About The Project

WHY AND HOW WE CREATED SONGS OF CHANGE

Civic Associate Artist, Veronica Coburn, reflects on the creation of ten inspirational songs, rooted in South Dublin County.

On the 18th March 2020, The Civic Theatre along with all other cultural institutions followed government guidelines and closed its doors. Silence settled into the corners of the building. No voices rang out from the stage. There was no heady buzz of conversation in the foyer. The Civic is all about people and place. The Civic’s place in South Dublin County. And the people for whom The Civic is a gateway to that most important of spaces, the imaginary realm. For it is in the dreamtime, and what is theatre and the arts but waking dreams, that we can contemplate, challenge and come to terms with the world and our place in it.

A couple of weeks into the pandemic The Civic’s General Manager, Niamh Ferry, sent an email: There has to be something we can do. To reach out. To provide a space for people to come together to respond to what is happening. In 2019 I had completed a public art commission for South Dublin County Council, Ghost Hares, exploring local people’s relationship to their immediate landscape, so I reached out to the people who had taken part in that project. Do you want to come together to explore the idea of change? In this collective moment of great change? Explore moments in your life when your view of the world was altered? The response was immediate and immense. Songs of Change was born.

Every Monday and Saturday for ten weeks I worked with participants on Zoom. Monday evenings and Saturday mornings. Each session started with games. To focus the group. To bring everyone together. To laugh. Did you know it’s possible to play chasing on Zoom? Then the real work began. I decided to work laterally. Build a sensory memory through exercises inspired by Jacques Lecoq’s poetic sensibility. Light. Colour. Texture. Smell. Providing a rich connection to lived experience. Participants responded to prompts and answered in lists and haikus. Lists for breadth and detail. Haikus for sensitivity and brevity. Slowly and steadily stories started to unfold. A house fire that erased everything but the memory of what went before. Early traumas. Moments of enlightenment. Of challenge. Times when the borders of how we see the world are tested. Ruptured. Expanded. Love in all its forms. The tender beauty of loving a child. The harsh realities of love gone wrong. Moments when we are changed utterly. Irrevocably. When the choice is to adapt or die.

In the weeks and months following the workshops I worked with Perth based composer, Debra Salem, to search through all the material to find the seeds of a suite of songs. Ten songs. Articulating moments of change in the participants’ lives. Some songs told one story. Others told multiple stories. Overlapping, a layering. We honed the words and Debra added the notes. And then Jess Kavanagh came on board to curate a merry band of singers and musicians to breathe life into the songs. The songs were filmed in The Civic Theatre over six days in September 2021 and it was a joyous experience. And now we invite you to click and listen. Click and listen to our songs. And we hope that in the process of listening they will become your songs.