Bluepatch Productions staged one of the hits of the 2010 Galway Theatre Festival with their play Memory Palace. Now, with the Festival once again upon us, Artistic Director of Bluepatch Productions, Aoife Connolly, meets with Barry Houlihan to discuss their new work and their aims and focus as a company.

Rushing from an evening rehearsal session to make this interview you can tell Aoife Connolly is in full Theatre Festival mode. For this year’s Festival, Bluepatch Productions are staging their latest work Chasing Butterflies. This will be staged in collaboration with Dragonfly Theatre, In the Garden. As Artistic Director of Bluepatch, Connolly outlines how the company came about and in what direction their hopes and aims are focused.

“Bluepatch started as an idea during my M.A. in Theatre Directing in U.C.D., but starting my own company was always part of the plan to be honest. I was a working actress before I decided to undertake the M.A. and before deciding to focus on directing.  I had always felt I was missing out on something or not contributing enough to the creative process. Becoming a director allowed me that opportunity to shape and create my own work.”

Following on from graduation Bluepatch was officially formed in November 2008. Also around this time, Connolly and collaborateor and actress Andrea Scott, travelled to New York and trained in Viewpoints and Suzuki techniques at the Saratoga International Theatre Institute under the tutelage of Anne Bogart. “This Viewpoints training allowed for a common vocabulary to develop during the creative processes.” Working on this shared wavelength with fellow collaborators allowed Bluepatch the chance to hone their own stylistic elements and focus on how their own artistic methodology would develop.

Connolly (pictured left) is clear and passionate about where she wants to take Bluepatch and how their work will be formed. “Bluepatch is about creating new and innovative work in a highly collaborative manner. It's very much about the physical artistry of theatre; imaginatively exploring the human experience with attention to form, identity and representation itself. For me the process is as important as the product and as such I believe it is necessary to be surrounded by a variety of creative skill-sets. Hence Bluepatch's collaborations with musician Aisling Quinn, director/actress/dancer Andrea Scott, playwrights Siobhan Donnellan and Jane Madden and visual artists Tamsyn Speight & Joanne Murray. Working in this way is like is a meeting of minds. Straight away there is a charged energy in the room and each collaborator arrives to the process with a bag of ideas, perspectives and colours.”

The style and elements of Bluepatch’s work is very much in this ‘physical artistry’ that Connolly explains. Recent Bluepatch productions such as The Memory Palace at last year’s Galway Theatre Festival have at their heart a physical and stripped back setting. Often incorporating a black-box space, the stage is carefully and beautifully deconstructed to allow an intimate connection between cast and audience. These new productions of Chasing Butterflies and In the Garden are further explorations of this:"Theatre as an art-form that offers a community experience for an audience and actor to share a fictional space and time. There is something so special in the aliveness of the experience; being able to hold the attention of an audience. As director I am especially conscientious of that. You have to offer something extraordinary in the ordinary and something ordinary in extraordinary.”

When one thinks of the music and scoring of a theatrical production, the challenge is very often how to balance this with what is happening on stage – by not forcing its own presence and relying on effects, the idea of place of music in a play has often been reduced to the background. Not so with Bluepatch where they have collaborated on an on-going basis with professional singer and musician Aisling Quinn.“Working with Aisling is a huge bonus; she is a musician, a songstress and really talented in the process of music production, a highly acclaimed songwriter she is very in tune with the langauge and physical make up of music. The most inanimate objects have become the most soulful and colourful engines of sound in our devised pieces”. There is a real soundtrack and input to the process of creating theatre by creating music specifically for the play. “There is a distinction in providing sound design and effects for a play as opposed to providing full tracks that add a whole other experience to the story. All elements are charged. Live Music has such a spiritual and visceral quality for an audience and when you incorporate it into the play you get something very special. If you really listen and experience what you hear as well as what you see with your entire body you get an entirely different theatrical experience.”

Portia Coughlan by Marina Carr and The Clean House by Sarah Ruhl were the first works by Bluepatch and Connolly outlines how she was drawn to these works by their strength and quality of the writing, their surrealist elements and how both writers played with space and time. Medea Redux was a site specific work produced in the garden of the Bernard Shaw pub in Dublin. “The garden was such a funky, alternative space and not at all in-keeping with the exterior presence of the building”. Medea was also staged for International Women’s Day and produced on stage at Smock Alley Theatre. Many of the characters and voices that Bluepatch has presented are those of strong, powerful and challenging female voices and this fact was a very deliberate direction taken by Connolly. In The Clean House, there is a sixty year old woman who has an affair with a younger married man, Portia Coughlan is torn by death and family and in Medea Redux we see the threatened and betrayed Medea. Connolly explains how she “wanted to explore, first of all, really well written works and explore the female consciousness but not from a traditional female perspective and also not through a male subjectiveness.”

The idea of memory, self and identity was central to last year’s Galway Theatre Festival play, the Memory Palace. The play was presented through particularly striking visual and aural medium, becoming a presentation of the subconscious and examination of the separation of the compartments of the mind where memory is stored and how these memories and stories of our own selves are accessed and retold. “With Memory Palace there was an emphasis on breaking down the human experience into its purest form, honing in on specific moments and taking away all superfluous elements. It was the mind, it was memory and the human experience.”

Chasing Butterflies is accompanied in the Galway Theatre Festival by In the Garden, written specifically by Siobhàn Donnellan for the Festival. Chasing Butterflies received its premiere earlier this year at the Cork Arts Theatre Writer’s week where it won three awards; Best Director (Connolly) Best Actress (Siobhàn Donnellan) and Best Actor (Martin Maguire). “We wanted to do a sister piece although we felt the work was strong enough to stand on its own and we felt it deserved another staging but we also felt it was deep enough to be fleshed out further by a sister play.”

Both these works are evocative and powerful in their subject matter and yet resolute in their staging and direction. The stage is bare, the setting is black and the experience is for the audience to surrender and become part of this story and engage with what are gripping stories.  One child has been touched by death and the other has been touched by darkness, there are senses or perpetual pain and living in a vortex where these horrible experiences re-manifest themselves to the family involved. “In Chasing Butterflies the spirit of the dead is more alive than of those left behind, whereas with In the Garden the characters are dead. They lived isolated lives, separated from human connection and they in turn meet in this sort of Eden and we see them connecting in their own way.”

Chasing Butterflies has just been recorded as a radio play. This set out its own challenges for Connolly in approaching a radio version of the stage play. "It surprised me how it required so much more concentration – every word, breathe and even silence had to be listened to. I’m used to working out ideas using the space and bodies as inspiration, so being confined to the one single sensory action of the ear was difficult. The real task was the complexity of framing this work solely through aural form and in holding an audience's imagination through that form. But it was a fantastic and really worthwhile experience.”

Fiachra O Dubhghaill and Siobhàn Donnellan in "Chasing Butterflies"

As if Aoife Connolly was not busy enough, Bluepatch are committed to Theatre-in Education and present classes and workshops to children and teenagers from primary school right up through secondary school level. These classes include such themes as Human Rights workshops which allow an opportunity to work in widely multi-cultural schools where there are such strong dynamics involved. The children and teenagers are afforded the opportunity to step out of the roles they may live in their school life. “We all have roles to play in whatever we do and we teach the right to have a voice and be an individual. They get to explore their identity wand ways of connecting with others they might not normally get.”

For the moment at least, all focus and every spare minute for Aoife Connolly and Bluepatch is committed to the upcoming Festival productions. “The Galway Theatre Festival is so important to me personally, I am from Galway and I have grown up watching the likes of Druid and we really need to keep the theatrical tradition alive here. There is a very real barrier between East and West in Ireland and trying to pierce that wall into the Dublin venues and audience is a challenge but there are really talented companies working in Galway and the Festival is a great showcase for these new works.”

Chasing Butterflies / In the Garden are staged at Nun’s Island Theatre 29-30October. For ticket details click here

For more on the Galway Theatre Festival, 25-30 October 2011 see http://www.galwaytheatrefestival.com/

www.bluepatchproductions.com

www.dragonflytheatre.ie

(c) Barry Houlihan. October 2011

@stagedreaction