Premiere of a new evening length work by composer Ann Cleare , created in collaboration with theatre-maker Shanna May Breen and multimedia artist Maura McDonnell. For millennia, the stars have guided how we live and have helped to form some of our earliest and most important mythologies. In the sky, we have found gods, the measurement of time, chemical secrets, and divine warnings, yet the more of its secrets we decode, the more mysteries we discover and the deeper we are drawn in….
From ancient maps to optical instruments to modern spectroscopy, the audience will sonically and visually experience how the night sky has been observed throughout history, exploring what has both guided and puzzled philosophical and scientific imaginations across time. Expect transmissions from space, experiments with light, alignments from ancient worlds, encounters with a spiral galaxy discovered in Birr in , outdoor walking, instrument building, and an illuminated large red orb, symbolic of a red dwarf, the last star that will shine in our universe ten trillion years from now, all directed by the musicians of line upon line percussion trio.
A modern-day Nocturne, designed for sites that celebrate and protect the dark skies, created by composer Ann Cleare, in collaboration with theatre-maker Shanna May Breen and multimedia artist Maura McDonnell. Ann Cleare is a composer and technologist, creating through the medium of sound. This practice extends to the areas of concert music, opera, sonic environments, and hybrid instrumental design.
She is particularly fascinated by timbre and texture and how these parameters can be activated with the use of technology to explore places, people, and ideas through sound. In all her work, the goal lies in expressing the sound of now, including how this relates to past and future worlds, exploring the sonic texture of what it means to be alive in the 21st century. Inspired by climate conversations, performance marker Shanna May Breen creates multi-platform artworks to carbonate change.
The project featured the work of five multidisciplinary artists, a Currach rower and an Ornithologist. Her main artistic output focuses on creating abstract experimental abstract animation film, she calls this art, a visual music art. Maura's visual music works have been screened, presented at music concerts, animation festivals, film screenings, academic symposia and in art installations all over the world, such as Australia, Canada, China, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Singapore, UK, US.
