Our partner Dunamaise Arts Centre supported and hosted our first week of rehearsals for Guest Host Stranger Ghost in Portlaoise this July. I wrote a blog about the experience, which you can read here.
L-R: Finbarr Doyle, Olamide Mariam Oladapo, Maeve O’Mahony, Kate Heffernan, Shadaan Felfeli, Eoghan Carrick
The latest news. Peat has been commissioned by The Ark, and this summer Tim Crouch has been working with me as director.
In June, a work-in-progress excerpt was shown as part of Still Loading – a mini-festival of new performances-in-progress for children, curated by The Ark’s Children’s Council.
Peat is taking shape. A final form has been emerging this year, its story taking a solid shape. A box that represents the bog, the secrets of the ground held in its packaged objects, a story unboxed.
Tim and I continue to work on its development this autumn.
Written by Kate Heffernan. Directed by Tim Crouch. Showing performed by Clare Dunne and Marcus Lamb. Commissioned and produced by The Ark. Development supported by Mermaid Arts Centre.
“The Arts Council is committed to supporting emerging artists of promise. One of the ways we do this is through the Next Generation Bursary Award which supports professional artists from across Ireland at an early stage of their career.”
I am proud to have been a recipient of this award for 2017.
With the crucial financial freedom provided by the bursary, as well as the support of Mermaid Arts Centre, I have spent the year immersed in my practice, further developing and finding opportunities to produce Montague, Peat, Dolly, as well as working on the early stages of new ideas.
The award has given me the time and space to find the next stories; to create, dream, plan, test, reflect; to think strategically about the future; to find opportunities, platforms and networks for my work. It has been an incredibly rewarding and fruitful year.
As part of the bursary, I joined 12 other Next Generation artists at a week-long residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig in County Monaghan.
A residential workplace for artists, the centre was founded by the visionary theatre maker William Tyrone Guthrie who, with the advice and encouragement of his family, bequeathed his entire estate and family home to the State with the proviso that it would be used for the benefit of artists.
The bursary recipients came from a wide variety of artistic practices: visual art, music, opera, dance, traditional arts, film, circus, architecture, literature. The week was a mix of working solo on our own projects, sharing work, and a lively and invigorating mix of conversation and debate.
It is difficult to describe how inspiring our time together was. Realising the similarity of experience on our separate journeys – the, highs, lows, costs, crises, risks and rewards – was a deeply galvanising experience.
The working relationships and friendships formed in this week are not something I foresaw, but have become a hugely important part of the year gone by.
Photos by Barry Cronin. Group: pictured L-R stairs; Niamh Campbell, Kate Heffernan, Sean Daly, Tara Kennedy, Leanne McDonagh, Tom Lane, Rouzbeh Rashidi, Laura Fitzgerald, Thomas Johnston, Laura Dowdall. Pictured centre L-R: Darragh McLaughlin, Katie Watchorn, Paul Gaffney.
I was recently a guest blogger for the Arts in Education Portal, where I discussed the research and development period for Peat, including workshops at Sacred Heart National School, Portlaoise.
You can read the first post here and the second one here.
The Arts in Education Portal is the key national digital resource of arts and education practice in Ireland. The ethos for the portal is about building a community of practice within arts and education, and providing a space where both artists and teachers can be supported and inspired. It provides a platform through which good collaboration practice in arts-in-education and arts education will be supported, developed and enhanced.
Since 2014, I have been exploring the layered history of The Montague.
The Montague Hotel is a real hotel – was a real hotel. On the far reaches of the rural town I grew up in, on the flat plains of Ireland’s midsection, my parents celebrated their wedding there in 1975. The Montague was the centre of things, where people celebrated everything, all of life and death – christenings to funerals and everything in between. It was a hitching-post on the Country–and–Western touring circuit, filled with the music of outsiders: frontier ballads of exile and emigration, outlaws and open plains, heartbreak, loneliness, loss. Closing its doors in 2000, it reopened in 2008. But not as a hotel. Taken over by the Reception and Integration Agency, it was now a detention centre for asylum seekers.
The Montague is a weird place: its disjointed narratives seem to be trapped like air bubbles between the layers of old wallpaper in the hotel ballroom. Preoccupied with the complexity of culture, society, history, I have been less interested in telling the real stories of this Montague than in taking a sideways glance at it, exploring how a refracted, fictionalised Montague could exist next to the real thing, whose political situation is present and pressing. In a weird confluence of real and unreal, in the clash between past and present, I’ve been searching for this story and a form for its telling.
In the early stages of development, I was supported by mentor Tim Crouch through Pan Pan’s excellent mentorship programme (listen to Tim and I talk about the early genesis of Montague on RTÉ Radio 1 here). Montague was then commissioned by Mermaid County Wicklow Arts Centre, and in November, with the support of Mermaid and an Arts Council Project Award, we began a 2-week research and development period with a full team of collaborators. During this fortnight of exploration, my initial text became a backbone. Exploring character, sound, set, lighting, movement, costume, texture, we worked together to explore the possibilities of form, to tell the imagined story of this real place – a story that began like this:
A band return to a hotel in the Irish midlands that they’ve been performing at since 1975, finding it transformed. In place of ticket holders for their 40th anniversary tour, an audience of asylum seekers. The four musicians are greeted by current resident Joyce and her young son, and she encourages them to stay and play.
In this imagined encounter, in the clash between past and present, the band are forced to confront the urgent reality of the stage they have just stepped onto. In a political situation that is present and pressing, the story and performance unfolds in the form of a sound check.
Development continues.
Writer: Kate Heffernan. Director: Gary Keegan. Perfomers: Sallay Garnett, Pat Laffan, Gina Moxley, John Olohan, Raymond Scannell. Choreographer: Megan Kennedy. Lighting and Set Designer: Ciaran O’Melia. Costumer Designer: James David Seaver. Sound Designer Jack Cawley. Sound Engineer: Eoin Murphy. Produced by Niamh O’Donnell for Mermaid Centre.
Montague is commissioned by Mermaid County Wicklow Arts Centre. Research and development period made possible by an Arts Council Project Award (Creation Strand). Early development supported by Pan Pan’s International Mentorship and Bursary Scheme.
Photography by Ste Murray.
PEATPeat began life as Elk, an exploration of the Great Irish Elk. On the east coast, right on the edge of Ireland, there is a place known as The Elk Graveyard. Here hundreds and hundreds of ancient elk skeletons were dug from the bog. Megaloceros Giganteus. Giant Irish Deer. The last megafauna on an island of, well, non–megafauna.
Twelve feet tall from tip of toe to top of antler, it disappeared about 10,500 years ago, the reasons uncertain: it became too big; its antlers grew too heavy; it was over-hunted; its food sources disappeared as the world grew colder. The Great Irish Elk lived across Europe and Asia, its continental cousins drifting eastward, sunward, in search of a better life. As the Ice Age descended, the ones who lived on this island were the first to disappear. Trapped, with nowhere to go as the snow stopped melting.
In June, I spent a week at The Ark developing the text with director Maisie Lee and performers Nyree Yergainharsian and Lloyd Cooney. We shared our findings with The Ark’s Children’s Council at the end of the week and, the following month, we presented a work-in-progress showing at On the Edge World Festival of Theatre for Young Audiences in Birmingham to an audiences of artists, producers and presenters. Sharing our ideas and listening to the feedback of audiences young and experienced has been invaluable.
As development progresses, the elk itself started to take a back seat, as bigger ideas began to emerge – ideas of preservation, migration, extinction, life, death and mortality. The text which is now emerging is something of a slant on Hamlet’s gravediggers for young audiences – a metaphysical conversation rooted in the world and perspective of two 12 year olds.
Development and showing supported by The Ark A Cultural Centre for Children, Theatre for Young Audiences Ireland and Culture Ireland. Written by Kate Heffernan. Directed by Maisie Lee. Performed by Nyree Yergainharsian and Lloyd Cooney. Originally supported by the Arts Council’s Young People Children and Education Bursary.
Who invented The Rhinestone Cowboy?
Ukranian-born Nudie Cohn and his Rodeo Tailors made American country stars embrace embellishment in the 1940s, and the love affair still burns strong in Nashville. A music of outsiders, country is about exile and emigration, frontier ballads of outlaws and open plains, heartbreak, loneliness, loss. Country stars wear their hearts on their sleeves, and their stories along their lapels. Cacti, lassos, lone horses, tumbleweed, covered wagons, dry horizons, bare crucifixes – Nudie stitched the icons of their lonely lives into their breast pockets.
So what should an Irish cowboy wear?
Finding its feet in the late 1960s, the Country–and–Irish tradition of music fuses Irish folk with American country, all speeded up to a quick-step rhythm suitable for dancing – ballads of colonial exile sang with a cowboy twang while people jive. The Montague Hotel was a hitching-post on its touring circuit, a regular haunt for the stars of the Country–and–Irish music scene which was hugely popular in the midlands, a key venue through the 70s, 80s and 90s.
The bands traditionally wore matching jackets, but not in the elaborate Rodeo Tailor style.
I find it hard to separate The Montague from Country–and–Irish, and have been thinking about it in this sense – about how the 40-year history of a country is weirdly contained within its walls, the story of who we are, where we’ve been, where we’re going. What if a band was to wear its sense of history, it’s sense of place, its sense of itself on its sleeve? What would these jackets look like? Bog cotton rather than cactus flowers, green plains rather than dusty plateaus? Old wounds becoming scars becoming appliqué embellishments, hardened into a smile by a rhinestone outline?
Maybe. Maybe not.
But, as I sit here tonight, imagining the characters of a band like this, I’m imagining how they might dress.
Aprilfestival: Teater for Små & Store is an annual performance event for young audiences, each year taking place in a different Danish town. This April, over 100 Danish and international companies performed over 600 shows in diverse spaces – from classrooms to viking halls to basketball courts – transforming the 2015 host town of Frederikssund (50km outside of Copenhagen). Traveling to the festival with the support of the Arts Council’s Travel and Training Award (with the Elk project and questions of accessibility on my mind), I was thinking about the festival’s amazingly enabling ethos and core aim – to give every single child in a regional municipality a theatre experience. And I was curious to see how the performance work would fit into non-theatre contexts, how it was changed by the fit-up nature of the festival, by the rough-and-ready settings – and how those spaces were in turn transformed.
I visited some brilliant schools. The performances were woven into the fabric of the day, children moving from maths class to a show to language lab to lunch. Even in the smallest schools, performances might have been taking place at the same time in several classrooms, the gym, the library, the yard. In little rooms, tables and chairs were rearranged into improvised raked seating, windows blacked out with refuse sacks and parcel tape.
For me at least, the less dynamic work was that which attempted to impose a theatrical space where none existed, an obsession with drapes and rigging and blackouts and theatreness, to recreate a black box or proscenium arch, to try too hard to hide the fact that we were in a classroom or a gymnasium. And on the other end of the spectrum, the vibrant work for me was so often that which did the opposite – embracing the non-theatrical nature of the spaces in order to elevate the space and the work itself, an attention to detail and artistry that suspended them without hiding or apologising for them – transforming and reawakening them into an other world.
A plastic bucket school chair takes on a life of its own. The coloured stripes of a multi-use sportshall floor become a key aspect of Lisa Becker and Claus Carlsen’s Besat af æbler for Teatrer Nordkraft (an early years live-art work and my hands-down highlight of the festival). A glossy classroom whiteboard acts as the perfectly reflective projection backdrop for the Northern Lights above the Tundra in World Images by Teater Madam Bach (directed by Imaginary Theatre Australia’s Thom Browning).
So many brilliantly found spaces transformed, so many times I thought, “I really want to make a show here.”
Elk was in my mind. I was thinking about the pathos of a creature doomed to extinction, about how to have an open and frank conversation about the vast world we live in with young audiences while at the same time offering a steady and sympathetic guide to navigating that bigness. And so it was brilliant to be immersed in Danish work, a tradition that does not shy away from the oftentimes dark reality of the world we live in. I encountered performances that dealt in many different ways with death, change and loss.
Teatret Gruppe 38’s Morket Ligger Under Sengen / The Darkness Rests Under the Bed was another highlight of the festival. A story about an older couple who return home to stay with their son, it drew gentle and playful parallels between a toddler’s fear of what lurks beneath their bed, and an elderly person’s fear of what might come in the night. The simplicity of its storytelling, its matter-of-factness, its placement of youth, age, life, death, light and dark on one plane and in one breath will stay with me.
