Day three of Trinity Arts Festival got off to an amazing start and finish. I was personally up bright and early to sample the kale juice at the 9am Juice Bar (surprisingly nice) and braved the weather til the bitter end to experience the most ambitious campus-wide murder mystery, and it was so worth it. Some of the University Times’ TAF Bloggers were at some of the events of the day:
Lunchtime Talk with Brendan Canty, Wednesday daytime
Anna Sheehan
Brendan Canty spoke to TAF goers in the grand surroundings of the Hist conversation room in the GMB at 1pm on Wednesday. He is the creator of Hozier’s new music video for Take Me To Church, along with several other fantastic music videos for the likes of Young Wonder, Mmoths and AlunaGeorge. Mr. Canty spoke with incredible modesty of his journey to success, totting off each song he helped push to fame and each act who had specifically requested him to make videos for them as if it wasn’t an amazing feat at all. Brendan captured all the audience in the room with both his incredible experiences and by playing clips of his work on full screen behind him. Brendan, whilst describing his inspirations for each video, and his manner of filming and stripping clips, would interject his intricate descriptions with statements such as ‘I just f*cking love mountains!’
The room turned silent when Brendan played the Take Me To Church video from start to finish for us all, having just explained his storyboard for the narrative of the video and all the techniques he had utilised to keep the watcher interested. The visuals blend seamlessly with the changing tempos in the record, switching from the intimate to the frighteningly urgent and intimidating. There was an audible intake of breath as it became apparent to us all that the video depicts a homophobic attack, which Canty explained was inspired from all the recent controversy about the Sochi Winter Olympics. I found this an incredibly difficult video to watch, overwhelmed by a feeling of disgust at the scenes of violence and torture presented before me, and will admit to having had a private cry in the back row where I was sitting! However, all the sadness dissipated quickly enough as Brendan finished up his talk and we all tucked into some delicious sandwiches provided kindly by KC Peaches, while chatting to Canty and listening to tips on how to win the TAF film competition!
Stage Combat with Ciaran O’Grady, Wednesday daytime
Alexandra Trant
From the outset I’m going to admit that I don’t often attend theatre productions. The Savoy deals are often too tempting to me as a student to take over spending the same amount of money on a Players’ production or even saving up for a production (many of which have appealed to me) in the Abbey or Gaiety. I’m quite ashamed to say that I still haven’t even been to Players’ show, half way through my second year of college.
While I briefly meddled in theatre in secondary school days, I haven’t ventured towards it in college until today, when I attended the Stage Combat workshop with Ciaran O’Grady from the Gaiety School of Acting. Before beginning the workshop, O’Grady emphasised something that I – and I’m sure many others – overlook. While Hollywood can add the special effects of fight scenes before, during and after filming, stage performers only have one shot to make it look realistic. It added a depth to stage acting that I often do not consider, and often would not appreciate. This workshop, although only an hour long, has changed my perceptions of that.
The workshop itself was incredibly well executed. After stressing (several times – as you would imagine) how important it was not to hit the person we were performing with, and a quick warm up, we launched straight into our first exercise – slapping. The performance is relatively easy to get the knack of, but the relationship and coordination between the two actors participating is admirable. After a few tries most people had gotten the hang of the movements, with our favourite TAF Secretary Owen ‘Blonde’ Murphy staggering across the room for dramatic effect.
Other exercises included different styles of slapping and punching, with attention being drawn to our movements and how the audience would perceive different actions. When I was attempting the punching movement with Jim Connell-Moylan from the Players’ society, our 8inch height difference often meant it took a few tries to make our style realistic! By far the most enjoyable exercise was the choking movement (kind of worrying, no?). As one would imagine, O’Grady carefully went through the safety steps, before allowing us to become creative. Many dramatic reaches for the heavens and squinted eyes and scrunched up faces came out as we mimed our untimely deaths.
TAF and Players Murder Mystery, Wednesday evening
Conor Scully
Last night at 7.30pm, a motley crew of wannabe Jessica Fletchers – the gal from Murder, She Wrote – assembled outside Players, armed with pens, a map of Trinity, and their collective deductive reasoning skills.
The goal? To win Trinity Ball tickets by solving a murder at the annual Trinity Arts Festival murder mystery. The event opened with “Picasso” announcing that he was to open an exhibition that contained a dire secret about one of his fellow artists. However, before he was able to reveal this, he fell to his death after drinking from a poisoned cup.
The suspects were then introduced – nine renowned artists including Da Vinci, Banksy and Kanye West. They then dispersed across campus, ready to answer questions from eager students who, generally, hadn’t a clue what questions to ask.
The event was mostly free-form in nature with participants able to interrogate all of the suspects at any stage. However, there were big set-pieces to draw everyone in – the highlight being a showdown between Kim Kardashian and Marina Abramovic over the true father of Kanye’s baby.
With the delightful participants able to improvise endlessly in character, it was easy to get distracted – indeed, I wasted twenty minutes chatting to the woman playing Kerry Katona just to listen to her accent. Three umbrella wielding detectives wandered about the Front Square, ready to answer questions and provide more clues or, more commonly, red herrings.
In the end, myself and my partner hadn’t really a clue what was going on and made a wild stab at the answer. Two freshers were the only ones out of over fifty teams to guess correctly (it was Van Gogh, assisted by Michaelangelo), but really the enjoyment lay in the engrossing show. A wonderful two hours – all credit to Players and to TAF.
Yet more exciting TAF events will take place Thursday and Friday, with a “special guest” being flown in from Berlin for the closing party on Friday evening! Watch this space for more TAF news.
Photography by Grace Nuttall.
