Ar Ais Arís – imaginative blending of old and new

Ar Ais Arís, a site-specific, virtua- reality experience that combines music, movement and Irish-language literature to explore the emotional impact of emigration is Brú Theatre’s show for this year’s Arts Festival.

Inspired by the work of writers Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Pádraic Ó Conaire and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and featuring the Conamara landscape, it’s a trio of short, immersive films.

Audience members, seated at the city’s Commercial Boat Club, will be kitted out with a virtual-reality headset and invited to begin their journey. Their first stop in this 20-minute show is Casla where a mother silently says goodbye to her first-born, off to America, never to return. This is based on Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s devastating short story, An Bhlian 1912. The next location is a mountain top, as an emigrant returns from England but can’t leave her troubled past behind. It’s inspired by Pádraic Ó Conaire’s story Nóra Mharcuis Bhig. The journey concludes in a therapy room, as a modern woman confronts the trauma she’s inherited from generations of displaced women. It’s inspired by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry collection The Assimilated Merfolk.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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