Lorraine Maye, Director of Cork Midsummer Festival, writes for Culture about Midsummer Moments, a series of events and experiences to celebrate the arts this June, 'born of the new and the now'.
Festivals are always about capturing a moment. Celebrating the new and the now. They point to possible futures, help us make sense of our present, unlock and invigorate the stories of the past. There's a thrilling feeling of discovery, a testing of new ideas. A collective sense of disruption and excitement. We gather as a community to reflect, be moved and be entertained.
The countrywide pause on activity in venues, festivals and cultural centres was and continues to be a massive shock to the arts sector, the way forward uncertain.
But move forward we must. It wasn’t possible for us to deliver the festival we had planned. Might it be possible for us to deliver something that would capture the essence of the Festival? We started with a blank page. We had conversations with our core funders, The Arts Council, Cork City Council and Failte Ireland who were hugely supportive.
Then gradually, led by the creativity and ingenuity of artists, crew and organisations, a programme that was most certainly born of the new and the now began to emerge.
Online first, with Brian Lobel’s BINGE project, a one-on-one performance piece that takes the solitary experience of binge-watching television shows and transforms it into an opportunity to find comfort in the lives of fictional characters. Commissioned by La Jolla Playhouse with support from CMF and the British Council, Brian forged an exciting new life for this project online, with the participation of artists from all over the world, including Ruairí Ó Donnabháin and Louise White.
It's not the festival as we had planned, but these are festival moments.
Peter Power is the festival artist-in-residence, soprano Kim Sheehan the inaugural winner of the Jane Anne Rothwell bursary and artist Marie Brett had just completed a research residency with us which focused on how we can access the arts as we age. Their thoughtful responses to conversations about how we might reflect on and interpret 2020 lockdown Ireland form our artist-in-residence strand, a series of work-in-progress sharings of projects that explore our past, present and future. Shelter & Place, co-commissioned by Carlow Arts Festival, sees Peter Power work with Leon Butler to develop a project that uses 3D imagery to enable people to share their lockdown environments with others. All That is Sound will see Kim Sheehan perform live excerpts from her album, recorded at home over the last couple of months. Day of the Straws, led by Marie Brett in collaboration with Katie Holly and in partnership with Sirius Arts Centre, will explore how social history surrounding the 1832 cholera epidemic relates to Covid-19 events.
When the old rules no longer apply, there exists the opportunity to create new and better rules. Everyone in the sector is thinking about how we can better support artists and freelance arts workers. The Everyman is always at the forefront of those discussions and we are working with them and Ali Fitzgibbon to facilitate an event called Turning Point, the start of a conversation about how we might imagine a new and better future together with practitioners in Cork.
Presenting experiences, live and in the real world, was initially almost impossible to imagine. The Glucksman brought us New Light, a project that will see the work of eight visual artists presented in a series of billboard walks. Composer Tom Lane reimagined two pieces of work as site-specific audio walks. Corcadorca, pioneers in the development of theatrical experiences for unusual and site-specific locations, developed a project that with the utmost of care and planning, will see them bring travelling theatre to Cork communities, most likely the first live, physical theatrical event since lockdown.
It’s not the festival as we had planned, but these are festival moments. New work and testing of ideas, partnership and collaboration, inspiration and hope. We are thrilled to be able to meet some of our wonderful audiences once again in new, imaginative ways. Together, we’ll keep the Cork Midsummer light shining in June.
Cork Midsummer Festival's Midsummer Moments runs from June 10th - 21st - find out more here.
