20, 21, 22, 23 and 24 August - 11am to 5pm
Exhibition at No. 61 College Street
Invitation for Launch of Exhibition
This is an exhibition of drawing, print, installation, video, graffiti art and performance and is created by Vanessa Donoso Lopez, Conor Harrington, Sinead O'Donnell, Sally O'Dowd, Siobhan Harton, Chrissie Cadman, Jessie Keenan, Jane McCormick, Christof Gillen and more.
The 'Non-Parade Parade' is a contemporary performance spectacle that is being devised in conjunction with artists, facilitators and workshop participants as a performance for a public audience on Main Street, Cavan on Saturay 24 August @ 5pm
Non Parade, Parade Review by Geoff O’ Keeffe
A Non
Parade, Parade: What is it? That was the burning question on everyone
lips. We all know about ‘real’ parades. We stand at the best vantage point we
can find, more often in the rain and spend the next hour or so, watching a
conveyor belt of advertising for local business, while desperately hoping for a
bit of colour, a touch of the exotic or a taste of the unexpected to numb the
boredom. When you have seen one truck, you have seen them all. So, there was hope
that this event might confront our notions of what a parade can mean and how we
engage with it. That it was devised and curated by The Trans-Art team, gave me
hope. It was going to be different.
And so…we start
at the corner of Main Street and Ashe Street and line either side of the
street- well that’s what you do in a parade, isn’t it? And then dancers are
moving in the street, creating patterns, sometimes walking at speed, sometimes
at a slow, stylised pace. Bunting is tied up, love hearts on banners fall into
place. Three women in evening dress ‘vogue’ outside a local fashion house. A
man on an office chair, wheels himself, furiously inputing data to his lap top.
They are exploring rhythm, tempo and architecture, within a riot of colour as
music washed over us and then they are off, moving up Main Street . And in the next moments as
the crowds that filed the foot paths start to follow, we realise that we the
audience, the community, ‘become’ the parade. We are more than passive
observers, we have become active participants. A stylised scrum from Cavan
Rugby Club, is juxtaposed with beautifully choreographed movement as dancers,
working with umbrellas create stunningly realised moments that are breath
taking.
We were engaged
in such a profound way with the beauty, the simplicity and the beating heart of
the Non-Parade, Parade. It challenged us to re-evaluate our notions of how art
can impact on us in public spaces. It was beautiful, inclusive and it felt like
this was ‘our’ parade. In creating a complicite
between performer and audience we were reminded that good art is not a luxury,
but a necessity. For that short space of time, the main street of Cavan town
became transported and uplifted. It was a place in which the ordinary became
extraordinary. It became a place where we could celebrate.