Continuing our look at highlights from the 2013 Fringe Festival with Mice Will Play by Caoimhin O Raghallaigh and Nic Gareiss.
Renowned fiddler Caoimhin and his virtuosic dancing bandmate Nic Gareiss from This Is How We Fly embark on their first theatre show in collaboration with WillFred Theatre Company. Here the fiddle player tells us what happens when the cat’s away.
Where did the idea to do a theatrical show come from?
The name “Mice Will Play” came from the fun Nic and I have when playing together as a duo and in This Is How We Fly. So this idea of actually exploring what it would be like to be moving through space instead of standing in the same spot playing tunes, and doing so with a director and lighting designer really was with intention of exploring and expanding ourselves.
You’re working with Sophie Motley and Sarah Jane Shiels of WillFredd Theatre Company who won Spirit of the Fringe last year. Has it been strange re-adjusting to a theatrical context and way of working?
They bring a whole other set of skills and ideas that we would just never have. Sarah-Jane and Sophie are so brilliant, and they’ve been really open and playful, with a way of approaching things that we would never have. I feel like we’ve learnt a lot about a number of things that we would’ve been blind to. As musicians we introduce things, we decide what we’re going to play and improvise. But we have lots of different approaches around Mice Will Play – we’ve collected stories, looked at proverbs, and its all woven together with music in an enlarged context. The idea that you want an audience to walk away with something, how to engineer that, that’s not something we’d be used to and I suppose in that sense WillFredd have been brilliant being able to imagine what it would be like to be on the other end of the performance.
What form does the piece take on then? Is it a movement piece or a gig?
There’s quite a lot of dance, a lot of fiddle and a fair bit of movement through the space, contextualising all of that through story-telling. We listened to some old radio programmes just as a way of tying material together. It’s certainly there in the beginning, that idea of weaving different strands of material together, taking elements from our own spoken word recordings, music, dance, movement too, to get an idea of what we wanted to do. We deliver spoken word, so it’s somewhat improvised, a bit how we would with music. It’s hard to give a sense of the piece because of that.
Mice Will Play debuts at the festival on September 17th at 7pm (€10) and then runs from September 18th to 21st at 7pm (€14/12 conc.) in the Project Arts Centre Cube.
