ARTOON
OUR NEW Minister for Culture (we’ll have to get used to that name change, arts to culture) swapped the shock and awe of Nama for the shock and awe of the New York school of painters in the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday evening, her first venture onto cultural ground since taking up the role. What must have been particularly soothing after her day in the Dáil were the dreamy sounds of Morton Feldman’s percussion piece The King of Denmark.
Music of another kind to the ears of the museum’s director Enrique Juncosa and his staff was Minister Mary Hanafin’s praise for the “place that Imma now occupies in the world of international museums”.
After a tour of the exhibition, Vertical Thoughts, the Minister delivered an eloquent response to the impressive array of major Abstract Expressionists on show. She also seemed keen to make a point that went down well with those present – that we must value the arts for their own sake, and take the tourism and economic spin-off as an added bonus.
The importance of inspiration was also very much to the fore in her speech.
Making the Minister feel at home in the cultural milieu was evidenced in the welcome she received from Imma chairman Eoin McGonigal, who said the arts are “extremely fortunate to have as our new Minister one of the most experienced, committed and widely-respected figures in Irish public life”.
He too emphasised the importance of Imma’s relationship with sister institutions abroad and how those international connections had become something of a hallmark. That, of course, is very much down to Juncosa, for whom this show is “a high point in the long series of diverse and innovative exhibitions” that he has brought to the museum.
Then, in the presence of Morton Feldman’s widow, Barbara Monk Feldman, composer Gerald Barry spoke of how the painters in the show were all part of Feldman’s world and invited those there into the Royal Chapel to hear Richard O’Donnell perform The King of Denmark.
Triskel works to go ahead
Despite the collapse last week of Murray Ó Laoire Architects (MÓLA), Cork City Council has confirmed that work is to continue as planned on the company’s €4 million scheme for the Triskel Arts Centre, writes Mary Leland.
“No implications are envisaged which might affect this project,” said Cork city hall on Tuesday. “We are proceeding with the Murray Ó Laoire proposal,” added director of corporate affairs Denis O’Mahony, “and we will see the Murray Ó Laoire vision through.”
This vision is to refurbish the medieval Christ Church on North Main Street and to connect it as a performance venue to the adjacent Triskel on Tobin Street, which, when re-opened later this year, will become the most historic cultural venue in the city.
Believed to have been the site of the poet Edmund Spenser’s marriage to Elizabeth Boyle, the Holy Trinity Parish Church and King’s Chapel dates from 1340. Subsequently, a chantry college, it was replaced by the present church in 1720, but even when it was taken over to house the Cork City and County Archives, the interior fabric was left intact.
The removal of the archives to a new building in Blackpool enabled the long-promised annexation by Triskel, where the restoration designed by Oisin Creagh of MÓLA exposes parts of the crypt and includes the retention of the box pews filling the nave.
Recalling that Murray Ó Laoire were the original architects for Triskel when the Tobin Street former stables and warehouse were adapted as a modern arts centre in 1986, Triskel director Tony Sheehan said he was saddened that the company would no longer be involved with the project. “The company has been a pillar of cultural life in Cork, engaged not only as architects but as partners in creative projects and as important advocates for the arts in the city.”
City Hall has also announced that the Murray Ó Laoire plans for St Luke’s Church on the northern side of the city are to be completed. There, Maire Bradshaw of Tigh Filí is to be the principal tenant in an arrangement involving other arts practitioners in Cork. In a prominent hillside location above the docks and at the edge of Montenotte, this was the site of three earlier churches and of a shrine for mariners, and the present church, almost as visible as Shandon, dates from 1889.
Acquired by the city council in 2003, its €1 million refurbishment was assisted by a grant of €600,000 from the Southern Branch of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) urban renewal fund. That fund is also the source of half of the €4 million to be spent on Christ Church, with the remainder provided by the local authority, where city manager Joe Gavin has actively promoted the scheme for what was formerly the Corporation church, with seating for councillors on the upper gallery under a canopy still bearing the royal arms.
Project Friends’ fundraising
Project Arts Centre celebrated the past, the present and the future, writes Sara Keating, as it launched its new Friends fundraising scheme on Wednesday night. Peter Sheridan, who was involved with Project in its first nomadic incarnation and its subsequent leaky home on Essex Street, made a passionate speech, reminding a young audience of Project’s history and legacy as “a vital socio-political force” in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Sheridan, an accomplished memoirist as well as writer and director, gleefully recounted the days of mop-duty in the factory-turned-theatre-space, which burned down three times. These included an anecdote about his own stage-debut, when he was talent-spotted by Colm O’Briain in a family production of Waiting for Godot for an amateur drama festival in Roundwood, Co Wicklow, in which half of the audience walked out. Earlier in the bar, general manager Niamh O’Donnell recalled how she first visited Project Arts Centre when she was just 17, for the infamous Irish Theatre Company production of Beckett’s first play, the only production in which, because of an accidental line-fluff, Godot actually arrived in the first act.
Artistic director Willie White, who wrote his Masters thesis on Project’s history, also had a store of historical tributes to draw on, but he was more keen to celebrate the 500 performances and 50,000 audience members that kept Project Arts Centre thriving in 2009. He spoke about still loving his job after almost eight years, and how satisfying it was to provide administrative and creative support to artists so that they could “get on with the job of making art.”
Artists in attendance to thank Project for their support included writer Phillip McMahon, director Annabelle Comyn, and dancers Jessica and Megan Kennedy of Junk Ensemble, whose new show will open this year’s Dublin Dance Festival at Project’s Upstairs Space.
White was also eager to move thoughts towards the future of Project and of Irish theatre, inviting members from the young THEATREclub, who have been nurtured by Project, to “realise the value of their own contribution to society through theatre”. The chair of Project’s board of directors, Annette Nugent, closed the formalities by reminding the audience that it was only with their support that the multi-disciplinary arts centre would continue to thrive, “so tell your friends you liked a show, buy an extra ticket, or become a supporter through our new Friends scheme”.
Arts festival Louth and proud
Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and Valentyn Silvestrov. Follow that. Louth Contemporary Music Society is adding to the list of world renowned composers by bringing acclaimed Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina to the county. Gubaidulina’s first visit to Ireland will be a highlight of this year’s Drogheda Arts Festival on the May bank holiday weekend. The Russian will be here for a concert celebrating her work, The Fire and the Rose: the Music of Sofia Gubaidulina, in St Peter’s Church, Drogheda on May 1st, after a film on her life and work in the Droichead Arts Centre.
Also in Drogheda Arts Festival will be a world premiere of an Upstate production of Conall Quinn’s – winner of this year’s Stewart Parker award – The Ones Who Kill Shooting Stars. Commissioned by the festival and directed by Paul Hayes, it’s described as an entertaining and surreal tale of love and death set on a Co Louth beach during the second World War.
Another festival commission is The Marienbad Palace, a visual art exhibition curated by Jacqui McIntosh, exploring ideas of reality where virtual reality is always competing, will be in two venues – Droichead Arts Centre and the Highlanes gallery – and will feature works by Laura Buckley, Diana Copperwhite, Jorge De La Garza, Alicja Kwade, Haroon Mirza and Ian Monroe and takes its title from JG Ballard’s 1989 short story “The Enormous Space” and Alain Resnais’ seminal 1961 film Last Year in Marienbad. Other highlights include dancer/choreographer Claire Cunningham’s, ME (Mobile/Evolution), Cirque de Légume’s show and South Korean born pianist Young-Choon Park.
