In April this year The Model gallery in Sligo, owners of a selection of Iconic Images of the greatest Celtic Epic, The Táin, was host to an interpretation of this ancient epic which married three art forms. What transpired was a sensual feast of imagery, sound and movement which featured the music of Lorcán Mac Mathúna, the contemporary dance of Fearghus Ó Conchúir, and the stunning paintings of acclaimed artist Louis Le Brocquy.
When Louis Le Brocquy produced his iconic depictions in ink of the ancient Celtic Epic The Táin, to accompany the equally excellent Thomas Kinsella translation of the ancient texts, he said of his work:
“Any graphic accompaniment to a story which owes its existence to the memory and concern of a people over some twelve hundred years should decently be as impersonal as possible… If these images – these marks in printer’s ink – form an extension to Thomas Kinsella’s Táin, they are a humble one. It is as shadows thrown by the text that they derive their substance”
Taking something so rich in imagery, and meaning, and presenting it, despite the walls of language that separate this essentially lyrical tale from present audiences, represents a challenge that Le Brocquy recognised entirely. I feel that he knew exactly the substance of the challenge and an appropriate approach to it.
I have always been intrigued by Le Brocquy’s ‘The Tain’ images ever since I came across Kinsella’s translation. They speak, as Le Brocquy said, of temperament and deeds, not of characters and heroes. Musically I felt that this splashing of temperament onto the receiving senses would bring the audience closer to the story through sound, and seemed more faithful to the intent of the text than the approach of bringing the story to the audience through a musical filter.
Imagine the medieval Gaelic courts where the reachaire (the storyteller) painted the action of The Táin with gesture of speech and hand, and brought a world from the spectral realms of an imagined past momentarily from the shadows. Louis Le Brocquy said that the words of The Táin cast shadows on the page. Shadows that he cast himself in ink. Forms and figures unmistakeably cast in deed and action.
Action is the essence of story, and a story as deeply formed in the primordial hunger of human nature casts striking shadows of deeds done, and their implications. These shadows are the relief of all the hunger that drives mankind’s ambitions; a portrayal in stark relief not of persons but of their unbridled inner hunger.
An Táin evokes all of this. It is a story too powerful to remain static on a page. It is a complex and many-layered story of intrigue; an unrestrainable drama that leaps from the page with a narrative style that brings the watched tension of the ancient court before our eyes.
In this video the aim of the artists was to give the medieval words of The Táin a physical interpretation combining movement, imagery, and music. To give the livid drama of the tale its full breadth with the “seen” and “heard” gestures of movement of body, and voice; all in the presence of a selection of Le Brocquys wonderfully animated “shadows of the text”.
For more details about Lorcan and his other projects, including Visionaries 1916 (Songs and music from the pens of Connolly, Pearse, Ceannt, and Plunkett) visit: http://www.lorcanmacmathuna.com