Amanda Coogan on Ode To Joy: 'The deaf performers will feel the bass'
Amanda Coogan has helped create the special performance of Ode To Joy. Photograph: Eoin O'Neill
When it comes to all aspects of her art, Amanda Coogan is certainly hands-on. The acclaimed performance artist is known for her highly visual and physical work across all media. As a child of deaf parents, who describes Irish Sign Language (ISL) as her mother tongue, gesture and expression underpins much of her work. The Dublin native will also be familiar to many people from her gig as an ISL interpreter on the Late Late Toy Show, going viral on social media with her wonderfully energetic signing.
Coogan is talking to me on a video call from her home in Belfast about her latest project, a live performance of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy explored through the unique perspective of deaf culture. Not only has she helped create the piece, but she is also in the middle of conjuring up an important element of the set as we speak. On her desk are piles of old shirts, the raw material for a canopy which will envelop the lecture hall of the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork city, where the performance is taking place as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival. Coogan is positively fizzing with excitement.
“We’re in this gorgeous lecture theatre in the Crawford just before they close it down and renovate it. I’m so blessed that they're allowing me to do this. One of the lines from the Ode to Joy is: ‘…above the starry canopy, there must dwell a loving Father’. So I’m literally sewing shirts together to make a patchwork canopy that will hang down over us and the audience. I'm covering the whole place with this and it will be like a huge installation.”
Ode to Joy, part of the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, is one of the world’s most recognisable classical music pieces, famously written when the composer had gone completely deaf.
Coogan and the Cork Deaf Community Choir will perform the piece in ISL alongside Lianne Quigley and Alvean Jones of the Dublin Theatre of the Deaf. Apart from the obvious resonances with the work of a deaf composer, their performance also recognises the immense effort behind the recognition of Irish sign language as a minority language in 2017. Coogan says the piece also embodies the struggle for acceptance and equality among all oppressed people.
“The idea in the Ode to Joy is this brilliant idea of utopia, where ‘all men become brothers'. We’re really questioning the idea of utopia, what that could be and how to strive for it. The translation of it into ISL is stunning,” she says.
Coogan has been digging deep into the cultural and historical significance of the work. Adopted by the European Union as its anthem, the Ninth Symphony was conducted by Leonard Bernstein in a famous performance on Christmas Day 1989, weeks after the fall of the former Berlin Wall. Bernstein changed the words, replacing the word joy, ‘freude’, with the word freedom, ‘freiheitand’ . More recently, Coogan points out how the piece was sung by a group of MPs in the House of Commons in protest at the Brexit vote.
“We as hearing people know the Ninth Symphony so well, it was really fabulous to try and translate the feeling and the emotion of this music,” says Coogan. “I have been translating podcasts about the symphony and its significance in historical terms. It has been a gorgeous challenge.”
Serendipitously, the recording being used for this performance is that of the recent EU Gala Concert by the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Brophy, to celebrate 50 Years of Ireland’s Membership of the EU. “The Department of Foreign Affairs are giving us that recording and I’m so thrilled because we really wanted an Irish one. It will have a glorious sound to it,” says Coogan.
The Ode to Joy is so well-known that Coogan is hoping that experiencing it through ISL will bring a whole new perspective. “It gives us another reading. It will be quite intense and of course for hearing people we hear this glorious sound, full on, with a lot of bass, because the deaf performers will feel the bass. It’s an immersive feast because when we usually experience Ode to Joy, it’s definitely with our ears. I want us to experience it with our eyes and with our bodies. This performance is for anybody who loves music but what I hope is that people see the beauty of ISL, which I am evangelical about, and deaf artists actually making this and the magnificence of their performances.”
Coogan has also been instrumental in reviving interest in the work of Waterford playwright Teresa Deevy, who lost her hearing at a young age but went on to have her work performed in the Abbey Theatre and recorded for RTÉ radio. Last year, Coogan presented the RTÉ documentary, Tribute: The Teresa Deevy Story, in which she explored the writer’s legacy and her unperformed script Possession, based on the story of Queen Maeve and the Táin Bó Cuailnge. Coogan has secured funding under the Decade of Centenaries initiative and is planning to stage a full performance of Possession, with Deevy’s script as the libretto and a score by Cork composer Linda Buckley. They are hoping to present a sneak peek at some scenes in Cork later in the year.
- Ode to Joy, Jun 24-25, Crawford Art Gallery, 25 mins, various performances, free but registration required. See corkmidsummer.com for more
