Rapping it up sean-nós style

Hip-nós, anyone? Marrying two such disparate musical forms as sean nós and hip-hop is not as crazy as it sounds, discovers Siobhán Long.

If even a whiff of Darwinian evolutionary theory applies to Irish traditional music, then sean nós singing is a pitch-perfect example of survival of the fittest. An ancient, orally-transmitted art form, it has not only survived through generations bombarded by competing sounds and styles, but has positively thrived, despite a collapse of many of the customs which would have been thought crucial to its existence, namely kitchen sessions, long, telly-free nights and attention spans capable of following a meandering tale through countless verses towards infinity. For some, sean nós is as deeply embedded in their DNA as the chromosomes that determine eye colour or the genes that dispense musicality from one generation to the next.

Hip-hop, on the other hand, is a child of the present, a recent interloper from the mean streets of Stateside urban jungles, a cultural transplant still struggling to find its own voice amid the metamorphosed urban landscapes of Celtic Tiger Ireland. What might happen, wondered Ray Yeates, director of Ballymun's Axis Arts Centre, if these disparate musical art forms were to engage in conversation? Intimately compatible or inevitably combustible? The jury's still out, but Yeates is convinced that this is a conversation on a homecoming that's got a lot more left to say, after its nervy, spunky debut at Borradh Buan, Ballymun's Irish language theatre festival, now in its fourth year.

"I saw this as a conversation between generations, between the city and the country, and between two art forms," Yeates enthuses about his brainchild, a collaboration involving five sean nós women singers from Donegal and five Ballymun rappers with an appetite for autobiography of a particularly graphic and revelatory kind. "I didn't feel that there had to be hybrids or synergies of any kind. Just a conversation, nothing more and nothing less."

Yeates grew up in Broadstone, attended a gaelscoil and learned sean nós as a child. Juggling conflicting emotions of affection and confusion about his cultural identity, he first encountered sean nós singer Gearóidín Bhreatnach in Glencolumbcille, where she attracts hordes of followers to her singing classes. Watching Breatnach and other sean nós singers, Yeates saw "something in their faces that stretched back 1,000 years".

On home turf, Yeates saw five young Ballymuners rapping, and he was transfixed by their "simple expression of emotion". It was the nakedness of their expression that stopped him in his tracks.

"When young men rap, they express themselves in a way that they won't when they're speaking," Yeates maintains, "and they also support one another in a huge way." Witnessing two utterly disparate forms of creative expression, Yeates set about luring them together, to engage them in a conversation and to see where it might take them. Interestingly, the sean nós singers were completely flexible and open to the unlikeliest outcome of this tête-à-tête.

Yeates ascribes their flexibility to an innate confidence in their own cultural identity, a confidence that their hip-hop conversation partners lacked utterly. Crossing generations and gender divides (the latter strikingly obvious, with not a single male sean nós singer in sight, nor a single female rapper in their midst), these 10 artists crossed paths last weekend in Ballymun and their collaboration, while never less than challenging, suggested that maybe - just maybe - more united than divided them in their choice of musical expression. Warren Gifford, a rapper with more than his share of stories to tell, found himself relishing this unlikely alliance.

"Everywhere you look now, you see signs for Polish and other gigs", he says. "Everyone's bringing their tradition over to Ireland, and we could easily forget about the Irish tradition, and let ourselves slip into American or English music. If we can bring the old tradition back and introduce it to the younger generation, to teenagers like us, they might just get more interested in it and want to adapt it in the way that we're doing. Then you've got the new tradition, and the old tradition living on, side by side."

Christopher Buckley wasted little time in spotting the upside of marrying hip-hop with sean nós. It offered him an unlikely but attractive route to credibility, he admits. With a repertoire utterly preoccupied by the realities of social alienation (death, drugs, murder and suicide), Buckley was sufficiently curious about the often forlorn inventory that defines sean nós to want to dig beneath its impenetrable linguistic surface.

"Irish hip-hop is looked down on a lot", Buckley maintains, "because people are inclined to think it's about us wanting to be American, but it's not that at all. It's all about our culture, and this is about mixing old Irish culture with new Irish culture. It's much more enjoyable than we thought it'd be."

Listening to the concoction of Bríd Óg Ní Mháilleand The Price Of Freedomcolliding in mid-stream, or the shell-shock collision that was Níl Sé Ina Láand the untitled rapping of Gifford, Buckley and their fellow collaborator Andrew Farrell, it was difficult to know whether these musicians are bridging a gap or attempting to straddle a yawning chasm. It's too early in the evolutionary process to cast cold judgement on their efforts, but certainly Deirdre and Sinéad Bhreatnach, the twin daughters of Gearóidín Breatnach, were insistent that the preoccupations of both genres shared much common ground. And the truth of it is that dastardly tales of heartbreak, death and destruction pepper both sean nós and hip-hop with alarming regularity. For Warren Gifford, it's the Ballymun rappers' local accent and local stories that set them apart, and make them relevant to local audiences in a way that Dr Dre or Timbaland could never hope to be.

"In this area, there's a lot of drugs and guns", he says, "and growing up, I would have seen people, the soundest people you'd meet, starting to get involved in drugs and committing suicide. We just want to open up people's eyes to stuff like that. You've got to say it the way it is, step up, not try to polish it up and tell people what's going on."

Christopher Buckley nods vociferously, fired up by the prospect of crossing swords with a tradition about which he knew so little before last weekend.

"People have different ways of expressing how they feel", he says. "Singers sing a song. Boxers hit the bag and rappers hit the page. It's as simple as that."

Borradh Buan, Ireland's only professional Irish language theatre festival, ends tonight at axis arts and community resource centre, Ballymun,