Celebrate Nollaig na mBan with Galway Arts Centre

Galway Arts Centre will kick off its 2018 programme this Saturday night, January 6, with a celebration of Nollaig na mBan, or Little Christmas.

This free event, in the City’s Dominick Street venue, will feature poetry by Elaine Feeney, theatre by Scripts & Scribes, an installation from Canadian artist Melissa Cayford and two video programmes. One of these is curated by artist and philosopher EL Putnam and the other by the international artists’ collective FemLink. The entire evening is being curated by artist Áine Phillips.

Galway poet Elaine Feeney will begin the celebrations at 7.30pm, reading from her honest, forthright poetry that shines a mirror up to Irish society, past and present.

Elaine’s most recent collection, Rise, was published last year by Salmon Poetry and was praised by fellow poet, Rita Ann Higgins, who observed that Elaine “continues to explore the fragility of now, but never loses sight of the inhumanity of our recent past, as in Harvest which relates to the Mother and Baby home in Tuam, or in the State’s treatment of women in History Lesson and Wrongheaded”.

Elaine’s reading will be followed by rehearsed reading of A Night with George Clooney, a one-woman drama by Belfast writer Brenda Murphy, which will be presented by Galway ensemble Scripts & Scribes.

A film programme will also run throughout the evening. It will include Interference, a selection of videos curated by EL Putnam, showcasing a range of performance practices currently taking place in Ireland. The featured artists include Amanda Coogan, Celina Muldoon, Siobhan Mullen, Rosalind Murray, Áine Phillips, and EL Putnam herself.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.