Image: Amie Dicke
If you never return to where you’ve come from, is this place you are now home?
Not A Word invites you to sit with a silent man on another unexceptional evening. A day’s labouring done, in a place that has never quite felt like home, he plays a beautiful old tune as memory dances amongst his dirty boots and cherished trinkets.
Brú Theatre returns to the Galway International Arts Festival with the premier of a new piece of physical theatre merging mask, music and movement in a celebration of those who took the boat - worked hard, faltered and slowly faded from memory. This excavation of a forgotten class of Irish navvies - those emigrants who helped build a country not their own, seeks the beauty in the banal, the poetry between the concrete cracks.
Performed by Raymond Keane, with live electronic and traditional music from Ultan O’Brien, Not A Word offers a moving portrait of one emigrant echoing many people’s stories today. This ode to a self exiled laborer, making his way in this small space between places, is directed by James Riordan with mask design by Orla Clogher.
Image Emilija Jefremova
Director: James Riordan
Producer: Jill Murray
Performer: Raymond Keane
Musician: Ultan O’Brien
Poem-Exile is Not a Word by Peter Woods
Set Designer: Andrew Clancy
Mask Design: Orla Clogher
Lighting Designer: Sarah Jane Shiels
Sound Designer: Jenny O’Malley
Costume Designer: Saileóg O’Halloran
Production Manager: Mark Carry
Stage Manager: Sorcha De Faoite
Assistant Stage Manager: Madison Carpenter
Chief LX: Michael Foley
Sound Engineer: Ellen Culloo
Technical Manager: Michael O’Halloran
Technical Assistant/Intern: Shane McDonagh
Crew: Mark Byrne, Denis Browne, Matthew Cunningham, Simon Daly,
Irish Language Advisor : Caitlín Ní Chualáin
Image by: Amie Dicke. Two Lines And Three Frames, 2011. Sandpaper abrasion on archival pigment print. Image courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles.