7 minute read
ARTS ROUND-UP
WIRED AND WONDERFUL
The NI Science Festival is set to return this month after revealing its seventh annual programme boasting more than 80 online public events. The STEM celebration will return for a fortnight of wonder and intrigue from
Monday 15 – Sunday 28 February.
Covering everything from the natural world, our planet, and the vast expanse of space to engineering, robotics, physics, the mind and body, food and much more, the festival will present some of the most prominent scientific minds, thoughtleading academics, and captivating authors. Adopting a digital format this year, the programme is packed with interactive workshops, engaging talks and discussions, screenings and more for audiences of all ages. The festival will also host a dedicated programme of online events for schools and educators the week before the festival opens (8 – 12 February). Among this year’s highlights is a partnership with National Geographic that will see the festival host a series of online talks with prominent science communicators, including well-known BBC science presenter Greg Foot, marine biologist Lucy Hawkes, award-winning natural history photographer Jeff Kerby, TV presenter and wildlife filmmaker Malaika Vaz, and ocean-focused bioengineer Kakani Katija. World-renowned physicist Katie Mack will be in conversation with festival favourite Jim Al-Khalili discussing her book The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), an exploration into the future of the cosmos and how it might reach its ultimate demise.
The festival will also host a series of events focusing on the natural world, including a conversation with Northern Ireland’s own Dara McAnulty, whose debut book, Diary of a Young Naturalist, won the Wainwright prize for nature writing in 2020.
For the full programme, visit nisciencefestival.com.
Dara McAnulty
LIGHT DURING THE DARKNESS
The Linen Hall Library in partnership with Conflict Textiles marked Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January with an online event featuring a transnational panel of contributors relaying personal stories about Holocaust-related family memorabilia.
An online exhibition, Light During the Darkness: Remembering the Holocaust, also ran until 1 February. Each day an item, be it a photograph, piece of memorabilia or other, with its own unique story relating to the Holocaust, was posted on the Linen Hall’s social media channels.
The event on Holocaust Memorial Day, took place via ZOOM and featured a panel of contributors including award-winning author and poet Marjorie Agosín, originally from Chile. Each person relayed a story about a family item relating to the Holocaust.
For more information go to www. linenhall.com.
Any time and everywhere - Anna Frank’s universality.
German arpillera, Heidi Drahota, 2011 Heidi Drahota collection Photo Heidi Drahota, © Conflict Textiles https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/conflicttextiles/
Photos of children from Terezin concentration camp (Set of five)
Conflict Textiles collection, donation from War Resisters’ International (WRI) WRI Photo Archive, © Conflict Textiles https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/conflicttextiles/
ARTS AND OLDER PEOPLE’S PROGRAMME
The Arts Council of Northern Ireland has announced £110,000 to enable 12 arts organisations in Northern Ireland to deliver a series of community-based arts projects benefitting older people. The funding is part of the Arts and Older People’s Programme, a pioneering initiative supported by National Lottery, Public Health Agency and Baring Foundation, which aims to tackle loneliness as-well as promote positive mental health and well-being among older people through engagement with the arts.
Among the successful applicants offered Arts and Older People Programme funding are:
Arts Care, who will design a series of Tool Kit Boxes that will provide online training to over 150 activity workers, nurses and carers across all five Health and Social Care Trust areas potentially engaging more than 2000 older people in the arts. The Tool Kit Boxes will contain up to fifteen facilitated arts activities designed by professional Arts Care Artists across four key art forms including music, creative dance, visual arts and creative writing. Prime Cut Productions, who will deliver a twelve-week visual arts, music, dance and reminiscence project to older people across Belfast, aiming to reach between 50-60 participants. The project will use photography, dance sessions and music to explore the ballrooms and dancehalls of Belfast’s past. The project will use the personal memories of participants as well as resources from Northern Ireland Screens Digital Archive and Belfast Exposed.
To view the full list of organisations offered Arts & Older People’s Programme funding visit www.artscouncil-ni.org
Arts Care Tool Kit Boxes
Armstrong Storytelling Trust, who will bring the traditional art of storytelling, music and reminiscence sessions to older people, aged 70+, across Northern Ireland who are experiencing dementia and isolation. It is anticipated that Armstrong Storytelling will deliver 40 sessions to individuals in their own homes digitally through Zoom, between January and May 2021.
Padraig Regan
Louise Kennedy
The Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast has appointed Louise Kennedy and Padraig Regan as the inaugural Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellows for 2020–21.
These new annual Fellowships have been established in memory of the Seamus Heaney Centre’s founding director and are inspired by his writing about the city of Belfast in poetry and prose. Fellows will be encouraged to carry on with their own creative work, and to contribute to the academic and extracurricular programmes of the Seamus Heaney Centre.
The award is worth £10,000 per annum, for a recently completed PhD graduate from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s. The Fellowship supports writers at this critical point in their career, giving them professional experience in the literary and academic sector, and allowing the University to maintain relationships with its extraordinary alumni.
Fellows, working in all forms of creative writing, contribute to life at the Seamus Heaney Centre through masterclasses, workshops, one-to-one tutorials, and performances, and bring new voices to the academic and public arena.
Louise Kennedy is a prose writer. Her publication record includes fiction in journals such as The Tangerine, The Stinging Fly, Banshee and Winter Papers, food writing for The Guardian and Irish Times, short scripts for RTE Radio 1 and a commission for BBC Radio 4 Short Works. Her stories have won prizes and she was short-listed for Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in both 2019 and 2020. Bloomsbury will publish her debut collection, The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, in April 2021. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the Seamus Heaney Centre, where she has just completed a PhD, the critical component of which was on the writer Norah Hoult (1898-1984); in 2019 she wrote the introduction to the New Island Books reissue of Hoult’s 1948 novel Farewell Happy Fields. Louise grew up in Holywood, Co. Down and now lives in Sligo. She is working on a novel.
Padraig Regan is the author of two poetry pamphlets: Delicious (Lifeboat Press, 2016) and Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real (Emma Press, 2017). In 2015, they were the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. They hold a PhD on creative-critical and hybridised writing practices in medieval texts and the work of Anne Carson from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s. They are currently working towards their first full-length collection.
Welcoming the new Fellowships Professor Glenn Patterson, Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s said: “Ciaran Carson was not just a great poet and writer of extraordinary, and extraordinarily varied, prose, he was an example to all of us who live and write here of how to be truly international in outlook and absolutely true to this place. He was an inspirational figure for student poets and writers within the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s, the Seamus Heaney Centre in particular, and it is fitting that the Fellowships created in his name should benefit students who have recently completed PhDs with us and are beginning to establish their own reputations as writers of originality and distinction.”
YOUNG MUSICIANS’ PLATFORM AWARD
Six exceptionally talented young musicians from Northern Ireland have been awarded the Young Musicians’ Platform Award, supported by National Lottery funding through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and BBC Northern Ireland. The six award recipients include classical awardees, opera singer, Andrew Irwin, cellist, Angus McCall and pianist, Justine Gormley; traditional music awardees, Jack Warnock and Rose Connolly and, singer-songwriter awardee, Roisin Donald (ROE).
The biennial awards which are run by the Arts Council in collaboration with BBC Northern Ireland, aim to showcase and support the development of young musicians from the region by providing individual funding awards of up to £5,000. This funding enables the recipients to spend a sizeable amount of time learning from a master musician, mentor, teacher or composer either in Northern Ireland or abroad.
Previous recipients of the Young Musicians’ Platform Award include acclaimed classical pianist, Michael McHale, soprano, Laura Sheerin, harpist, Richard Allen, violinist, Michael Trainor, folk artists, Conor Mallon and Niall Hanna and jazz drummer, Ed Dunlop, among others.
As well as this training opportunity, the awardees will receive two professional radio broadcast engagements, including one with the Ulster Orchestra in 2021. Performances at this level raise not only the professional profile of the young musicians but also give a boost to their performance experience.
