Week 10 at UCC

Monday began with the practicing of the mysterious song Eadaoin wanted us to learn. (I forgot to mention this song in my last entry). Basically, the song is of unknown origin to Eadaoin but she has a certain fondness for it and wishes to not know of its origin to this day. The ensemble now choir impressed both Eadaoin and I not out of any profound meaning but rather for the pleasing sounds that came from it. She compared it to that scene in The Shawshank Redemption where Red perfers not to know what the opera singers were on about. Afterwards we were tasked with devising a piece based off the wall scaling movement Eadaoin showed us. Its interesting to experiment with the movements and seeing the possibilities. Despite our group scrapping the reverse climbing of our piece it was still nice to experiment if it worked or not.

With performance week being so close we started formatting the piece we would soon display. This is a combination of the movement and animal-based pieces we’ve been working on from the start of the semester. Looking back on it now it’s a lot to remember from where to start and to where it ends but it just comes as second nature to the ensemble.

Tuesday fleshed out the final piece more with the finishing touch of a speech which literally de-humanises the ensemble into their animal forms, at the time the significance was not clear until Friday’s class. Other than that we just kept rehearsing the piece till the end of the lecture.

Friday saw us exploring the piece in greater detail and allowed us to divulge into the greater significance of the piece being of Xenophobic nature. This was made more significant by one of the ensemble members opening to the ensemble about their own personal experience with being on the other end of some of the more upsetting aspects of the speech at the end of the piece. It makes me speculate the impact the ensembles work could have on  the audience. It could go either way…

There is nothing further to add onto this weeks blog other than a feeling that our time as an ensemble with Eadaoin and Jools is coming to an untimely end, its been quite a progressive few months of feeling at first uncomfortable to the initial intensity of the lectures to now established the foundation of our artistic curiosity.