The Blue Door: Drama Night at Zion School

I was delighted to be invited to Drama Night at Zion Parish Primary School in Rathfarnham. The play, Harvest to Harvest' was a celebration of 150 years of the school, a time-line of events and memories that had been researched and chosen by the students themselves (with some help from the teachers of course). These events were acted out, in brisk little tableaux or song and dance routines, as when the grandmother (played by a child) remembers her first drama night in the school, a performance of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Other memories/events were accompanied by images, such as the first Barbie Doll or (hilariously) the birth of the school principal Tom Conaty in 1957, projected onto a wall beside the stage.

My part in all this was a recording I made, involving a collage-poem of memories, each chosen and spoken by a different child. Tom wanted to work with a 'soundscape' and mentioned Joe Brainard's book-length poem 'I Remember', in which each line begins with those words. He had thought about substituting 'I heard...', since he wanted to emphasise sounds and listening. I suggested altering this slightly to 'I Overheard' and he agreed. So, over the course of four intensive workshops with Tom and teachers Emma and Eilish (and others), we introduced 3rd and 4th class students to our framework and elicited lines/memories from them. The students were truly marvelous and the whole thing accrued and composed itself with wonderful serendipity.

The school was originally a church and retains a lovely heavy arched blue door. So when the children came up with 'I overheard the blue door opening' and then, later, 'I overheard the blue door closing' we had our opening and closing lines. Eventually I took these recording and edited them into a little sound-piece, weaving in many of the sounds mentioned by the children. For example (though these are not in sequence):

I overheard the clock ticking
I overheard the last leaf on the tree waiting to fall
I overheard the dress swishing
I overheard the pencil getting a haircut
I overheard the silence of maths
I overheard the silence of the earth

Not hard to find sounds for some of these of course. With others, such as that last one, I improvised (the silence of the earth is a loud heartbeat). I was careful not to be too literal, so although occasionally a line follows its aural counterpart, the piece is generally more impressionistic, a fading in of a number of sounds, followed by a series of memories.

The main prop in the play (that stayed onstage throughout) was a life-sized model of the blue door itself, and our final recording was used in a kind of prologue/intro, that was played just before the opening routine.