The Fringe festival comes to the canals this month with the Kirkos ensemble creating Music for Cranes at Grand Canal Dockyard. This outdoor music performance, supported by the Arts Council, Dublin City Council and Waterways Ireland intends to use the cranes of the city as musical notation. “The initial idea was to simply convert the shapes of cranes into a musical score as we play, but things are evolving with the performance as we find out more about the context it will take place in,” says Sebastian Adams, director of the Ensemble.
“They (cranes) have become a potent symbol of everything that’s wrong with Dublin, as they tear apart a lot of the things people love about Dublin in order to replace them with buildings that could (and do) exist anywhere else,” he adds. “The bittersweet part is that there’s nothing really wrong with cranes – they’ve just been caught in the crossfire of greed, and could just as easily be building things that are really designed to make the city better to live in.”
“The bittersweet part is that there’s nothing really wrong with cranes”
The audience will sit (uncovered) in pods of 1 or 2 people in the large concrete dockyard from which the Viking Splash Boats are launched – there will be social distancing channels between each pod and we can move through them and make the music take up the entire space.
Sunday September 19, Grand Canal Dockyard, 4.30pm & 6.30pm, free but ticketed.
Canal Bank S.W.A.L.K. is a summer partnership between Totally Dublin & Waterways Ireland
Canal Bank S.W.A.L.K. illustration – Gav Connell
