A City + A Garden: Stories and soundtracks combine for walks in Cork and Dublin
A Garden and a City: Top, Danny Denton, Deirdre Breen and Mary Hickson; above, Tolu Makay, Lisa McInerney, Connor Lovett.
Like so many of us, Mary Hickson has been walking familiar streets in her city a lot more than usual. But Hickson, known for her work as director of biennial Cork festival Sounds From a Safe Harbour (SFSH), has been on a very specific mission: to augment our reality with the aid of technology, and to light up familiar city streets with a brief spark of magic.
“I’ve literally been walking and walking like a lunatic, seeing parts of Cork I’ve never seen before,” Hickson says with a smile. “I’ve just walked Louise’s story four times in a row, and I was sending notes to our musical director: shave ten seconds off chapter four.”
A City + A Garden is a departure for Hickson, and one of a host of emerging tech-based workarounds to the problem of making and experiencing art and performance against the backdrop of the Covid-19 crisis and its ongoing and varied levels of restriction.
Four writers, two Cork-based and two Dublin-based, have been commissioned to write stories set to musical accompaniment and sound design, which the audience experiences via headphones as they walk mapped routes in the two cities, enhanced with visual cues by designer Deirdre Breen.
The stories are divided into chapters, which can be accessed either using your smartphone’s GPS information, or via QR codes en route for the technologically cautious. They will only be available for ten days, and only in the mapped locations provided.
“It’s in the cloud, so all you need are your smartphone and your headphones, and yourself,” Hickson says. “But you’re the live element: you physically have to be on the route to hear it. We’re not going to make it available online, so you can’t sit at home on your laptop and listen to it.”
SFSH is renowned for the calibre of the international acts it brings to Cork’s small venues and Hickson has, with the uncanny knack she possesses for such things, assembled a veritable dream-team of Irish authors, musicians and other creative workers to pull together an ambitious site-specific, multi-disciplinary project in a matter of months.
Authors Lisa McInerney, Louise Hegarty, Gavin Corbett and Melatu-Uche Okorie have worked with musicians and actors including Fish Go Deep, Hilary Rose and Tolü Makay. Stinging Fly literary editor Danny Denton and composer Seán McErlaine are in the mix as literary curator and musical director.
The project is funded by the Arts Council to the tune of €116,000, and is appearing as part of Brightening Air | Coiscéim Coiligh, their ten-day nationwide season of arts events which overlaps with Cork Midsummer Festival. There’s a sense that it’s about more than just novel workarounds to social distancing: it’s also, Hickson says, a “halfway house between the past and the Covid existence” for arts workers employed on the project.
“I think it’s value for money, not least for how many artists have been engaged across disciplines,” she says. “I guess it’s an experiment too. We have to consider other ways of making work. At the start of the whole Covid thing, I was railing against other ways of enhancing live experience, but now I’ve gotten with the programme. Nothing can beat live, but this feels really good, and finding that bridge to technology has been interesting.”
A City + A Garden was conceived of in April, when it was anyone’s guess when Ireland’s third lockdown would end, Hickson explains.
“The likelihood of a Sounds From A Safe Harbour was becoming less and less likely, because it was so hard to see the wood for the trees, so when the Brightening Air opportunity was announced, I thought, is there something we can do?
“We still couldn’t go beyond 5km from our houses and it wasn’t clear when that was going to lift. I thought, ‘if there was something I could do to change how I see my locality, if it could be creatively enhanced, what would I do?’ Could we add a layer of fantasy to existing landscapes, in a hyper-creative way?”
For now, A City + A Garden has replaced Hickson’s regular work with SFSH: there will be no 2021 iteration of the festival, and her team are now beginning to look ahead to their 2023 programme. The logistics of the construction of A City + A Garden, which in recent weeks has involved more in-person work for collaborators, has also been a halfway point.
“It feels like things are starting to wake up, and in the way that we’ve made this, we have been able to spend more time together, because we’ve been able to walk routes together and meet outside, but it hasn’t been exclusively in real life either,” Hickson says. “It’s been half and half, so it feels like it comes from this transitional place: a Covid purgatory.”
- A City + A Garden, by Sounds From a Safe Harbour and Body & Soul, will be available from June 11-20th at locations in Cork City and in Dublin’s Botanical Gardens, as part of Cork Midsummer Festival and the Brightening Air programme
In Lisa McInerney’s Town: A Love Story in Body Parts, a Northside rebel tells her love story, narrated by Young Offenders star Hilary Rose and set to music by Cork electronic music producers Fish Go Deep. “It’s the story of a girl from the Northside who falls in love with a boy from West Cork, a beautiful love story,” Hickson says. “It’s really Cork: if you’re not from Cork you might miss out on some of the 'lapsy pas' and the 'goms' and the 'feens', but it’s still really good fun.”
Louise Hegarty’s Now, Voyager is read by Cork actor and theatrical director Conor Lovett, and features sound design by sound art improvisers the Quiet Club. “Louise’s character is a ghost who has been occupying the city for 300 years,” Hickson says. “It immediately puts you in another world. It didn’t necessarily need music, but last week it still felt like it was missing something, so we got the one and only Seán Ó Sé to sing De Banks into his phone and send it to us.”
Singer-songwriter Lisa Hannigan and Cork author and editor Danny Denton, also literary curator for the entire A City + A Garden project, have teamed up to produce a small piece for children that will be available in both Cork and Dublin. “Lisa has a little boy at the moment who she has been writing songs for, so we commissioned her to set a poem written by Danny to music,” Hickson says. “We really wanted there to be something for small children too.”
Nigerian-Irish short story writer Melatu-Uche Okorie tells a poignant tale centred around the Botanical Gardens in The Names For Things, with narration and song by emerging songstress Tolü Makay. A young boy plays truant in the Botanic Gardens, hoping to salvage a memory of his sister. “It’s about the garden itself, and about how his sister was obsessed with flowers,” Hickson says. “The boy goes there to somehow try to reconnect with her.”
Novelist Gavin Corbett lives in Glasnevin, close to the Botanical Gardens, and has brought a decidedly local feel to his story, Constance. The tale is narrated and sung by jazz vocalist and composer Dorothy Murphy, accompanied by cellist Kate Ellis. “The central character, Constance, has lived beside ‘the Bots’ all her life and she visits it every day,” Hickson says. “In the story, she laments two lost relationships.”
