FUAIM: Talking theatre, music, sound ...

5 Jun 2013

The growing significance of music in Irish theatre will be among the topics explored and celebrated at an upcoming UCC symposium on Saturday 15 June.

Among the nine acclaimed contributors to the free FUAIM Theatre and Music Symposium on Saturday 15 June at Ó’Riada Hall in Cork City are composer and director Heiner Goebbels (music theatre works include Black on White (1996), Eraritjaritjaka (2004), Stifters Dinge (2007) and Songs of Wars I Have Seen (2007)), Tom Creed (Festival Director of Cork Midsummer Festival) and Emelie FitzGibbon (Artistic Director of Graffiti Theatre Company in Cork). The symposium will offer an open dialogue on creative opportunities between music and theatre and a showcase of current research and experimentation in the area. It is organised by the School of Music and Theatre at UCC in association with the Cork Midsummer Festival and the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences at UCC.

While the affinity between theatre and music is as old as the history of the arts, the tendency to combine these two media took a particularly intensive turn in the last century. Since Cage’s “happenings”, various modes of theatricalising music have irreversibly eroded the boundaries between music conceived for the concert hall and for the stage. At the same time, contemporary theatre has been increasingly influenced by the idea of theatre as music. From the use of language as music and the actor as a musical performer in Beckett’s plays, which mark the beginnings of postdramatic theatre, to the transformation of stage, props, actors and images into musical instruments in recent productions by Simon McBurney and Heiner Goebbels, contemporary theatre has often appeared most exciting, innovative and provocative when inspired by music.

In the keynote address of the first FUAIM Theatre and Music symposium, composer and director Heiner Goebbels, whose work epitomises the intermedia tendencies of contemporary theatre, will discuss his aesthetic principles and modes of musicalising theatre and theatricalising music in landmark productions such as Max Black (1998), Landscape with Distant Relatives (2002), Eraritjaritjaka (2004) and Stifters Dinge (2007).

Renowned intermedia artist, composer, musician and writer David Toop will investigate different modes of reception and the connections between different artistic media in an anti-lecture which will use recorded and live sound, images, voice, verbal and non-verbal information.

Director Emelie FitzGibbon and composer/sound designer Cormac O’Connor will provide insight into their collaborative process in a presentation about Graffiti Theatre Company's production of Angela Betzien's Where in the World is Frank Sparrow?

Composers Roger Doyle and Conor Linehan, writer-director Paul Mercier, director Tom Creed and composer-writer-performer Ray Scannell will lead a panel discussion on the relationship between music and theatre in their work, and reflect on the growing significance of music in Irish theatre.

The free symposium (registration required by emailing fuaim@ucc.ie) takes place on Saturday 15^th June from 10.30am-6pm at Ó Riada Hall (Music Building, School of Music & Theatre, Sunday’s Well Road, Cork).

For further information and a full schedule see: http://www.music.ucc.ie/drama/research/theatremusic