Anyone associating St Patrick's Day with greenery will have to think again when UCC celebrates March 17th with a performance of The White Quadrangle, an evening spectacle of performance art devised by the Half/Angel company as an exploration of the university's fusion of architecture and academia.

"Much of the preliminary work could be described as persuasion," says Jools Gilson-Ellis who, with Richard Povell, makes up the company presenting this project and the Knitting Map for Cork 2005. They describe the complexities of animating UCC's Victorian quad - finding some 150 to 200 staff and students to form the cast. Asylum seekers will provide the rhythms, schoolchildren will form a choir and experienced abseilers and climbers will decorate the rooflines enclosing what Gilson-Ellis and Povell see as a sacred space: the greensward of the main quad.

The trickiest live element is the academic staff, who it is hoped will assemble as a constructed representation of scholarship and teaching. This seems a lot to ask of a university whose staff dynamic is hitting the headlines, but Gilson-Ellis - on sabbatical from UCC's English department - isn't daunted. A dancer, choreographer, writer and knitter, she works as an interpreter of academic and artistic discourses, writing her own text, while Povell develops technologies that emerge as patterns (as in the Knitting Map) or sound sources.

They have been working on their 2005 projects for 18 months, encouraged by a grant of €215,000 for the White Quadrangle; the Yorkshire woollen-milling company Sirdar is providing the wool for the Knitting Map, which will be gradually unrolled in the basement of St Luke's Church.