NUIG premiere of new dance and music piece

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

The Galway Music Residency and the Galway Dance Artist in Residence, Ríonach Ní Néill, presents a special performance on Wednesday next, October 12, at 7.30pm at The Cube Theatre, NUI Galway.

The group will premiere A Passing Echo, a new dance and music work by Ní Néill and composer Jane O’Leary. It marks the final in the current series of ConTempo/raneous, the Galway Music Residency’s series of cross-genre collaborations with Galway-based artists, and the launch of Ní Néill’s Winter/Spring public programme.

A Passing Echo is a new work for string quartet and three dancers. Its origin came from the question of how art inspires artists, and how fragments of a work – a few notes, a simple gesture – can appear and reappear over different generations, artists and art-forms.

The new septet evolved from O’Leary’s 2015 quartet, The Passing Sound of Forever, which itself was inspired by the first movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 95 (Serioso), and which took its title from the closing lines of Dermot Healy’s poem ‘the echo of all that’s happened’ from his collection, A Fool’s Errand. All three works will be performed in the evening programme, tracing the genesis of A Passing Echo.

The creation of A Passing Echo involved a close collaboration between choreographer and composer, who investigated and contributed towards each others’ creative processes, resulting in a work in which movement and music are closely interwoven.  Performed by dancers Maria Nilsson Waller, Lucia Kickham, Magdalena Hylak and the Galway ConTempo Quartet, with music by Jane O’Leary and choreography by Ríonach Ní Neill, A Passing Echo marks the culmination of a very successful creative partnership.

Concluding with a Q&A discussion with the artists, this unique event brings together Galway’s ensemble in residence and dance artist in residence, some of Europe’s finest dancers and one of Ireland’s most distinguished composers.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.