Chameleon bringing life back into Cork

Johnny Hanrahan, founder of Chameleon, a creative projects company which aims to stimulate Corkonians.

Johnny Hanrahan, who ran Meridian Theatre in Cork for 20 years until its Arts Council funding was axed in 2011, says he never again wants to be in a position where he is dependent on a large lump sum of money from a national organisation. Having taken time out to write and adapt for the stage Sebastian Barry’s novel, The Secret Scripture, as well as to reassess his career direction, he reflects that Meridian’s demise “was in many ways a tremendous stimulus to creativity.”

Hanrahan has set up Chameleon, a creative projects company that works within the arts, entertainment, education, tourism and community building. The company is currently staging a city-wide pilot project called ‘Acts of Random Beauty.’

“The project is designed to introduce playful, interesting, artistic and challenging interventions or occasions into the everyday life in the middle of Cork city. Not all the things we’re doing are artistic but they’re all designed to make the experience of being in town that bit more interesting.”

The activities range from pop-up performances of opera, traditional and classic music to fun workshops for children. “It’s not a big money driven scheme, although it’s not without an economic dimension. The Cork Business Association is backing what we’re doing and we’re getting help from Cork City Council. It’s about rendering the city more interesting.”

Hanrahan says Chameleon events tend to happen on Saturdays. “Because of the limitations of our budget, we can’t do a blanket programme at the moment. But our aim in the long term is to create a programme that will exist on a semi-permanent basis which will be attractive to people. The programme includes children’s theatre in the library, craft workshops on the street and generally creating moments for people to enjoy.”

The biggest events planned for the month of September are cellograff sessions. “Cellograff is a new form of graffiti pioneered by German graffiti artists. The idea is that cellophane is stretched between trees or lamp posts. An impermanent wall is created. It’s translucent and people can do graffiti on it. It’s a huge tourist attraction in Paris. There’s no clash between doing this and people’s issues around what should be on the walls of buildings.”

Hanrahan says he has “a big team of young volunteers working on this. They have all kinds of knowledge of cult events and stuff that’s happening online. We plan to wrap the Sugar Cube (beside the Electric Bar) in cellophane and we’re talking about wrapping a double deck bus and then putting graffiti onto it. It will be like a mobile art experience. There are a lot of very fine graffiti artists in the city. It’s of the street, it’s very democratic, it’s young and there’s nothing of the ivory tower about it.”

Hanrahan’s agenda is “broader than the arts. It’s about having a vital city in the broadest of cultural terms. We’re called ‘Chameleon’ because the company changes colour all the time and changes focus, depending on what we’re doing.”

To give the company a financial base, it plans to tour a number of mainstream shows. “We have a network of cafés and hotels where we put on shows once a month. Audiences can have dinner while the show is on or a show can be performed for a company night out.”

The main difference between what Hanrahan is doing now and what he used to do “is that we earn all our money whereas before we were grant aided. What happened to Meridian was a blow but it wasn’t necessarily a disaster. Nobody has the right to expect funding on an annual basis.”

* www.chameleoncork.com.