Irish Monsoon Wedding on Newstalk, Stephens Day at Noon :-)

If you missed this first time around, here is another chance to catch my radio documentary:

Irish Monsoon Wedding: Radio Documentary Newstalk 106-108FM,

In this heart-warming love story, The East meets the West, The Sea meets the Hills, and Darjeeling harmonises with the Cork lilt as Eileen and Brendan O’Brien make the long and arduous trip from Cork to the foothills of the Himalayas to give their only daughter Emma away in an elaborate Nepali wedding ritual involving destiny, and many bottles of whiskey… Irish Monsoon Wedding tells what has once again become an archetypal Irish story - of parents coming to terms with the loss of their children to foreign shores, or, in this case, to a far-off mountain-top above the clouds in India.  Bittersweet tears are balanced by the joy of a colourful, intercultural wedding celebration complete with intricate Nepali rituals. This exotic tale unravels against a backdrop of Edith Wilkins’ wonderful Centre for Street Children, and Fair Trade Organic Darjeeling Tea, available for sale here in Dublin and Cork.  Tune in for a monsoon of tears, of singing, of laughter and of course that essential ingredient for any love story - true love.

Noon, December 26th, 2012, on Newstalk 106 – 108FM
A Deirdre Mulrooney Production
Sound Supervision by John Davis

Joan Denise Moriarty: Ballet Warrior, on RTE Sunday Miscellany

I was delighted to be asked to contribute a piece on the mysterious Joan Denise Moriarty to RTE Sunday Miscellany yesterday on the occasion of 65 years of Cork City Ballet, and the centenary of her birth - perhaps (she kept her date of birth a secret).  Here is a link where you can listen again at your leisure, should you so wish:

http://www.rte.ie/radio/radioplayer/rteradioweb.html#!rii=9:3432719:68:11-11-2012:

I'm in fine company with Martina Devlin, opera singer and writer Judith Mok, poet Michael O'Loughlin, and Siobhan Harte.  Enjoy!

Dance School Tardis: My Magic Fundit Finale :-)

I haven’t written in here for a while – I have been busy.  Among other things, I underwent a FUND:IT CAMPAIGN! Well, the good news is that I live to tell the tale.  Here is the best bit:

Blue Sky

With one day left to go on my 35 day fund:it campaign, I opened my eyes to see a clear blue sky outside my bedroom window.   Even though it was October.  It was Saturday, October 6^th  to be precise.  At the back of my mind, I knew yoga was on in Dartmouth Square at 11am, and Cathy Pearson, a friend of mine since we did the UCD/NYU Scriptwriting Summerschool together many many moons ago was the teacher that week. I hadn’t seen Cathy in a while and had never done her yoga class.  That, combined with the blue sky, and the building inner dread of “Hell and Back”, a sadistic 10k run from Kilruddery Estate, Bray, up the Sugar Loaf, through mud pits, under barbed wire, through ponds and rivers a friend had signed me in for the next day got me out the door to stretch gently in the open air with Cathy.  (And did I mention that those Dartmouth Square Saturday morning yoga classes only cost €5?  Good value! All the more reason to cycle over there, yoga mat on back).

My Fund:it “Adventure”, which started on Monday, September 3rd, would prove to be quite an emotional rollercoaster, with a happy ending eventually thanks to 63 great people - micro-philanthropists all.  Putting oneself at the mercy of the universe like that can be a terrifying experience, believe me. 

Of those 63 fine people, there were only three I didn’t know before, including eminent architectural historian Shane O’Toole who is writing a book and curating an exhibition about one of Ireland’s most important (and forgotten) modern architects, Cork-born Noel Moffett – who was married to the young Margot Moffett, one of Erina Brady’s dancers in 1940’s Dublin (she was also prime organiser of the White Stag Art exhibitions).  We connected for the first time when Shane, who had been following my research for a while (unknown to me - how flattering), kindly contributed to my Fundit campaign.  We subsequently met for a wonderful nerd-fest (I speak for myself when I say “nerd”!), of 1940’s gossip and anecdotes involving Erina Brady and her dancers. It was as if our research constituted the two respective sides of one coin. 

One thing I learned from my Fund:it campaign was, firstly and foremost – dig deep and stay connected with your inner zen.  Some people who you think owe you a favour may let you down.  This will probably happen.  Don’t waste your precious kilojoules on disappointment, or getting angry at them.  The faster you let that go, the better for you.  Move on fast.  For every one of those, several others will surprise you with their affirmation of you and your work.  These good people will emerge delightfully, out of nowhere, and sometimes just as you are about to despair, before you turn in for a night’s sleep and just can't face up to another glimpse at your fundit page and its static balance.  My advice? Focus on them!   

So, getting back to Dartmouth Square yoga class on the last day of my fundit campaign, and just before launching myself kamikaze-style into “Hell and Back” (notice a theme emerging?).  I arrived to pleasant Dartmouth Square, locked my bike, unravelled my yoga mat, and had a chat with Cathy Pearson (www.yogadeep.com), who I hadn’t seen in a while – since our mutual friend Dragana Jurisic’s birthday party a year and a half previously.  Dragana, a wonderful photographer herself, worked with Cathy on her first documentary film “Get the Picture”, about epic photographer and photo editor John G Morris – which, incidentally, was part-funded through American crowd-funding site Indiegogo.com.  Just completed, and now set to premiere at the Cork Film Festival November 2012, Cathy’s film happens to be Indiegogo’s most successful Irish crowd-funding film project to date.  
"Get The Picture?" Temp Trailer from Get The Picture on Vimeo.

I mentioned my own little fund:it project, “Dance School Tardis” to Cathy.  She immediately asked me to send her a link to it, kindly saying that she would like to contribute to it, and to share it on facebook. I said “oh, we have just one day left in the campaign, and we have luckily reached our target, but it would be really nice of you to share it – the more people that know about it, the better”.  So that was that, I was the better for doing the yoga class, the sun stayed out, and much later that night, after seeing “Bird with Boy”, a theatre festival show by Junk Ensemble on Henrietta street, and just before I hit the hay, I remembered to email Cathy the link to the Dance School Tardis fundit page: http://www.fundit.ie/project/dance-school-tardis

Before I knew it, it was Sunday morning and I was making like “Platoon” in the dreaded Hell and Back, up the Sugar Loaf, through marshes and rivers and mud-pits and over haystacks and walls and under barbed wire, and through electric fences – lovingly designed by an ex-military sadist.   

When I got home from that, cold, covered from head to toe in mud, with scrapes, bruises, and nettle-stings (one of our 4-person team even broke her foot), I had a hot shower and collapsed onto my bed for a while.  

Photo by Mark Doyle.  Thank-you Mark! :-)

Then I hobbled to my computer screen, as you do, to share my tale of tribulation and triumph on facebook. 

But first, I noticed that Cathy had kindly done as she had promised and shared my Dance School Tardis fund:it campaign on her Facebook Page, generously declaring:

“My Friend Deirdre Mulrooney has just one day left to raise funding for her beautiful film about some of the history of Modern Dance in Ireland. Please help share and support if you can.... we have to hijack the arts by finding new ways to keep it going, this is great. Become a philanthropist for the day, no amount is too small.”

How great was that?!  That cheered me up to no end. 

Beneath her opening comment, I noticed a whole conversation had broken out about my prospective film – starting with: 

“Cathy, you would never believe it.. my mum is one of the little dancers in this film. the little one who turns and looks directly a the camera with the two bunches . Can you imagine her surprise to see her self on film 70 years later?...”

“at 49 seconds”

Katie, a friend of Cathy’s who I didn’t know (a photographer in Berlin as it turns out), had spotted her 80 year old mother, no less, in the 1943 “Dance School” film extract on my video pitch! (See above). This was the concentrated dancing blonde tiny tot that I couldn't find!   Katie’s mother Ann was overcome with emotion at seeing her younger self on celluloid, and reconnecting to those unforgettable modern dance classes which inspired a life of creativity in her.  (None of the 1943 dance class participants were aware the film existed).  She had even written notes about the classes, and tried to track down anything that might be written about Erina Brady’s dance classes in later life.

!

Magic. Overcome with enthusiasm for the project, and ready to hop on a plane from the UK to contribute her reminiscences, and creative life story to the film – I was suddenly feeling like one of the luckiest people on the planet. 

Good job I got out of bed and went to yoga the previous morning!  So you see, how Fund:it is about much more than just the money.  Though of course, the money is the essential enabler.  As well as facilitating that incredible connection, both Cathy (who alluded to this heartening anecdote in her talk on Crowd-funding at Dublin Websummit a few weeks later), and Katie kindly contributed to the fund also.  That was my magic finale from Fund:it and the universe.  Worth waiting for. 

And now – the sequel – making the film! I’ll be keeping you posted on that.  In an ideal world, we’ll be screening it on International Women’s Day, March 8^th, 2013.  But I hope to have a rough cut of it well before Christmas.  I’ll be keeping a little diary of the making of, here on my blog. Now the time has arrived to invoke the goddesses of documentary film-making.  If you are that way inclined, please, invoke them with me, and watch this space!

One more word of advice for anyone thinking of embarking on a Fund:it crowd-funding campaign – everyone needs a cheerleader/personal coach when embarking into those daunting and unknown waters, to keep "one" going through thick and thin.  Crowd-funding like Fund:it is predicated on people who help each other in any way they can no matter how modest (not necessarily money) - just what is needed to keep going in these straitened times.  Massive thanks to my Mum for filling that unwavering cheerleader role with panache. And to the other great people.  You know who you are :-)
[& just in case you don't, there is also a list of my great pantheon of believers here: http://www.fundit.ie/project/funders/dance-school-tardis] 

Listen again to Doreen: Telling the Dancer from the Dance

 
 
Doreen: Telling the Dancer form the Dance was broadcast again on RTE Lyric FM last month - if you missed it you can catch the podcast here:

http://www.rte.ie/lyricfm/features/   - about 4th down on the page

Doreen: Telling the Dancer from the Dance - Friday 13th July
 
In 1927 W.B Yeats founded the Abbey Theatre Ballets with Ninette de Valois, the Irish woman who would go on to create the Royal British Ballet. The school is a largely forgotten movement of huge cultural import to Ireland. It has been neglected by history books and omitted from Yeatsian narratives. This programme sheds new light on Yeats' prophetic vision for dance and features a rare interview with the late Doreen Cuthbert, who danced in the Abbey Theatre Ballets from its inception in 1927 until its demise in 1933.

Contributors include Yeats' biographer Roy Foster, Professor Richard Allen Cave, author of 'Collaborations: Ninette de Valois, W.B Yeats", Professor J.W Flannery, author of "W.B Yeats and the idea of a theatre", and Percy Lovegrove, Doreen Cuthbert's husband. The documentary reclaims this lost cultural history and in doing so tells the dancer from the dance.

A Deirdre Mulrooney Production for RTÉ lyric fm.

Sound Supervision by John Davis. Narration by Pat Laffan.
The programme was made with the support of the Broadcast Authority of Ireland's Sound and Vision Broadcasting Funding Scheme. Additional support from the Arts Council of Ireland.

Spot the Artist: My Irishwoman's Diary from Tuesday July 27th, 2012

Click to enlarge for a proper look at the 1910's Orpen life drawing class, and to read the article.  Thanks to Dora Forster for sharing her family photograph with me.

Yoko Ono still says Yes, and she's visiting Dublin I hear...

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I hear that Yoko Ono is going to be in town on Thursday, at Dublin Pop Up Biennal, at Point Village, to visit her wishing tree installation and inaugurate something else.  That reminds me of the time I bumped into her when I was living in Paris, and she and her friends were reviving the Fluxus Movement.  I wrote a story about it that was broadcast on RTE Sunday Miscellany, and published in the RTE Sunday Miscellany 2004 - 2006 Anthology.  I just rooted it out from an old hard drive - here it is!: 

Yoko Ono Says Yes

After some French and English at UCD, it was on the Number Ten bus, swinging around into Baggot Street that the ‘there has to be more to life’ epiphany hit.  Time to avail of the ‘year out’ option.

Intrepidly browsing Eason’s International magazine shelves an A3-sized magazine called Paris Passion leaped out at me saying ‘Come do an internship in Paris’. Who was I to say no?  22 Rue Yves Toudic, Paris 75009.  I wrote it down.  

No sooner was I comfortably ensconsed in my teeny chambre de bonne on the swish Avenue de la Grande Armee, than I consulted my Rough Guide for the aforementioned Rue Yves Toudic. Well, when I say ‘comfortably’… A little wider and longer than myself, my room consisted of a single bed and one plug-in electric cooking ring on which I cooked porridge for le petit dejeuner, le dejeuner, et le tea.

Map in hand, out of my Chambre de Bonne I marched, down the six flights of stairs, up past the Arc de Triomphe, down the Champs Elysees and all the way to Place de la République. It was my first foray in Paris.  Before the end of day, I was in the Paris Passion Magazine offices saying ‘hi, I saw your advertisement for Interns, when can I start?’…

I was assigned to the Culture Editor, who in turn assigned me to the Classical Music and Opera Listings.  ‘Great!’, I enthused.  I knew nothing about Classical Music and Opera, but thought it best not to mention that.

For my first assignment, the rather glamorous Culture Editor (I heard she went out with John McEnroe afterwards), asked me to deliver an RSVP to a gallery on Rue de Seine et Bucci.  (Couldn’t they have faxed it?).  ‘No problem!’, I responded cheerfully and set off on my mission like Indiana Jones.   

Beloved Rough Guide in hand, I found the narrow Rue de Seine et Bucci. Confidently, I counted down the numéro’s to find the one I was looking for.  But it wasn’t there.  How could that be?  I paced up and down the rue, trying to figure out the logic of its street numbers. Finally, I resorted to banging on the boarded up entrance of a derelict-looking building where in a causal universe, the gallery should logically be. 

No answer. Picturing the faces at Paris Passion when I arrived back with the letter undelivered got me walloping the boarded-up entrance even harder.

Time passed.  Eventually a door where there was no door creaked open. Within, a little man whispered: “SSShhhhhhhhh,  Yoko Ono and John Cage are in here”.  John Who? The little man led me in to a small brightly-lit space with television cameras, a white ladder against a white wall, and, yes, Yoko Ono standing there in all her understated glory with short hair and big bug-eyed glasses.  It was unmistakeably her. 

I found myself squashed up beside a gentle-looking tall man, who smiled at me benevolently, before moving over so I could lean on the wall beside him.  That was John Cage, I discovered later.  Yoko nodded at me, and returned her gaze to the camera.  I watched on incredulously as she climbed the step-ladder, reached up, took hold of a magnifying glass that was dangling on a piece of string from the ceiling, peered through it at something on the ceiling, and then climbed down the ladder again. She took a moment, before pronouncing delightedly to the camera: “It says yes!“  Miming out climbing actions she elaborated “You see, life’s like that, you’re climbing, climbing, climbing, climbing – and the answer is YES!”

As soon as Yoko concluded her strange display, I handed over the RSVP, and ran out of there as fast as my little legs could carry me. ‘Weirdo’s!’, I  thought.

Back in the safety of Paris Passion’s open-plan office, I sidled in front of my computer screen and returned to compiling my listings.  A while later I mumbled in a throwaway manner ‘Oh yeah, Yoko Ono and some tall guy called Cage were there recording stuff for TV’.  

As if back where I came from - Joyce’s land of the ‘yes, yes, yes’ - this sort of thing happened every day. 

Bohemians at Ormond Wine Bar for Summer Sojourn.

Enjoy Bohemians: Et Ce Chant dans mon Coeur over a lovely glass of wine in Ormond Wine Bar!  The Bohemians are very happy here, and you will be too.  We are pondering summer solstice bottle and pyjama parties and in the meantime invite you to create your own soiree - under the eye of Dublin's own 1940's Bohemians...  From 1940's Dublin to Paris, 1971, and now back to Dublin 2012: "Et ce Chant dans mon Coeur" 7 Bilingual Poems in French and English by Dancer Jacqueline Robinson, and Images by Basil Rakoczi, founder of the White Stag Art Group. For the month of June, in memory of Ireland's first modern dancer, June Kuhn (nee Fryer). Many thanks to Marie Stamp for help in transferring the exhibition from European Union House.