Lynnette Moran, Festival Director of Live Collision International Festival

Lynnette Moran is an independent Arts Producer & Festival Director specialising in Live Art, Theatre, Visual Art and Digital platforms and is bringing Live Collision to the Project Arts Centre, Dublin.

Talking about international  artists in Ireland and performance form, how is Irish theatre different in comparison to European theatres?

Irish theatre is very literary based. When I came back to Ireland in 2009, I had been living and working and training  in the U.K. for over ten years, I felt culturally growing somewhere else with a different aesthetic and also a different understanding of theatre and live practice actually was and what constituted a performance or theatre piece. So, when I came back I was still quite struck by that binary of theatre, visual art, dance which are quite compartmentalized into their own thing. But, of course there were brilliant people who were interdisciplinary in their approach. But, perhaps our works was presented or spoken about self-compartmentalized. I wondered how I was gonna fit in that landscape. So, I set up Live Collision to begin a conversation around that. Also, when I was living in the U.K. I worked with a lot of artists, and worked in the Battersea Arts Centre which is the space for new work in the U.K., very experimental, and I was a part of the generation of young producers working there at the time. (Not young anymore). Who were questioning what is a producer in the arts, how does a producer encourage a trajectory of an artist. That became my practice, in a way that as a producer, theatre maker, director, my fascination was about long term trajectories, and within those trajectories, performance and brilliant shows happen. When I moved back to Ireland, I had been working with great international people in London and I wanted to continue to work with them, and I didn’t want to change my relationship with them. I started to meet some really interesting people in Dublin, and thought like ‘oh my god, if that person met that person, that’d be really cool’. That happened really organically. I was really excited about meeting new artists in Dublin, and I really noticed that people were talking between art forms, and there wasn’t really a platform to kinda promote that. So, the festival became a kind of lab, and testing ideas. (…) So, I started introducing these people to each other and building that platform of what Live Collision was.

Do you encounter any difficulty in making less traditional theatre in Ireland in comparison to other countries?

Yes, I think that making theatre in Ireland is different. In a way, it is culturally unique to Ireland. Obviously, we have such an amazing literary history. But, that also that is a good and bad thing for young theatre makers, because there is a huge pressure before you. Also, I suppose a lot of the support and attention are towards the big houses, so as a young maker with ambition you think ‘how can I go into those spaces or do I want my work to grow internationally?’ Sometimes that can feel a bit alien or unexplored. I think a lot of artists in Ireland train in Ireland, but also train internationally. And there is a lot of influences that people bring with them. From my perspective, I think Irish artists have a quite global perspective, and I think that global vision leads to really exciting  work. I think that that has shaped how Irish theatre has evolved. (…) I think, sometimes, that Irish theatre has a mixture of disciplines which make the art form really strong.

When you’re making the programme, there is a diversity of artists from different parts of the world, and diversity of content… Considering the art forms and the socio-political zeitgeist of the current Irish society, how do you think the whole programme would impact Irish audiences?

I’d say that the festival’s ethos is very political, it’s driven by thoughts of being primarily interested in practitioners who have a voice, like an urgent voice in our contemporary society. I’m really curious about artists who are speaking to our contemporary conditions. I think live art–the reason why it is called a live art festival– while also incorporating lots of disciplines, the umbrella of live art gives permission to have some of the conversations that don’t happen in other conventional spaces. I also think that it gives space to more marginalized conversations or the conversations that are pushed to the margins because they are more difficult to be in the center. So, I hope that Live Collision pulls those questions, or those conversations into a primary position and allow those political provocations to sit at the very center. When I’m in the theatre, I’m the festival director, but I’m audience as well.and I think we the audience have become more aware of how vital it is that we are more political aware, that we’re prepared to new wrong, that we’re prepared to evolve our thoughts and educate ourselves, to enter conversations with other people. I think one of the huge successful referendums in Ireland, in comparison to the rest of the world which is falling apart— I think it’s because people in Ireland still know how to talk to each other. Even if that conversation is very difficult. And I see that been translated into artists and their work. Artists will speak about stuff that they’re not quite sure yet, they haven’t made their minds, they’ll still for that feedback, that development of thought. We’re pulling apart the accepted norms. (…) I made a piece with Amanda Coogan, where we worked with Dublin Theatre of the Deaf and the dominant language of the piece was ISL

Was it a Teresa Deevy play?

Yeah! And there was another one also in the Project and predominantly the audience were also ISL speaking, and we can see how the dominant culture can shift. So we’re not just trying to present what’s happening, we’re trying actively to develop voice and platform that is speaking in a different number of levels.

Oisin McKenna — ADMIN

— Intercultural inspiration : why do you think this performance would be relevant to the contemporary Irish zeitgeist, and do you think the performance’s meaning would differentiate in a different culture or would it be aimed towards a more humanitarian and communal international experience?

There are certainly lots of themes within the performance that I think will be very relevant to a Dublin audience – housing precarity, anxiety about the news cycle, feeling alienated by a mundane and gentrified contemporary urban culture. The show was written in and about London, but I think (I hope) it will feel familiar to people living in lots of different urban places.

In saying that, I’m interested in making work that is highly specific, in terms of time, location, and culture. I would never try to make anything that’s ‘universal’. Some people will relate to the work and some people won’t. That’s all fine. It’s more about trying to articulate certain ideas and stories with as much specific detail as possible, so it’s rich and vivid and meaty for the people who do respond to it, even if that’s a smaller number of people. I would rather do this than make something that is vaguely relatable but ultimately insipid for larger amounts of people.

— What is the importance of international performances in the world of Irish theatre, which can present a certain traditional form?

It’s incredibly important. Totally invaluable. When I lived in Ireland, having the opportunity to see work by international artists entirely transformed my approach to the work I was making. As in any cultural scene, there are certain ways of making work that are fashionable and popular within the Irish theatre scene, and certain ways of making work that aren’t. That’s fine, but it often means that there are so many different types of work that you rarely get to see in Dublin, because they’re seen as less fashionable, or somehow less legitimate. That can mean the reference points that people are being influenced by are narrower and there is a hegemony that defines that type of work that is valued and the type of work that is not valued. So I think it’s always important to see work from outside of the scene and context in which you’re located, particularly when that scene is as inward-looking as the Irish theatre scene can be.

–What are your opinions on the role of the artist in a multi-cultural society? And how do you, possibly, create political arguments and intercultural conversation amongst spectators?

I guess I’m interested in art that is oppositional or that contests and problematises popular narratives. I’m not that interested in work that seems to confirm something that people already believe about themselves or their surroundings. I like work that makes people feel uncomfortable. I’m interested in the political possibilities of that discomfort, how it might cause a person to think critically on their own behaviour or on their surroundings. I am also interested in art as a vehicle for disseminating political ideas, in a way that’s potentially more accessible and affecting than academic political texts.

In saying that, I don’t really know how to create intercultural conversation among spectators. I don’t have any deliberate strategies for doing so. Maybe other artists do. I guess I feel that I can’t control how audiences respond to my work, let alone have any conscious influence on how they might engage with each other. Really I just talk about things that are interesting to me, try to do so in a way that’s impactful and of a high artistic quality, and hope that that will have some sort of effect on the audience.

 

Lee Welch — No Feeling Is Final

What are your thoughts on the role of visual art in contemporary society?

A backdrop for Beyoncé and Jay-Z.

[a thoughtful repose]

If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.



On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.

/ / /

What are your opinions on the role of the artist in a multi-cultural society? And how do you, possibly, create political arguments and intercultural conversation amongst spectators?

A lot of the time I feel intellectuals say a simple thing in a hard way. And possibly one of the roles of an artist is to say a hard thing in a simple way. The other day I was thinking about how society doesn’t teach us to look at images. They teach children to read – words, sentences and vocabularies – but not to read images. I am interested in this issue. I want to make people ‘see.’

I suppose my work is less argumentative and more about gesture. Posturing. Sometimes in life, you dig so deep inside that you can’t imagine getting past where you are in that moment. Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?

[interrupted by a knock at the door]

/ / /

Can you tell me more about the two new paintings, created for the Festival and how the live performance element will interact with these?

The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” Say it in a concerned way. They’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And they’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” They don’t realise something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. They don’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it.

 

/ / /

 

Do you think this installation and the performance will be relevant to the contemporary Irish zeitgeist, and do you think their meaning would differentiate in a different culture or would it be aimed towards a more humanitarian and communal international experience?

I am not sure, I’ll tell you afterwards.

[thinking for a minute]

Yeah, for sure. I feel it would be a whole other experience set in another culture. Even if it were to be staged in an other venue in Dublin it would be altered, let’s say City Hall for example, a spectacular example of Georgian architecture, the whole atmosphere shifts. Then if we start to consider how it may have an affect in say a New York car park in one of those stacked mechanical parking lots, which makes it possible to stack three cars on top of each other, the installation and performance takes on a whole new dimension not only physically but culturally. Having said that, it seems we are focused on culture or place and in the same regard I think time has a major influence too. With every single reiteration the audience sees something else — they see another detail. The next day the piece would be a whole other thing. So much of what transpires is within the audience. The happenstance nature of our being. A phone ringing. A sneeze. Silence.

[sipping from a tumbler]

I mean, it’s not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.  

 

Rachael Young – NIGHTCLUBBING

NIGHTCLUBBING was born from this incident that happened in a nightclub in London where two of three women weren’t allowed to go in this club space because of their body size. This led me on a journey of think about feminism, people having different experiences and different cultures, and what happens if you have a deseable body or what happens if you’re assigned to a different gender and how does it all shift under the structures of feminism. And then I started to think about how to link all of this (…) Grace Jones in particular can’t portray this masculine or feminine, so like she’s always been herself. She doesn’t put wig in her hair, she doesn’t come like with the western idea of beauty and also I liked the way that she could be like an icon or a person to look to.

And is it something that happen quite often in London?

It is definitely something. And the reason I thought it would be so interesting, and I started to have conversations about it, and there is also a sense of selecting people to go in first. So there is a kind of people that they choose, so people have this different experience, but it’s all part of what I like a general microaggression that people face it all the time. And no, it is not ok.

And this is being performed as a live art piece, isn’t it?

This piece is a live performance piece, yeah as Afro-futurism to talk about these topics.

In terms of accessibility of the performance–considering that this is a live art performance– do you think it is accessible for both theatre goers and non theatre goers? For artists and the general public? Would all this information be easily accessed?

Yeah, we’ve worked to make this quite accessible with interdisciplinary, it plays in a lot of different settings, it plays in theatre, in gig spaces, it plays for queer audiences, it plays for a predominately wide audience. So, the piece itself is accessible, it is a contemporary performance.

And do you think that the reception of this performance in Dublin would be different from the reception in other countries?

Interesting, because I don’t know what the political landscape is in Dublin–well I mean I do know what it is in Ireland– but the show has toured internationally so, to Amsterdam and other places. So, lot of people from lots of places feel like they’re being outsiders, or not part of the club. And this is what we are talking specifically, the club space, and if you think about, generally, the idea of a club, there is inclusivity and exclusivity, it’s quite like another universe.

And do you consider this performance to be quite radical, in a way,  in which you try to evoke different perspectives on the issues of the society, to create communication between audience members?

I think it can be seen as radical, because it is entering a space in which you choose a queer woman, a black woman, or  any of this, can be perceived as a quite radical and political act to talk about the things that we often push it under the carpet. And it is a radical and political act to create conversation between audience members. It is not blaming anyone, it is giving the audience the space to think about how they may or may not be related with this.

And what would be the main idea that you’d like the audience to get from this performance?

I guess it is looking from a perspective that the audience will feel uplifted, and that’s the main thing. And there is an amazing live music and often I think it quite helps the show to be perceived. I think will feel uplifted and ready to implement, I don’t know… Move forward into the future.