Belinda McKeon sits in on a workshop in Annaghmakerrig, where 13 artists have come together to experiment with new ways of creating performances
Summer is a busy time at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, or Annaghmakerrig, as it is called by the artists who flock to work in the company of Co Monaghan's lakes and low skies, in the big house bequeathed for their benefit upon the death of Guthrie, more than 30 years ago.
Typically, they spend their working days in creative solitude, coming together only at mealtimes, when the great kitchen table strains under the weight of the spread put on for them by the centre's staff.
The results of these quiet days are to be seen everywhere in the arts: look closely and you'll see the brush strokes that were quickened, the scenes tightened, the characters rounded during undisturbed hours in a studio, or at a desk, or in a fishing boat on the lake.
Recently, however, Annaghmakerrig's nooks and crannies resounded with the sound of activity of an altogether more collective kind. And Guthrie, in his day a renowned theatre director, could only have approved.
On this particular fortnight, far from maintaining a distance, artists from a variety of performance disciplines are free to step in and out of one another's working spaces, consulting, collaborating and creating in the first instance of Thread, an initiative facilitated by Dublin Fringe Festival.
Vallejo Gantner, the festival's director, and Maedhbh McCullagh, its programme director, have brought 13 artists to the centre to take part in a workshop with the help of four impressive mentors: Steve Valk, Daghdha Dance Company's dramaturge and founder of Schmalclub, Frankfurt's renowned situationist art project; John Collins, director of the New York theatre company Elevator Repair Service; Michael Lew, winner of the new-media award at last year's (oddly named) Montreal Festival New Cinema New Media for his work in nonlinear film; and Jocelyn Clarke, commissioning manager at the Abbey Theatre.
As the list of mentors suggests, the focus is on rethinking narrative, on looking at different approaches to writing for theatre, on finding new ways of using text in the creation of work for the stage.
The participants are wary of slotting into any one category, but, loosely speaking, their number includes four directors (John Breen, Jason Byrne, Thomas Conway and Caroline McSweeney), three playwrights (Jeffrey Gormley, Oonagh Kearney and Erin Marie Panttaja), two choreographers (Rebecca Walter and Fearghus Ó Conchúir), three composers (Julie Feeney, George Higgs and Ailís Ní Ríain) and an actor (Donal Toolan).
Each has come with a project to work on; several projects, in some cases. But by the time I visit, in the second week, this workload has been multiplied by association; now they each have one another's projects to worry about as well as their own. Directors are being drawn into choreography, composers are in demand as performers, playwrights have become librettists and devisers are bringing the rest of the group through workshops in method.
Everywhere, creative force fields are intersecting, and the resultant energy is palpable. It's there in the studio where Walter and Kearney are experimenting with a piece that will physically choreograph text - its shapes, its visual form - while Byrne coaches Toolan, an experienced radio actor, in a technique that uses every muscle of his body, and Panttaja slowly reorganises the sections of a play she's working on.
It's in the sun-filled front room, where Ní Ríain and Conway develop an idea she has for a combination of music and text, to be performed by a classical harpist, intercut with an electronic recording that undermines the certainty of what she says and plays.
It's in the conservatory, where Breen and Feeney discuss their idea for an opera devised from interviews with the participants and mentors. It's in the workshops led by McSweeney on a technique called viewpoints, by Gormley on an approach he calls flexistentialism and by Higgs on the artistic use of audio applications. It's at the kitchen table, where nobody will stop talking about their ideas and where new appointments, and new teams, are constantly being made.
Walters starts to describe the group exercises that began the first week, in which the mentors divided the participants into groups and gave them pieces of text - everything from random instructions to architectural manifestos - to turn into performances. "And everyone's approach to dealing with the text was so wildly different," says Walter.
"Fergus and I would be trying to get everybody to move around it, and others would be saying, 'What's our justification?', before we get up and do it. It was just like the Tower of Babel. But then we're finding this strange Esperanto slowly."
"What I find exciting," says Conway, the director, of the idea he is helping Ní Ríain, the composer, to develop, "is the idea of text, music, image and stage in tension with each other but with no one foregrounded, dominating over the other, which is how it is in traditional models of text."
Higgs, however, who is developing a piece for choir, brass quintet, classical guitar and singing hose - a long plastic tube that he swings in the air to produce humming sounds - is wary of using the workshop as an excuse to depart from text simply for the sake of doing so. His patience with the week's "intellectual discussions", the talks on what text in theatre is and is not, has worn thin.
"Drama, for me, is to do. It's active. I like the abandon that you get in those high points in theatre, and I don't think they have anything to do with rational thought. It's just feeling."
Higgs has hit on what is rapidly becoming a concern for Gantner and the mentors. Although the participants are committed to exploring new ways of using text in theatre, it seems they don't necessarily want the mentors to guide them. Thread was intended as a group workshop, but, perhaps inevitably, by the second week the group has fragmented to form something closer to the usual Annaghmakerrig scenario: artists working as individuals, or at most in twos and threes, on specific pieces.
That evening Gantner, Lew and Valk meet to discuss the group's apparent resistance to the structure that it is the mentors' job to impose on the fortnight. Since last week the emphasis has shifted away from the sort of communal, mentor-led workshops spoken of by Walter. But Gantner and the mentors are still keen for the project to retain a sense of direction. "It's a game now of enabling people's work to proceed," he says, "because they've got great, and different, projects. Which is exactly what we wanted to happen. But I guess what we're in danger of losing is the bigger-picture kind of learning process."
The problems seem to be that the participants' interest in the mentoring side of the project has tailed off in week two, and that, in becoming more distant from the mentors, they are losing the idea of themselves as a group. "I think," says Valk, "that it's really important for artists to be aware of the commonalities of what they do. I notice in Ireland more than in Germany that the arts seem to be very separate from one another and that there is not a sense of the power of artistic practice, like the Abbey and the National Concert Hall and the arts schools and the festivals just putting their muscle together and making changes. So while maybe this group kind of stuff seems a little bit childish, and simple, it creates a kind of communal energy."
Gantner and the mentors throw ideas around. To the outside ear they're difficult to grasp, but they are based on endeavours that all three have witnessed in other situations, in the work of other artists or theatre companies, and they discuss them fluently, eventually coming up with the idea of a set of rules, like the rules for composing a piece of music, designed, over the next few days, to pose challenges to the artists' use of text.
Looking at the amount of work the participants have planned for the rest of their time at Annaghmakerrig, however, it's clear the mentors will have their work cut out. There's the opera penned by Breen and composed by Feeney, in which most people are being asked to perform. There's Gormley's flexistentialist (you had to be there) project, which will also require a full house. There's a spectacular-sounding collaboration between Byrne and Ó Conchúir, to be performed between two levels of the dance studio on Saturday, when artistic directors and other interested parties will come to see some of the fortnight's projects.
In the studio, meanwhile, "the wall" - the space where the participants post ideas, observations and criticisms each day - is quickly filling up. Time is short. But Gantner's not worried. Not really. "Everyone, last week, was saying: 'I'm going to have this show on Saturday.' It was going to be this all-singing, all-dancing thing," he says. "And now they're realising they've got four full hours with each person they're working with between now and Saturday; it's not going to happen."
But this is not a problem. Rather, it suggests the kind of long-range vision Gantner was hoping Thread would give rise to. Some of the projects, he hopes, will be developed enough to find their way into this year's fringe programme. Others may not, but the thinking behind them will infuse future projects, future ways of making, imparting a much-needed change of tack to Irish theatre's treatment of text.
"One of the things I was really wanting to come out of this was a sense of alumni, a sense of people who have been through it," he says, "and that next year, if and when we do it again, there will be another batch of them."
Later on George Higgs echoes Gantner's feelings on the value of the fortnight. "I hate to bring it down to something that's not art related," he says, "but I find the relationships with people more interesting than theatre - and that is theatre. It's all the different kinds of people that are here. And you come here expecting something, even if you say otherwise. And the way you profit is the way you least expect it or see it. You don't see it straight away."
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