Boomerang Theatre's dockland installations coincide with Cork's disengagement from its maritime history, writes Mary Leland
The men who struggled daily for employment on the Cork docks witnessed, and contributed to, the economic growth to which their labour was crucial and which would eventually lead to most of them being discarded. In Cork terms, these workers were a rough lot, but in the programme of installations devised by Boomerang Theatre at the Cork Bonded Warehouses on Custom House Quay, they are celebrated to an extent they themselves must never have thought possible. Port executives, stevedores and sponsors of the commemorative exhibition (organised by Boomerang's director, Trish Edelstein) must feel some mild amusement at this tone of wonderment and regret, even while sharing Edelstein's conviction that the dockers represent an honourable tradition in a maritime city.
For anyone growing up in a city with a busy working port, both affection and irony will be understandable. In Cork, the watchmen's huts were narrow exclamation marks along the wharves which were also a bus route. At night, their flaring braziers punctuated the quaysides where the cargoes were unloaded or stored to await shipment. Double-decked bridges opened to let the world steam in. When we read at school of "Sandalwood, cedarwood and sweet white wine" or heard in church about those who go down to the sea in ships and occupy their business in deep waters, these references seemed almost commonplace, so ever-present is the split river and all its comings and goings. And later, when the prostitution on the city quays became something of a civic scandal, even then there was just a faint hint of the faraway, the exotic - could these be Lascars (sailors from India or the Far East) walking up Albert Quay? But there was nothing mysterious about a port-related feature known to every student in the city: the pubs licensed to open early in order to quench the dockers' thirst.
"It was thirsty work," explains Edelstein, who interviewed dockers from Irish ports and from Liverpool, Glasgow and New York. She did not see herself as a historian, she says, but as an artist amassing material to which invited colleagues might respond in a creative way. She also boarded tankers laden with soya bean just to experience what it must have been like to work in holds piled with coal, with grain, with dusty timbers.
"However, very quickly into the process I realised that the knowledge the dockers had of the docklands was of huge social importance, and I felt a responsibility to archive these stories, not just for this exhibition but as a social reference for future generations," she says.
The artists she recruited include print-makers Charlotte Donovan, Raed Ibrahim, Hani Alqam, Sally Maidment and Jill McKeown, and audiovisual artist and composer Marcel Wierckx. Using the facilities of Cork Printmakers on Wandesford Quay, Edelstein also worked with Holland's Ruud Lanfermeijer, whose interactive designs combine theatre, film, television and dance. The idea was to bring about a partnership uniting two communities, that of artists and dockers, and to create in the process a memorable piece of work significant for the city of Cork.
"In a way, I created a map in my mind, like a chart," says Edelstein. "A map shaped by memory, culture and experience. The geography of the map shifted according to the people I spoke to, but the end result was to show a sense of place and of the spirit of the docks and the dockers."
Thus a real conveyor belt discharging real coal; thus the 43 windows of the turreted north facade of the bonded warehouse filled with weather-resistant prints and the stone walls acting as screens for moving images; thus, in the Custom house itself, all the images on display, with more collages of text and pictures.
SUPPORTED BY THE Arts Council, Cork City Council's Docklands Development programme, McCarthy Developments and Ronayne Shipping Ltd, the project has the advantage of immediacy. This exhibition comes at a time when not only are the dockers disappearing from the city centre, but the city port itself is being encouraged to go away, down to the lower harbour. The dockland released by the disappearance of the port is to be recreated as South Docklands, a vision of modern urban living.
The port buildings, Custom House and warehouses sit on five acres that are central to these plans. The port's clients, such as IAWS and other companies, have other even more valuable sites along the riverside. In Cork, the public perception has been that the port authority wants to relocate, but the truth is that the city quays, handling over a million tonnes of cargo a year, are doing very nicely.
"The City Council is adamant that the docklands redevelopment is going to proceed," explains Port of Cork chief executive Brendan Keating. "If that happens, the port has to relocate. The council's plans are inconsistent with vibrant port activity, and although these quays are very profitable and an essential part of our trade, 65 per cent of our business is serving the needs of our customers, and many of those are now talking to City Hall about the value of their quayside holdings."
South Docklands may be the local authority's vision, but it's not the vision of the port authority, although it could be, according to Keating, if the price was right (he estimates that €50-€60 million would cover the costs of a move to Ringaskiddy). And while the city planners like the idea of cruise ships and naval vessels tied up alongside the south jetties, their drawings include bridges which make such traffic extremely impracticable.
Boomerang's project, meanwhile, searches for the social reality of a port, rather than its romance. Still a force to be reckoned with, the dockers are no longer the Mafia-like groupings of gangs which were once so familiar - and sometimes frightening - to the city. The dockers' badge remains a proud label, but it is no longer handed down from generation to generation or from brother to brother. Although the sense of comradeship survives, there is no longer that power to strangle the trade of the quays.
While the foreman is still important and the men still muster for a kind of hiring fair - although a more equitable one - as they have done for generations, there are fewer of them now. Rationalisation plans carried out by the port authority, its clients, the trade unions and the stevedores during the 1980s saw to that. And as the type of labour and its conditions changed, the port kept pace by developing deep-water facilities at Ringaskiddy in the lower harbour.
Plans for Boomerang's installation have - like the installation itself - movement at their core, and the intention is to bring the work to port towns from Derry to Beirut. There is scope for further voyaging in a programme called Cities on the Edge, relating to ports such as Naples, Istanbul and Marseilles, as well as Cork, where a maritime identity is under threat of obliteration.
But Edelstein did not have all this in mind when she devised her proposal. Her concern was one story only, or the story of one strand in the complex organism that is a working modern port. Cork's actual "docklands" is not an empty space crying out for resuscitation but a thriving port serving many clients and providing people with work. The grain silos are full, the jetties are stacked with timber, and there is no dereliction.
Except, that is, in the Bonded Warehouses themselves, where the curved roofs are breaking into shards and their supporting struts shredding into warped and drooping timbers. High up under these old rafters, hoists and hooks and cranes lie in a tumbled litter beside the windows. The turrets hold spiral stairs leading to alleys vaulted like a cathedral undercroft, with white-painted brick knitted in row after row of arches. Below these internal lanes are the vaults of the warehouses, even now, despite the restrictive packaging and boxing, emitting a mild, comforting waft of something spirituous, amiable and familiar.
"I'M INTERESTED IN the ordinary", says Edelstein, who has something of that transformative quality once applauded by poet Theo Dorgan when he remarked on Cork's ability to make legend out of ordinariness.
As a child in Dublin, Edelstein remembers watching the Guinness barges go by. Now, in Cork, she is fascinated by the stories she has been told, such as the one about a mother who, after her five sons had shed their overalls at the door, washed them by treading them like wine in the bath. Or the security man known as "the Bumper" for his habit of bumping up against home-going dockers to feel if their pockets concealed any goods, pilfering being something of a perk of the trade. These are the stories Edelstein wants to preserve in a time of change.
Although she did not plan it that way, her project could be seen to mark the point in history when Cork finally disengaged from its maritime foundations.
• The Eyes of the Docksruns at the Bonded Warehouses, Lapp's Quay, Cork, from Nov 30 to Dec 10