C108
Review
Cork:
Daphne Wright and Johnny Hanrahan at various locations
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| Daphne Wright and Johnny Hanrahan:
performance and installation shots from Croon,
2004; photo Dara McGrath; courtesy National Sculpture
Factory |
Conceived out of a mixed parentage
of theatre and visual art, Croon occupies
a space outside of both disciplines - a place where language
is automatically reconsidered in the process.
The event begins at the Everyman
theatre where two guides start the tour of three nearby
locations in the manner of a class trip. Limited to twenty-five
per group, the experience is of a decidedly intimate nature.
From the offset, movement around each site is encouraged.
There are no division lines between observer, object and
performer. The spectacle of theatre subsides with what
may be termed as the often-quieter experience of visual
art. Irregular to the field of visual art, the human performer
becomes another material within the installation for Daphne
Wright to manipulate. This manipulation and direction
happen on common ground through the primary process of
visualisation, and not separately through respective art
disciplines.
Over the first year Johnny Hanrahan
and Wright evolved the concepts through drawings. The
second year, definitions of art and theatre inevitably
collided. The multi-authored world of theatre contrasts
with solo-authored visual-art practise. A storyline in
theatre clashes with the ambiguous nature of any narrative,
if there at all, in visual art. In Croon the result
was a narrative broken but nonetheless present, and what
could be termed the theme in the literary rather than
visual tradition of theatre was revealed in experience
and not in script.
The voice of each performer in each
site is oblivious to the observers, addressing no audience
and engaging in no dialogue. Strong soundscapes saturate
the atmosphere, be it ghostly radio vibes or nuclear desolation.
A huge vat concealing a seventeen-piece choir transmutes
from static sculpture to performance; service hatches,
framing singing heads, randomly open and close. A performer,
in a tuxedo, searches for musical harmony as if to deactivate
the pain of emptiness in his songs of 'Mr. Heartbreak'.
The boiler-suit performer also searches, arranging obscure
objects into and onto the walled territory of a concrete-block
maze. Logic is sought through manic scribbling of mathematical
equations in chalk and cantations of chemical compounds.
Finally the heightened perspective of floating metre-wide
columns is circled and cut through by a stilt walker and
his barrage of proverbs selling global politics. Raisons
d'être can't be bought. Clad in flesh tones, a lifeless
'parallel' figure stretches across the floor, calling
to mind the puppet on the carpet in the first site. Strained
breathing gradually amplifies but he never finds his feet.
At this point Croon seems
to slide into a theatrical experience; the script is language-heavy;
what visual art tends to leave out, theatre insists on
including. Croon has an ending, but the experience
up until this point successfully resonates beyond the
performance.
Croon is bravely interdisciplinary
rather than multidisciplinary, surpassing the familiar
yardsticks.
Niamh Lawlor is an artist,
based in the Cork Artist Collective, Cork.
Daphne Wright / Johnny Hanrahan:
Croon, presented by Meridian Theatre Company and
the National Sculpture Factory, Metropole Hotel, IAWS
Building, Everyman Theatre, Cork, 3 - 7 February
2004
