It would be good if actors worked on cities. If they abandoned their traditional acting acting and became fully engaged in transforming the city. This would be a great hope. ..Can one conceive what would happen if actors suddenly became builders!
Daniel Liebeskind, The End of Space
Framemakers Symposium on Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change: Public Thinktank Limerick took place in May/June 2005, comprising a month-long open social space, with an intensive week of discussions, roundtables, artistic interventions and presentations from leading world thinkers.
In response to Dublin Fringe Festival 2005, we named our second Framemakers action a Theatre Congress. SEVEN DAYS OF EVERYTHING was conceived as a work which responded to the civic function of theatre and the use of theatrical space and knowledge as a public utility: what is the most useful thing to do with a theatre for a week? Hence the inclusion of a dance company production in a theatre program.
Forming a strategic partnership with TASCQ (Traders in the Area Supporting the Cultural Quarter), Steve Valk created a dramaturgy entitled SEVEN DAYS OF EVERYTHING (See Appendix 1), and began to work our way into the social and cultural fabric of Temple Bar, and to develop an ecology : a constellation of people connected by the project, and an ecological and aesthetic attention to the way in which the project developed. As opposed to aiming for a predictable outcome, could we create the conditions for an unpredictable event to take place, arising out of interactions between a network of citizens whose relationship to each other is contextualised by their encounter with Framemakers?
In the course of our preparation for SEVEN DAYS…, we enjoyed a social afternoon with residents of Crampton Buildings in Temple Bar, the only remaining indigenous community in Temple Bar; we created a small sit-down area at the Saturday food market in Meetinghouse Square and used a ’creative survey’ to engage the public in discussions about Framemakers themes; attended a Residents Forum Meeting held at Dublin Civic Offices Wood Quay; addressed The Attic Actors Studio in Filmbase.
As the Project developed we decided to use a Talk Show format to facilitate our assemblage of interesting people and objects, and this provided the substance of our daily performances. See Appendix 2 for a record of these performances.
Besides conducting the SEVEN DAYS OF EVERYTHING TALKSHOW each night of our residency in Project, we also co-hosted with CityArts Dublin a discussion on Theatre in the City: Dialogue and Dissent, chaired by Aisling Reidy, Director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, and a balcony concert hosted by BASTA! Youth Collective featuring local bands, attended by over 200 people on Essex St. Our ‘set’ was open during the day as a social space and facilitated many encounters between residents and workers in Temple Bar, visitors to Dublin, and Participants in the Fringe Festival.
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PRESS RELEASE
Framemakers: Theatre Congress
Project Arts Centre Cube, East Essex Street, Temple Bar, Dublin
Mon 19 Sept – Sun 25 Sept
Open rehearsals 10am – 5pm
Evening presentations 8pm – 9.30pm
Tickets: Free
FRAMEMAKERS a theatre congress
for a new millennium…
and the Traders in the Area Supporting the Cultural Quarter present:
SEVEN DAYS OF EVERYTHING
“a choreography of the social” by the citizenry of Dublin’s Temple Bar and the project team of Framemakers: Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change
Who are we? What is a cultural quarter? Are paintings useful? Do theatre ideas influence city planning? Everyone knows, if we don’t eat or drink, we die. What we are not aware of, is that if we are disturbed from entering into the dreaming phase of our sleep, we die just as quickly. Our ability to dream, to process experiences in the subconscious, is our ability to survive.
TEMPLE BAR is on the one hand a geographical place, an area of streets and stores, restaurants and shops, a commercial district in the city. But it is also a nighttown, a dreamscape, a strange terrain of exotic personalities, ideas, objects, furniture, films, books and food types. It is a place teeming with experiential links, actual interfaces, to the imaginary. With the turn of a step, or a journey up a flight of stairs, it is possible to enter a new world, a secret bookshop, an unusual religious practice, an esoteric healing experience…. The ”cultural quarter is both a physical place and a metaphysical territory and both far exceed our ability to experience their richness in totality.
Daghdha Dance Company’s contribution to the Dublin Fringe Festival is an extension of its Framemakers program entitled SEVEN DAYS OF EVERY-THING.
HE DRANK HIS MILK, HE BIT INTO A SANDWHICH.
A social choreographic event, a “theatre congress”, a civic gathering, SEVEN DAYS involves in its initial phase (already in progress) a kind of rigorous anthropological exploration of the people and places in Temple Bar. The project then begins a process of mobilizing citizens, artists and practitioners of all sorts, as a means of gathering impressions, exchanging ideas and initiating potential activities. Finally, this matrix of active participants will begin a process of weaving, constructing and choreographing a rich and complex web or tapestry of everything it has found or discovered. From Monday September 19th to Sunday September 25th, Framemakers will transform the Project Arts Centre into an experiential interface, a place to encounter and engage with the fullness and rich complexity of human being in Temple Bar.
Monday:
Film Clip: interview extra from Easy Rider DVD / Readings from Robinson Crusoe / Jack Moylett on Willem Reich and Orgone / Dominique Beyans on an artistic adaptation of Chess
Tuesday:
Film clip from Network / Readings from The Silver Key by HP Lovecraft / Robin Parmar, sound artist / Karisma, rapper / Noeleen Hartigan, Policy Coordinator, Simon Community / Pauly D, rapper / Nicole Peisl, dancer / participatory mind poem
Wednesday:
Film clip from The Day the Earth Stood Still / Michael John Gorman, curator Free the Robots! / Manouche guitar music from Jose Carlos Anselmo and friend / readings from Ian M. Banks Culture novels / Flavia Pawlowski from Boitatá -Brazilian eco-solidario crafts / readings from Old Testament by Anthony Carrack from Simon Community / Martin Giannini from cultivate.ie on The Art of Living / refreshment interruption courtesy of Lemonjelly Café / participatory mind poem
Thursday:
Afternoon discussion co-presented by Framemakers and CityArts- Theatre in the City: Dialogues and Dissent. Speakers Nona Ciobanu, Artistic Director, Toaca Cultural Foundation, Bucharest, and Michael Klien, Artistic Director, Daghdha Dance Company. Chair Aisling Reidy, Irish Council for Civil Liberties
Film clip from Communion / soundtrack by Alex Ebauche, electronic artist / Peter Mikl, Cultural Attaché, Austrian Embassy / reading from Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, read and introduced by actor Chris Carroll / Aisling Reidy, Irish Council for Civil Liberties / reading from Sediments of an Ordinary Mind by Jeffrey Gormly, read by PJ Kelly, Irish Blood Services Board / participatory mind poem
Friday:
Afternoon event WE LOVE LEGO / WE LOVE PLAYSTATION – Open play with Jacob, Tariq, Naomi and Shane
Film clip from The Philadelphia Story / juices and Guarana drink from Brazil courtesy of Delicias do Brasil / Dylan Haskins, BASTA! Youth Collective / reading from The Eye of the Queen by Philip Mann / Tarik Carrigy (8yrs) playing Playstation in interview / LEGO objects by Jacob Wolfe / yoga for children with Anne Marie Carney and her Yogabugs / Maura McGrath, daughter of one of the Rossport 5 / participatory mind poem
Saturday:
Midday – Balcony concert by BASTA! Youth Collective . Performances by Attendance c.200 people
Guest Pat Liddy, Temple Bar historian / readings from Ulysses Special Edition by actress Regan O’Brien, nervousystem / dance performance –Public Space- featuring excerpts from the Seven Days creative survey / songs from singer songwriter Rebecca Hart, USA / original prose and poetry from the Simon Community read by Paddy Walsh / short walking tour led by Pat Liddy visiting site of premiere of Handel’s Messiah, and Dublin city wall foundations at Isolde’s Tower / umbrellas courtesy of local restaurants
Sunday:
Film clip from The Philadelphia Story / Brendan O’Byrne, Professor of Consciousness, TCD / an appearance by the Silver Man performance artist / virtual theatre: A Trip to Space by Soul Gun Warriors / Japanese tea ceremony with Dmitri Maslov / film clip from Framemakers interview with Mark Patrick Hederman, Glenstal Abbey / Readings from The Place of Dead Roads & The Job by William S. Burroughs / Anthony Fox, The New Theatre
Project Leaders: Jeffrey Gormly and Steve Valk
Assisted by Marion Pierce
Consultant Choreographer: Michael Klein
Videography and Editing: Davide Terlingo
Technician: Dave Guy
Furniture courtesy of Flanagan’s Furniture, Mount Merrion
Philipe Starck Lamp by HAUS
Matchstick Models by Liam Mixer Byrne
Tree loaned by Irish Film Institute
‘seven musics to change a world by’ courtesy of Morgan, City Discs
Blackboard by Temple Bar Information Centre
Stuffed Cockerel by Lemonjelly Café
Frames loaned by National Photographic Archive
Chilean photo show and traditional music provided by Ricardo
Rubbings by Mary B. Keane
DVD by Francis Fay, courtesy of the artist
DVDs by Francis Fay and Mary B. Keane, courtesy of the artists
Painting loaned by the artist, Olive Barrett
Gremlin emerging from wall courtesy of Christy Flood, Modelmania,
8 Crow St
Limited Edition Ulysses thanks to Cathach Books, Duke St
Thanks to St. Nicholas of Myra, Francis St for the Teapot, Christian Brothers Synge St & Blooms Hotel Anglesea St for accommodation, and Talk & Surf Wexford St for technical comms
Thanks to Willie, Siobhan, David and all staff at Project; Claudine, Lisa & Martin at TASCQ; Francis, Mary and residents of Crampton Buildings; Temple Bar Properties; Wolfgang, Adrian, technical crew and all at Dublin FringeFest, and Martin Keane
Flyer design by Hugh at 2Cdesign
Framemakers: Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change is initiated by Daghdha Dance Company, in association with the Project Arts Centre (Dublin) and in partnership with The Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies (University of Limerick), The Irish Peace Society, Limerick City Council, The Garvey Resource Centre Limerick, nervousystem, The Glue Factory, Soul Gun Warriors, BASTA! Youth Collective, MA in Dance and Performance (University of Limerick), The Sculpture and Combined Media Course at L.S.A.D, City Arts (Dublin), The Interaction Design Centre (University of Limerick), Interface (School of Art and Design, University of Ulster), The Kiesler Foundation (Austria) and The Dublin Fringe Festival. Framemakers is supported by the Arts Council, An Chomhairle Ealaíon, Fáilte Ireland, the Limerick City Council and the Austrian Embassy in Ireland.
Project Leaders: Jeffrey Gormly, Michael Klien, Steve Valk.
For further information contact Daghdha Dance Company: mail@daghdha.ie or +353 (0)61467872
TRANSFORMATIVE THEATRE AT THE FRINGE
by Colin Murphy
The Village Magazine Thursday, September 29, 2005
The avant garde had a distinctly retro look at the Fringe last week. Project’s downstairs theatre space may be more used to experimental, abstract productions, but for the entire week it was transformed into a cross between a GP’s waiting room and a talk-show studio. The Framemakers crew had spent the preceding days wandering through Temple Bar, begging and borrowing furniture and decorations for their Seven Days of Everything project. The result was an elegant brown leather suite (replete with its product-placement price tag), some art on the walls and various bits of eclectic clutter. Wandering in around 7pm on Saturday evening – the space was open all week to wanderers, with a promise of tea, coffee and chat – host Steve Valk was animatedly talking to Dublin historian Pat Liddy, an American singer was tuning a guitar, and Jeffrey Gormley was wolfing down fish and chips. Turned out there was a show on that evening – I’d missed that in the programme. I hung around. Tickets were free. People drifted in, and then a decent sized crowd for 8pm. Framemakers had billed this as “an effort to expose and make sense of (the) potential for profound transformative innovation in our present day situation”. But by the time it got started, it became clear that – lofty ideologies notwithstanding – this was to be nothing more, and nothing less, than a good old fashioned cabaret/talk-show miscellany. Steve Valk was a gregarious and gentle guide to the evening. His main guest, Pat Liddy, gave an enthused and informed discource on Dublin. They meshed on ideas of public space and civic engagement. (In case we missed it, a hand-drawn cardboard sign at the entrance proclaimed “Public Space”.) Rebecca Hart provided plaintive chords and deft lyrics in the musical interludes. An actress came up to be interviewed, but instead took up a copy of Ulysses on the table and read at random, but elegantly, from it. Spontaneity often works out just plain sloppy, but this had a freshness, an energy and an honesty about it that was difficult to resist. With more time, or a more-ingrained habit of talk-show theatre-going, the audience would have engaged more actively. It was the kind of evening to provoke talk, or chat. And then Pat Liddy delivered the coup de grâce. Leading us out the rear of the theatre, into the lane at the side of the Olympia, in a trickling rain (they’d borrowed umbrellas as well, and handed them out), he took us through Temple Bar, through a gate for which he’d the key, to a private courtyard. This was the site of the first performance ever of Handel’s ‘Messiah’, in 1742, he said, as we stood beneath apartment windows in the rain. The umbrella holders pushed forward to make a makeshift auditorium, and Rebecca Hart took out her guitar and sang. It was simple, novel and and a little bit special. Valk calls his work “social choreography”. Call it what you want; bringing people together, entertaining them, making them think, making them talk. It’s been done before, but it’s good to be reminded how easily it can be done again – and in a theatre, not just a TV studio.