The University Times had the pleasure of sitting down with Rachel Holmes, a Senior Sophister (Drama Studies) student at Trinity College Dublin. The undertaking of her final year capstone project, entitled “This is the Place” is currently underway.
For drama students, the capstone projects can vary from musical productions, to plays, to design showcases, and pretty much anything in between. It can be a collaborative project or an individual one, which is unique to the Drama Studies Degree. The proposals are pitched in the summer before fourth year, leaving at least a little over a semester of hard work for each piece.
Holmes took an original perspective, creating a visual and audio experience in the Samuel Beckett Theatre. “It’s a hybrid of a design and theatre making capstone… an audio installation”, she explained.
Originally, she intended to explore the experience of being an artist in Dublin as a whole in her actor-less creative piece. Since having narrowed it down, “This is the Place” now reflects on the closing of artist spaces in Dublin. In light of the recent closing of Workman’s Cellar, Holmes reflected on the place’s importance, saying, “[It] wasn’t just a club venue or music venue, people also performed there. We had fundraisers there for college events… it was a place to connect”. The closing of Workman’s led her to think about how there are so many venues in Dublin that have closed down even just in the past four years.
The cycle of venues in any city is a normal occurrence, but in Dublin nothing creative ever takes the spot of a closed venue, Holmes explained. “There are only 83 [nightclubs] in the entire country”, she said. This is a significant drop since the early 2000s, and a lot of those nightclubs were also music venues.
For other drama students, preparing for their capstones might take place as rehearsals, or script writing. For Holmes, its research and conversations. She has developed a large list of “places that have been lost to time”, as she put it. To speak about this accurately, Holmes felt that she needed community voices as well, hence the conversation part of her preparations. She reached out to DJs, asking them to fill out a form she made about clubs they used to play in, and even some historians. “It’s like doing a social history of Dublin as well”, she explained. She plans to use anecdotes and stories from the community as part of her installation in the Beckett.
“The aim is to put a voice back on these buildings, a voice back on the office blocks, to point out that, as you walk by this apartment block every day, that used to be a venue that people gathered in, a place people met their wives, all of those types of things”, Holmes said.
Her show is on in the first week of February, showing on February 4th and February 6th in the Samuel Beckett Theatre. Tickets are limited because of the piece’s interactive nature. An exciting part about Holmes’ piece, however, is that it can leave the walls of the theatre. She’s creating an audio walk that the audience can do after the installation, using an app called Echoes to walk around the city and visit the closed down music venues, listening to the memories from and facts about the once vibrant spaces. “It’s no longer just another statistic, another just empty building that you kind of get used to seeing and ignore, you kind of stop to acknowledge the space,” Holmes said.
“This piece has a definite tone of loss to it, but it’s not to say that Dublin is empty, Dublin isn’t empty, it’s just vacant,” Holmes summarized.
