Sunday, July 23, 2017

Ireland Study Abroad, Installment 5


It's been a long and busy handful of days in Galway. I really enjoyed the size of Galway; it felt manageable enough to get a handle on location. I know where all my favourite coffee shops are by now. The Arts Festival has been great, and we've seen lots of shows: Irish Shorts 6 from the end of the Film Fleadh, Yellow Moon, Bathroom, Pumpgirl, Dún na mBan tri Thíne (The Fairy Fort is Burning), Woyzeck in Winter, Crestfall, and a staged reading of Bir Tawil.
We also met with the author of Solar Bones, Mike McCormack. I really appreciated that he talked a lot about the publishing side of being an author and how he was rejected so many times. I'd like to try reading some of his other books, particularly Notes from a Coma, if I can find the spare time someday.
We also spent a day at Cliffs of Moher and Coole Park, as well as a day on Inis Mór. I wish we'd had more time to spend at Coole Park; there were a lot of trails I wish I could've walked, and views I would have liked to have attempted to draw or paint.
A lot of the performances we were able to see were quite good; I personally think I enjoyed the reading of Bir Tawil the most, even though it was only actors reading a script rather than a full production. You could see a few of the actors tearing up on stage during the reading. Afterwards, there was a Q&A session so the playwright could get feedback on his work. Crestfall, on the other hand, has mostly left me very unsettled. While the production itself was strong, I'm having some difficulty understanding what purpose was served by putting that type of graphic violence and brutality on stage.

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