Picture this: spotlights atop two 90-ft cranes, a projectionist above a handball alley, two opera singers and a full moon over Galway Bay. Such was the scene in a Salthill secondary school at the weekend when artist Dorothy Cross presented her latest work.
Entitled CHIASM, the Project Arts Centre off-site performance attracted some 900 people - and a few curious "gatecrashers" - over two nights to watch a spectacular fusion of Shakespearean romance, Greek myth, Atlantic turbulence and natural wonder. The set was Poll na bPeist, Inis Mor's rectangular pool which has been described by writer Tim Robinson as "primeval chaos pitted against fundamental geometry".
Cross is regarded as one of Ireland's most adventurous and award-winning visual artists, and was responsible for the "ghost ship" - a painted Irish Lights tender - at anchor in Dublin Bay earlier this year. She discovered that the proportions of Poll na bPeist or the "worm hole" on the terraced cliffs at the back of Inis Mor on the Aran Islands matched those of the standard handball alley floor.
Having commissioned filmmaker Cian de Buitlear to shoot images of the limestone pool, which is fed subterraneanly by the Atlantic, she went in search of a suitable alley. Working from a list of 370 supplied by the GAA, she discovered that several were already demolished. One in Tulsk, Co Roscommon, had been destroyed without the organisation's know ledge. In her view, handball alleys deserve a protection order, as "modernist sculptures" and "beautiful empty arenas".
She was given free run of the alley in St Enda's College, Salthill, which overlooks the bay running out to Inis Mor. The school principal, Mr Vincent Kilbane, and vice-principal acted as steward, car-parking attendant and bouncer throughout three cycles of the performance on Saturday night.
Projected from two 90-ft towers, the film filled the alley floors, while the artist selected "fragments" from 10 romantic operas to complete the cycle, which she called CHIASM. Even as the audience on board a gently listing scaffold marvelled at concretetrans formed into a kaleidoscope of limestone and tide, tenor Eugene Ginty and soprano Carol Smith walked onto water and burst into song. The operatic excerpts ranged from Strauss to Puccini to Bizet and Berlioz.
The artist used the alley's dividing wall to further reflect the pain of love and loss as the singers continued their unaccompanied duet.
Only the constant traffic on Galway's busy Knocknacarra road distracted from the performance - that and the luminous moon.
The artist had intended to make the most of the rain, which held off during the first night's three 45-minutes cycles. Her singers had agreed to risk "the deluges of the western skies".
