The Monthly interviews John McIlduff from Dumbworld about, “Whales, Bats and Anarchy”– Part 1 – Creating avenues to produce art

What was the inspiration behind the latest project?

I have been working with Brian Irvine, the composer, for at least 15 years, and we made all the work for this project together.

From the very beginning we have been doing all manner of things, from composing operas to writing pop songs, but the core of the work we have been doing for the last 7 or 8 years, is that we have been developing work with all sorts of different groups, trying to create what we think is interesting works of art. We have been trying to create what we find interesting, and brilliant art, and the work also marks a moment where we have been part of a collaboration. That can be us working with young people in Nairobi (Kenya), Transition Students in County Clare, or older people in Derry.

You work in partnership?

The two of us have very different skills, I’m a writer, a film-maker, and a theatre director, Brian is a composer, and we aim to work with people, to come together with groups of people, to enable them to be at the centre of creation, the centre of making. Our job is to facilitate an opportunity so that people, whose job is not making art, to be able to create, and each time we get involved in a project we find new ways to produce art.

John McIlduff

And what has been created through this project?

We created quite a traditional song with a group called The Pink Ladies, who are a group of people who have survived cancer, they are now known as the Hive Cancer Support Choir . We worked with them to write lyrics, compose music, produce a song and then it was filmed and is shown as a projected piece of art.

There is something a little more esoteric, working with Tools for Solidarity, who repair tools for people in the Third World. We connected them to a group of improvisational musicians and we created duets between the improvisational musicians and the people who repair the tools. We produced films of that experience, and they are now video installations of experimental music.

It does sound like a very ambitious project. How was it pulled together?

The work does come from a number of different places, different avenues. We are funded by the Arts Council so that allows us to have people in our office who work for the organisation. We have built up contacts, groups we have worked with, so we have a network that has been built up over time.

If we look at the Red Note Ensemble project which is “A Children’s Guide to Anarchy”. That came about through myself and Brian looking to develop ideas, and we came across a pamphlet which was published during the Civil War in Spain in the 1930’s. The pamphlet was teaching children how to be good anarchists, Anarchy was a very vibrant ideology, in that country, at that time.

That started us thinking about the positive side of Anarchist ideas, and we had been working with Red Note for a while, through a number of projects. We discussed the project with them, they suggested we come into a primary school they were working in, and we developed songs with those young people.

We didn’t want to teach the children about Anarchist ideas, rather we wanted the kids to teach us what their ideas and notions of freedom were. And over a period of about a year we opened up an avenue to produce songs together. Eventually, they performed those for their school.

Myself and Brian had been working for a number of years on projected content, we call them street art operas, where we have pieces of street art which metamorphose into animated content. Then Red Note secured a little bit of extra money, and we thought we would turn the songs we had made with the children into animated projections. We called them animated posters. And that was the second stage of that project.

That sounds like a project which developed in different directions over time?

We like the idea that the work we do will have some sort of life beyond just the participants, that the work will be able to be seen by other people and that we might be able to tour the work around. And using projected content is a way to do that. People can see it in lots of different places.

Do you have a particular way of working?

The process that we go through, initially, is a process of demystification. We pose questions, “What is it to make things?”, “How easy is it to make things?”, “How natural it is to be in a space where you can create?”, and if there is a space which allows you to write words, lyrics, music, then creativity is possible.

We will go into a space and almost randomly, with random words, and random thoughts and ideas, produce a song.

We were in Carlow, we had been around the town collecting love stories, and we intended to make a musical from those stories.

We went into a school in Carlow, and all we did was ask the children to tell us their name and something about them, and through the use of the natural rhythms of speech, Brian is very good at producing music which emerges out of the natural rhythms of speech, within half an hour we had produced a song.

That is our process of demystification. We think it opens up a Pandora’s Box of creativity.

And that allows you to create artistically?

Yes, and no matter the level of proficiency we can make it work. We offer our technical skills and we can work with a class of 5 year olds or 7 year olds and even if they have never sung before we will be able to create the space where they can produce something uniquely beautiful.

We always try and find that space where whatever it is that each child has to offer creatively, we can make something with that. And usually when you see it, you can see it is genuinely amazing,

To see more of the work of John McIlduff and Dumbworld see the following link – dumbworld.co.uk

weekly-logo
artist forms link
New Belfast Community Arts Initiative trading as Community Arts Partnership is a registered charity (XR 36570) and a company limited by guarantee (Northern Ireland NI 37645).Registered with The Charity Commission as New Belfast Community Arts Initiative - NIC105169.