Some creative unsticking

Design for performance

Unsurprisingly, Covid slowed down projects I was working on, and knocked some out completely. It also knocked my confidence as an artist – primarily because of the lack of regular creative work, a dearth of substantive contact with other artists, and having to adapt to new ways of working that weren’t always conducive to my creativity.

So it was a real pleasure recently to be able to finally air some ideas for a set design project that had straddled a lot of that Covid time, with a work in progress showing nearly two years after we first started talking about it. The Holding Bones project hit a load of bumps in the road, but the show was changing shape and bursting to come to life. And it helped keep me connected with some kind of creative life too.

I’ve known Niamh Lawlor of Puca Puppets for many years though we have never worked together. So I was pleased when in late 2020 she asked me to help design a production that was a bit of a departure for her. Even more so when I heard she’s also asked director Veronica Coburn and sound designer/composer Sinéad Diskin to work on it. Two women with strong theatre practices, who I respect hugely and hadn’t yet had an opportunity to work with.

The Holding Bones is a one woman show about death and about our connection with ancestors and family. It’s gentle and sad and funny. It’s written by Niamh about her family, and this was the first time she’d be working in this way, with a director and designers. She is a skilled artist and multitasker who is used to doing it all herself. She also has a long career as a deft puppeteer, and it was clear we should use her talents to help tell the story – even though it was adamantly not a puppet show. Or even a show with puppets.

We started out deep in early 2021 lockdown. Like many others, we were anxiously trying to figure out how to do our creative work via Zoom. Building up a meaningful artistic language between people working together collaboratively for the first time is a complex enough process. It turns out that doing it online dulls a lot of the organic, human connections that I didn’t even realise were going on in previous processes. How to do something meaningful and inventive and joyful and three dimensional while talking to small faces on a screen in my spare room. At the end of 2021 we progressed to meeting in a room, masks carefully on. My first time physically in rehearsals since autumn 2020. I found both these online and offline experiences unsettling and nerve-wracking. Was it obvious to everyone that I was off my stride? That I was struggling to remember how to think as a designer? That I felt a bit creatively shrivelled?

In the room together we had the time to play. I’d almost forgotten how. To not focus too much on the final product yet. To develop a visual and aural language that suited the piece, and that wove all of our aesthetics and ideas in. We played with paper and light and clay and music and drawings and yarn and voice and plastic sheeting and tinfoil and sound. We tried to find ways of populating the stage around Niamh with other beings. Veronica and I both wanted to see Niamh the artist on stage – a glimpse of her overcrowded workspace, her beautiful drawings, the way her hands make objects come to life. I didn’t have enough time. I felt I could have spent at least another week or two or more in this process of bringing the materials to life and finding out which ones would serve best.

By the time we did a work in progress showing of The Holding Bones in the Civic Theatre at the end of 2022, I had designed two full productions since Covid – Sing Your Failures and Hive City Legacy – and was feeling a bit more confident again in my creative abilities (though I still resist having creative conversations via Zoom). Niamh and Veronica had created an almost fully-formed show, and we had come up with a satisfying design that would allow for further exploration and development, should The Holding Bones get a further life. We felt it was in a very good state. It had been a slow road to get to this point and Niamh had put so much energy and work and inventiveness into the piece – I primarily wanted to make sure she was happy with how it had all come out.

In the Civic studio, on a wintery Saturday afternoon, Veronica and I talked the assembled audience through what they were about to see, how we had worked together, and our hopes for the future physical staging of the piece. And we sat back and watched Niamh weave her gentle magic over the people in the room.

I can’t honestly say that I feel fully creatively unstuck yet. At all. The last few years have been frustrating from that point of view. But doing things like playing with the team on The Holding Bones has kept me buoyed up enough to keep swimming into this new year.

Two years of talking

Event coordination, Other work

My website has been quite neglected of late. But I have a good excuse in the form of #WakingTheFeminists.

Other than all the practical logistics of being involved in the core team that coordinated the whole campaign (that small thing), I also dove head-first into the world of public speaking – not something I took to easily, but managed to get through it thanks to a lot of peer support and endless preparation. I hadn’t spoken much in public before, at all. All I can say is that it gets easier (and even enjoyable) over time – and I’ve been lucky to have had the opportunity for a lot of practice over the past two years.

Here’s (more or less) all the things I’ve spoken at to date in relation to #WakingTheFeminists – from small groups of students in seminar rooms, to 1500+ people in the Bord Gais Energy Theatre. There are probably a few I’ve missed, but you get the idea.

And that doesn’t count radio, TV or print media interviews. But that’s a whole other story…

Photo by Kate Horgan

  • #WakingTheFeminists public meeting, Abbey Theatre 2015
  • Theatre Upstairs post show discussion 2015
  • Trinity Drama & Theatre studies Contemporary Irish Theatre in Context seminars 2015 & 16
  • NUI Galway seminars 2015 & 16
  • Theatre of Change Symposium presentation, Abbey Theatre 2016
  • UCD Arts Administration seminar 2016
  • Lir Academy seminar 2016
  • Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards acceptance speech, National Concert Hall 2016
  • IETM plenary meetings, Amsterdam, Valencia, Bucharest 2015-17
  • #WakingTheFeminists Spring Forward public event, Liberty Hall 2016
  • TCD Law Society panel discussion 2016
  • F Festival panel discussion, Back Loft 2016
  • Luoghi Comuni Festival panel discussion, Milan 2016
  • Dublin Junior Chamber International awards 2016
  • Offset panel discussion, Bord Gais Energy Theatre 2016
  • Drogheda Arts Festival ‘Dissenters’ event 2016
  • Gaiety School of Acting seminar 2016
  • Nottingham European Arts and Theatre Festival presentation 2016
  • All Ireland Performing Arts Conference panel discussion, Town Hall Theatre Galway 2016
  • Body and Soul Festival, panel discussion 2016
  • Visual Arts Workers Forum presentation, Gluksman Gallery, 2016
  • Cork Midsummer Festival presentation, Triskel 2016
  • Inspirefest presentation, Bord Gais Energy Theatre 2016
  • UC Berkeley seminar Dublin 2016
  • Culture Night panel discussion for RTE Arena, Dublin Castle 2016
  • University of Limerick seminar 2016
  • Creative Minds series panel discussion, US Ambassador’s residence 2016
  • #WakingTheFeminists One Thing More event, Abbey Theatre 2016
  • Sibeal Conference in conversation, NUI Galway 2016
  • TCD Philosophical Society presentation 2017
  • Creative Ireland Gender Policy workshop 2017
  • Women of the World festival presentation & panel discussion, Hull 2017
  • Rough Magic’s ‘The Train’ panel discussion, Abbey Theatre 2017
  • Circus & Gender conference presentation, Mercat de los Flores Barcelona 2017
  • Arts Council’s Future Retrospectives panel discussion, Science Gallery 2017
  • UCD theatre studies seminar 2017
  • Sandymount Study Group & Curious Dolls Study Group presentations 2017
  • Sugarglass Theatre post show discussion 2017
  • Pori Theatre Festival in conversation, Finland 2017

 

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It’s all go.

Design for performance, Event coordination

A bit of an overview post of the past couple of months. It’s been busy.

2015-04-22 10.16.28– A Girl is a Half-formed Thing won a Fringe First and the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award 2015 during its run at the Traverse this August. Aoife Duffin also won the Award for Acting Excellence from The Stage. The London run at the Young Vic for early 2016 has been announced.

– I designed for performances in more dusty disused spaces: a doll factory in Crolly, Co. Donegal, and an unused shop unit in Smithfield, Dublin. More to follow on these.

– My photo (right) was used for the front cover of the Earagail Arts Festival brochure.

– I’ve been selected to take part in the Theatre Forum/Dublin Theatre Festival Next Stage programme later this month – aka theatre bootcamp.

– I was invited to take part in a lovely Dinner and Dialogue event to talk about good design in a beautiful Georgian house in Dublin’s city centre, as part of the year of Irish Design.

– Moonfish Theatre’s Star of the Sea is fitting up again this week for its national tour, including a few days as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival.

– Thanks to grants from the Arts Council’s Theatre Artist Development Scheme I’m developing a pilot initiative with Mermaid Arts Centre called Gap Days for freelance theatre workers to take paid days to think, dream and plan for later this year, as well as preparing for year four of the Pan Pan International Mentorship programme.

Like I said, all go.

Design for Stage and Screen Ireland website

Design for performance

Earlier this year I worked with Ewa Segner and Siobhán Bourke of Irish Theatre Institute to compile a website to highlight stage and screen designers coming from and working in Ireland.

You can access the website here. It is in Beta mode for the next few weeks, and the content is being updated and added to every day – an ever-growing catalogue of the work of costume, set, lighting and sound designers/composers who design for the stage, and production, hair, makeup and costume designers who design for screen.

A Girl is a Half Formed Thing horizon ideas sketch

A Girl is a Half Formed Thing horizon ideas sketch

Most exciting (for me) is the chance to see some of the sketches side by side with the final production images – it’s always a treat to see the development of ideas, and the idiosyncratic ways that designers approach their work.

The timing of the website going live in June was to coincide with both the year of Irish Design and the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. However, it is a resource that will be kept up by ITI, along the same lines as their Playography and Irishtheatre.ie sites.

Ireland mapping report for IETM

Other work

Screen Shot 2015-06-19 at 18.05.02Earlier this year, I was commissioned by the secretariat of the IETM international network to write a ‘mapping’ report that outlines the current situation of the contemporary performing arts in Ireland. Incredibly difficult to distill it all down, but I had a go.

Here it is in all its sweeping, unsubtle, gap-filled glory.

(Thanks to Cian O’Brien of Project Arts Centre for being the outside eye and reassuring me that you’d never guess from reading it that I was a left-leaning liberal.)

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