Drama takes to the streets

Corcadorca is getting Corkonians used to the idea of theatre in public spaces as part of every summertime, writes Mary Leland

Sometimes with Corcadorca events, the question is where the engineering stops and theatre begins. The forthcoming production of The Tempest is an example: as designer Roma Patel places her tiny figures on little white platforms and crowds trees of green filigree into miniature glades around the proposed playing area, director Pat Kiernan explains some of the restrictions imposed on his use of FitzGerald's Park in Cork.

"We had to have a structural survey of certain elements in the park that we wanted to use. It turned out we couldn't use them without support, so we're reproducing these areas instead in order to avoid scaffolding."

There have been a few Corcadorca productions in which scaffolding might have been an advantage - and a few others in which scaffolding seemed to have a major role. It's not so much that a lot of the drama occurs on insecure lots, as that there is a fearlessness of approach which means that audiences, willing but cautious, have made their way into buildings (and even building sites) or parts of buildings not usually associated with theatre: underneath the balcony of the City Hall; along the Victorian battlements of the City Jail; up the narrow stairs of an unappealing night-club; through the vaulted halls of disused garden centres and abandoned factories, and even along the steep stone flights of Cork's Patrick's Hill.

Most recently, there were three locations for The Merchant of Venice, an old warehouse, the new court house, and the street outside a church of Byzantine domes.

Now Corcadorca wants to engineer this kind of performance and this kind of theatrical street-walking into Cork's own civic identity. The desire is understandable, given the success of the company's 2005 programme under the title of "Relocations". This drew three other European companies into the Corcadorca scheme of things for the city's year as European Capital of Culture. Compagnie Jo Bithume from France, Teatr Piuro Podrozy from Poland and Grid Iron from Scotland were already skilled practitioners of this promenade and open-air style; in Cork the task was first to find arenas for each production and then to find an audience.

The sites eventually included the 16-century Elizabeth Fort, the old City Morgue and the Grand Parade, and the audiences, drawn first for the sheer novelty, expanded from the reliable Corcadorca core into a mass which, with the longer-running Merchant, almost became part of the ensemble in itself.

It is this response on which Pat Kiernan now intends to build. "Our long-term aim is that Cork itself would be able to sustain a regular 'Relocations' event, a festival which might be mounted every two years initially but eventually on an annual basis, using the city centre and its public spaces. Cork is the right size for that, and people become accustomed to the idea so that it becomes part of a summer-time calendar. The most exciting work I've ever seen has been in public places - there's a tradition of that right across Europe."

The most exciting work Cork has ever seen has often been that generated or performed by Corcadorca, from Disco Pigs to A Midsummer Night's Dream. Along the way the company has met and worked with - indeed even struggled into creative life with - people such as Enda Walsh, Judy Hegarty and Conor Lovett, Ray Scannell, Conall Creedon, Steven Gale of UCC, and other graduates of UCC's Dramat.

There has been a fair bit of new writing ("You have to spend an awful lot of time working on new texts, though. And then presenting it to 30 or 40 people in a theatre!") and from this has grown the biennial Corcadorca Playwright Award.

The company was founded in 1991 when Kiernan, adrift from both second- and third-level education (his work with Dramat was tolerated until he won Best Director at ISDA) decided that he "had to do something", apart from his devotion to fishing and fly-tying.

He was awarded the Mary Robinson Goodman Theatre Chicago fellowship in theatre direction in 1994 by the Arts Council of Ireland (which led to an engagement with Peter Sellars), but it was Disco Pigs which consolidated ideas, ambitions and relationships.

"We had done a number of shows over about four years with Enda, but that's the one where it all came together. It was so well written that even though the language was cloaked the more you read it the better it became, a very well-thought-out idea but deliberately disguised. Eventually it was the language itself which seemed the most important thing in it. And that was also the one where we recognised that we wanted to bring our work outside of Cork. It took us all over the world, really."

From Best Production at Dublin Theatre Festival in 1996, to Scotland on Sunday's Critics Award at the Edinburgh Festival and the Observer Play of the Year, both in 1997, Disco Pigs subsequently toured worldwide and also became a movie. The downside was that two years later when they all returned to Cork and ordinary life, it was a matter of starting all over again.

But other things were also happening for Kiernan, including work at the Gate Theatre in London, as well as at the Samuel Beckett Centre and the Abbey in Dublin. He had also got another taste of European style theatre, witnessing the Jo Bithume events in Angers, seeing how the company could track the town with visual references to the production, installing clues and connections overnight with no fear that they might be damaged.

"It was like a football match in terms of numbers, recognition and excitement. It changes how you see a place, it gives a sense of ownership, creating a bond between you and where you live. As citizens I believe we're entitled to that!"

That sense of entitlement, provoked and nurtured by Corcadorca, is already alive in Cork's citizens. What matters now is both money and civic endorsement. In a way both elements are being mustered. In terms of civic engagement the city authorities have already shown a willingness to open streets, stop the traffic and close off business. Admittedly, Cork 2005 was the city council's business in the end, and lessons about corporate generosity and imagination were learned the hard way. But Corcadorca, fuelled by the Arts Council's grant of €190,000 (a disappointing increase of €22,000 over last year), has to find a lot more money for itself.

Already the building firm of John F Supple has provided significant support as title sponsor for The Tempest, a production which Kiernan estimates will cost about €185,000. While the company gets €17,500 from the city council and €2,000 from the county, it is still looking for the type of funding which will enable future plans. And not just for productions.

"Securing funding is a very involved, unusual process and I don't think it's just about the work. In fact it's our audiences who are making the main argument for us, reinforcing our ethic of creating this kind of work and at the same time creating the demand for it. What we would be interested in now would be to get into partnership with the city council, with the object of making 'Relocations' a kind of civic legacy from Cork 2005. We feel we're good at this event-type, off-site production but it's important to keep it exciting and vibrant and in association with the city."

Corcadorca is also looking for a home of its own: not a performance space - they even rehearse in public - but a place in which to plan and think and meet. A fixed point, even though Kiernan himself may not be fixed. "I'm not satisfied yet with where Corcadorca has got. We need to go up another couple of notches - besides which I love the city anyway. But yes, I will be working elsewhere. I've loads of places to get to yet."

The Tempest opens at FitzGerald's Park during the Cork Midsummer Festival June 22-July 1