Exhibition reveals a snapshot of life in Cork City
Produced by the Cork Midsummer Festival and German documentary theatre-makers, Rimini Protokoll, a cross section of 100 people will tell their stories. The show has been staged in many cities, including London, Berlin and Melbourne.
Rimini Protokoll’s Stefan Kaegi is co-director and he was one of the curators of ‘Parallel Cities’ at last year’s Cork Midsummer Festival.
The other director of ‘100% Cork’ is Dubliner, Una McKevitt. She casted the show, starting at the CSO (Central Statistics Office), where writer and CSO employee, Mary Malone, volunteered.
Each participant asked someone they knew to take part, creating a chain.
“Rimini Protokoll generally starts casting the show with someone from the statistics office and they work through the census. We’ve narrowed Cork down to seven areas, such as north-west and north-central. The north-east is made up of Montenotte, Tivoli and Mayfield.
“That has been the most difficult area from which to get people. There are two kinds of people; people who would never, ever want to do something like this, and those that have a real yen to do it. A few people have said that it’s their lifelong ambition to be on the stage of the Cork Opera House,” McKevitt says.
McKevitt attended community centres, making contact with the locals. Selection categories include age, locality, nationality, gender and marital status. McKevitt noted the divide between northsiders and southsiders in Cork. “Northsiders generally identify where they’re from, more than people on the south side. They’re extremely proud to be northsiders.”
To build a profile of Cork’s citizens, McKevitt asked the cast questions. “What many people said, about 50% of them, is that they’re very relaxed and don’t get stressed. That seems to be something that’s particular to Cork. I don’t think you’d get the same answer in Dublin. Obviously, there’s massive stress associated with being unemployed, but I don’t think Cork is the worst place in the world in which to not have much money,” she says.
The age of the cast ranges from two-and-a half years to 77. There are 16 children under 12 and ten people over 65. “The older people are very interesting. Many of them are involved in over-65s groups. They’re dynamic and have a lot to say for themselves,” McKevitt says.
In the show, each individual introduces themselves, allowing the audience to get to know them. “A kind of game is played. A lot of the show involves voting on issues, with cast members going from one side of the stage to the other, on the basis of whether or not they agree with certain statements. We also put the lights up on the audience and ask them some of the questions the cast have been asked,” McKevitt says. Some of the cast’s stories are more prominent. “For instance, audiences will hear a German man talk about why he moved his family to Cork. He feels that Germany is moving towards a fascist state. He prefers Cork over Dublin, because he thinks Dublin is too close to its colonial past.
“He’s a socialist. There’s quite a few people in the cast who identify with being socialist. They have a very different perspective on the world around them,” she says.
Questions include whether radical change is possible and whether there is an alternative to capitalism. “You could follow someone around the stage and think they’re really like you, but, sometimes, they’ll surprise you with their answers to certain questions. They’ll either be more liberal or conservative than you’d expect them to be. That’s a kind of hook for the audience.”
Children under 12 are asked about the books they read and the films that they like. Non-Irish people living in Cork like the city’s slow pace. “The rain is the main disincentive to staying here,” McKevitt says. She asked the cast to identify the most vulnerable group in Cork City. “A lot of them say teenagers are vulnerable, because too much pressure is put on them to excel and, also, they don’t have anything to do in their spare time.”
‘100% Cork’ is both theatrical and socio-political, says McKevitt. “Rimini Protokoll wants to make theatre in ways that are not traditionally done. They ask what the parameters of theatre are, and what can theatre do outside of people pretending to be other people in costumes. What we’re doing is one of the most direct ways of engaging people. It looks at how society functions and brings that directly to the audience. I suppose that’s challenging, in a way. We all have our own fiction as to what our lives are like. Everyone thinks they’re normal or average and have typical lives. But a show like this challenges that. A lot of people are radically different from one another, even though they’re living in the same place.”
The show is different every night. “It’s playful, in that it’s a game to some degree. There’s an open microphone and various members of the cast speak about things that didn’t occur to them during rehearsals. So there’s room for the cast to be spontaneous.”
McKevitt, a freelance theatre-maker, creates her own work for the theatre, not using actors but friends, contacts and family. Her show, ‘Singlehood’, was performed at the Dublin Fringe last year and examined people who are single. In encouraging people to attend ‘100% Cork,’ McKevitt says it’s a 90-minute, immersive experience, a kind of “guilty pleasure” for anyone curious about the make-up of their city.
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