Archive News
Three-day festival celebrates the role of dance in Irish life
Date Published: 12-Apr-2012
Leading Irish dance-makers will be Galway next week for Dancing Days, a three-day festival of contemporary dance performances, talks and events.
Dancing Days, which runs at the Black Box Theatre and on location from April 19 to 21, is being curated by Galway’s Dancer-in-Residence Ríonach Ní Néill.
It is part of an international conference, entitled Mapping Spectral Traces. Through performances, exhibitions and discussions the Festival will examine the role of contemporary and traditional dance forms in Irish culture and society today.
As part of the event the world premiere of Frame will take place at the Black Box Theatre on Thursday next, April 19 at 8pm.
Ríonach joins forces with multi award-winning architect Michelle Fagan and film-maker Marek Bogaski to present a three-dimensional show on how people are shaped by the surroundings they create. Tickets are €15 and €10 concession rate.
The Black Box Theatre will also host a special performance, Corp_Real on April 20 at 2pm. This show encompasses live and film performances by internationally acclaimed and award-winning choreographers and dancers. It features Jenny Roche in Altered Copy, an adaptation of Business of the Bloom by award-winning US choreographer Jodi Melnick; Fearghus Ó Conchúir with Mo Mhórchoir Féin – A Prayer, a reflection on the impact of the Catholic Church on the formation of the Irish body; and 3+1 for now, an exploration of Dublin city, where the skyline changed every day during Ireland’s economic boom. It will also include video works from Andrew Duggan and Cindy Cummings. Tickets are €5 including free entry to the Corp_Real Symposium, which follows the performance, at 3.30pm.
This unique meeting of international dancers and choreographers with scientists and architects will include Cambridge neuroscientist, Philip Barnard speaking about his work with choreographer Wayne McGregor from Random Dance Royal Ballet.
The final festival show, Cuairteoireacht – the Rambling House takes place on Saturday, April 21. The audience for this event will be ferried by bus from Galway’s Town Hall Theatre at 6.30pm to a mystery location in Connemara for a ‘cuairteoireacht’ of the past, which is set in the present. This event seeks to open up discussions about how Ireland’s landscape changed from being the ‘céilí at the crossroads’ to what environmental writers Frank McDonald and James Nix recently called ‘chaos at the crossroads’.
The event will feature straw boys, sean-nós dance and song. These fuse with contemporary dance, film and installations to make an exciting night in which the audience will be a vital player.
The centrepiece is a reworking of Cindy Cummings and Andrew Duggan’s 9.8 meters per second, a series of dance performances, video works, installations, projections sited in a ‘pre-lived’ unsold vacant house. This work preceded Ireland’s housing crash and the resulting focus on Ireland’s ghost estates. Now set in the aftermath of the economic ‘fall’, the work shifts to examine the current situation and its social, economic and cultural context. Concertina player Tim Collins (Kilfenora Céilí Band) leads the music and set dance programme, which also features sean-nós singer Lilis Ó Laoire, strawboys from Clare and Conamara sean-nós dancer Pádraig Ó hOibicín. Tickets are €20, including coach transfer.
As part of the weekend, the Centre for Irish Studies at NUI Galway will present Choreographies of the Irish Body on Friday next, April 20.
This conference will feature talks on The Choreography of Exile in Colum McCann’s Shorter Fiction by lecturer Marie Mianowski, and Mapping the Catholic Body by Professor Gerry Kearns.
The conference is organised by Dr Nessa Cronin and Tim Collins, who are based at NUIG’s Centre for Irish Studies, Dr Karen Till of NUI Maynooth, and Galway Dancer-in-Residence, Ríonach Ní Néill.
The NUIG conference is free and open to the public. Tickets for shows are available from the Town Hall Theatre at www.tht.ie and 091 569 777. For full listings see: www.ciotog.ie, www.mappingspectraltraces.org and www.nuigalway.ie/centre_irish_studies
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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