips away home after the ceremony without making eye-contact.

I was also asked to be a participant in the Mentor Room session, where you’re paired with a second mentor and talk for a couple of hours with someone who has a question about their practice. In reality it’s more along the lines of coaching than mentoring, and was an exercise in listening and asking questions, rather than giving advice or opinion. It was great to talk to a young Italian woman about her struggles in deciding how to be both an artist herself (a dancer) and a producer for other people’s. Familiar territory.

Finally, I did a 3 minute presentation as part of the Newsround session to talk about the website I’ve been working on for Irish Theatre Institute highlighting Irish designers for stage and screen. You can see details of everyone who presented at that session here. Thankfully there’s a long-standing IETM tradition of giving newsround participants a shot of the local strong alcohol (grappa in this case) after their 3 minutes are up, because I was bricking it.

My favourite non-art thing that happened was being semi-kidnapped for 20 minutes by a local Bergamasco man who I could barely understand, and being force marched with Gavin Quinn & Aoife White to walk around and photograph the town’s cathedral from every possible angle.

Not true. My favourite non-art thing was the cheese.

2015-04-26 19.24.11

A nice wall. Not the cathedral.

 

A Girl and Star of the Sea on tour

Design for performance

Very happy that the two shows I designed last year, Star of the Sea for Moonfish Theatre and A Girl is a Half-formed Thing for The Corn Exchange, are both off on tour this year.

A Girl has already been remounted in the MAC Belfast and at Norfolk and Norwich Festival this year, and next up is the Traverse for the Edinburgh Fringe – where we’ll be in the company of lovely people all round: Sonya Kelly with How To Keep An Alien, Tim Crouch with An Oak Tree and Bryony Kimmings with Fake It Til You Make It, among others. More dates and venues for 2016 are in the pipeline.

Thanks to a touring grant from the Arts Council, Moonfish’s Star of the Sea will be heading off on an Irish tour in September and October, starting back in the Taibhdhearc. As I write I’m back on the Galway GoBus with my sketchbook from last year for a meeting with the team to see how to put it all back together again.

Star of the Sea sketchbook

Star of the Sea sketchbook