The Ballad of a Care Centre
John Conway, Supported by Kildare County Council Art Service / Creative Ireland, in partnership with the HSE, Naas Care of the Aged Centre, and Riverbank Arts Centre.
When: 16 – 20 June
Where: Kildare
Ticketing: Tickets for this experience will be available to an invited audience of previous project participants from Naas Care of the Aged.
The Ballad of a Care Centre is a site-specific theatre work delivered via live performance and virtual reality to previous clients of the Naas Day Care Centre.
Fionnuala: What’s it like to forget?
Dee: I’m more concerned about what it’s like to be forgotten.
Since 2019, John Conway has been developing his work built around the individual and collective oral histories of older people who attend the Naas Day Care Centre.
Their stories, audio recorded during an Age and Opportunity Artist in Residence programme in 2019 have, under Conway’s vision, become this work of art that reconnects the day care centre residents with their memories and stories. Strands of their memories and life stories are entwined to form a new narrative presented under both a nostalgic and critical lens, which explores the romanticising of certain experiences and the minimising of others, whilst acknowledging mortality and the challenges of social isolation, aging, and age related illness.
Using traditionally performed site-specific theatre, virtual reality, and cutting-edge motion capture technology, to build worlds-within-worlds-within-worlds where the viewer is taken on an out of body - out of time experience, this unique event will be presented to previous clients of the Naas Day Care Centre.
Starring Dee Burke and Fionnuala Gygax.
Listen
Liam Geraghty, award-winning audio producer of podcasts and radio, has created four special editions of his hugely popular Meet Your Maker series focusing on the experiences within Brightening Air | Coiscéim Coiligh. In this episode, he talks with James Riordan (Ar Ais Arís) and John Conway (The Ballad of a Care Centre) about adventures in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in theatre and the arts.
Behind The Scenes: The Ballad of a Care Centre
About the artists
The project brings together some of Ireland’s premier practitioners in socially engaged arts and health, documentary theatre, and virtual reality.
John Conway is a visual artist working extensively in community, youth and health settings. His work is characterised by the production and coproduction of innovative projects which respond to sensitive and often challenging themes in a variety of contexts with different communities. His practice seeks to challenges target communities’ understandings and expectations of visual arts. He is the Director of Other People's Practices and Kildare Young Filmmakers, and is a studio artist at Rua Red South Dublin Arts Centre.
Aisling Byrne is a freelance theatre artist, director and educator based in North Kildare; and has worked extensively in the fields of arts and disability, community drama facilitation, contemporary theatre & socially engaged theatre practice with an emerging practice in filmmaking. Aisling is the founder and Artistic Director of ‘Run of the Mill Theatre’ and the award-winning Dublin based theatre collective Talking Shop Ensemble alongside writer Shaun Dunne.
Elaine Hoey creates interactive VR based installations, appropriating contemporary digital art practices and aesthetics to explore the politics of digital humanity and our evolving relationship with the screen. Utilising virtual reality technology she immerses the viewer in performative and often uncomfortable roles within her digitally constructed worlds.
Dee Burke's theatre work includes Hedda Gabler (Abbey Theatre) Glorious Madness, Angel Meadow, Vardo Corner, Thirteen, The Boys of Foley Street, Laundry, World’s End Lane, Memory Deleted and Down the Valley (Anu Productions), Beautiful Dreamers (Performance Corp and Anu) Meat (Smock Alley), Locked (Philip Kelly), Always Alone Together (Game Theory), Macbeth (Boil in the Bag Productions) and Revolution (Tracy Ryan). She holds a degree in Social Science (UCD) and trained as a Youth Theatre facilitator with Youth Theatre Ireland
Fionnuala Gygax is an actor / theatre-maker based in Dublin. She is dedicated to making ambitious, contemporary work that experiments with theatrical form through collaborative, devising processes. She is the co-founder of Chaos Factory with Rachel Bergin, Venetia Bowe and Danielle Galligan, and teaches Devising in Trinity College Dublin.
Read John Conway’s article on the importance of this work, his process and the use of Virtual Reality in The Ballad of a Care Centre in our Spotlight section.