A 20-minute ovation for the Project's innovation
Saturday January 10 2009
'Where do you go if you want to try out an opera based on a Bunny Carr quiz show?" The deficit is ballooning, and Gaza burning. Dee Roycroft, though, has more pressing questions on her mind.
"Where do you go if you want to do a musical version of the love scene in A Midsummer Night's Dream?"
Where indeed? All over the country, frustrated artists, actors, writers have long obsessed over such questions. If you had an idea for a circus starring vegetables, should you talk to the Arts Council, or your psychologist? If you had issues with how your father had raised you, should you put them to him, or to an audience?
If you wanted to show slides from your trip on the Trans-Siberian railway, should you upload them to Flickr, or would people pay to hear you talk about them in a theatre?
Now, Dee Roycroft, with a small coterie of colleagues, has come up with the answer. It's called Project Brand New, and it involves 12 different acts getting 20 minutes each on the main stage of the Project Arts Centre next week (four acts each night, Thursday to Saturday).
The idea is to give new performance ideas a run-out in a format where criticism is invited, but where no reputations, or finances, will be destroyed.
Irish theatre is a conservative beast. As Roycroft sees it, the process of putting on a show is depressingly predictable: apply for funding, rehearse for four weeks, play for one or two weeks. This is the "production model", and it inhibits creativity: to put on a show, it has to look good on paper, in order to get funding. And funding raises the stakes, and the responsibilities. "You get your week in the Project and blow 60 grand and play to 15 people a night ... " is how Roycroft summarises it, pithily.
Roycroft found herself moaning about this while on a programme run by the Dublin Theatre Festival two years ago, which brought together "emerging" theatre artists to help develop and promote their work. (The programme is called 'The Next Stage'; more info on www.dublintheatrefestival.com)
She had been inspired by the Shunt collective in London, who put on performance events in abandoned buildings; others were excited by the Battersea Arts Centre's Scratch Nights, which introduced the idea of showing audiences unfinished work in London eight years ago, and most famously gave birth to the monster that was Jerry Springer --The Opera which started life as a series of songs at the piano. Roycroft and three other young women -- Louise Lowe, Jody O'Neill and Róise Goan (now director of the Dublin Fringe Festival) -- decided to do something about it, and Project Brand New was born.
The artist Will St Leger quickly came up with a catchy pop-art logo, which (in a nice postmodern twist) gave them momentum and focus, and Project Arts Centre director Willie White, who had been talking about doing something similar for years, gave them space. The first outing last year sold out the Project's studio space; the second sold out the main space (Tickets were just €5).
For the third outing, there were over 40 applications for the 12 slots. On the night I attended last July, the theatre was buzzing. And the work was good.
One of those on stage that night was Megan Riordan, with a piece called 'Luck'.
Initially, it seemed as if hers had run out. Crucial to the Project Brand New concept is face-to-face feedback from the audience. Riordan sat down in the feedback chair outside the theatre after her short performance, and a man walked up and told her how and why her piece didn't work. She was gutted. "I learned something about myself," she says. "I prefer anonymous feedback." Still, others encouraged her, and she performed a full-length version in the Fringe.
It won an award, was revived for two weeks, and a British producer is looking at bringing it to Edinburgh and on a UK tour this year. She'll be testing her luck again this time, with an enigmatic piece that has something to do with the internet, but she doesn't want to give anything away in advance.
Meanwhile, another participant is putting the finishing touches to the Bunny Carr-based opera, cited above. (The other examples above are also based on actual performances.)
Lighting designer Paul Keogan has teamed up with composer Conor Linehan to write an opera based on the 1970s RTE quiz show, Quicksilver, combining affectionate satire with serious music.
Amongst other intriguing offerings is Dylan Tighe's documentary account of a journey from Beijing to Moscow, which he describes as a cross between travel writing, stand up comedy and performance art.
It won't all be good, of course. But the saving grace, if it's bad, is that it won't last longer than 20 minutes. And after all, if you really don't like it, you can tell the performer yourself.
colinmurphy@independent.ie
- COLIN MURPHY
