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Viriditas: Online

Date 01.08.2020 - 30.06.2021
Venue Online
Organiser Saolta Arts
Event Website Click here

Lead artist/composer/performer: Ceara Conway
Vocals: Anna Mullarkey, Peter Mannion, Richard Fitzgerald

Musicians: Jack TaltyFrancesco Turissi, Anna Mullarkey
Illustrator: Ann McBride

Music of the Plants recording facilitator: Marina Levitina
Singing bowls:Mara Elaine O’Grady

 

Performances are closed events and not open to the public. Programmed for hospital patients and staff. Viriditas is available as a limited edition CD and online for everyone at Saolta Arts.

 

In February 2020 Viriditas was presented as a series of intimate performances throughout the wards and waiting rooms of Galway’s public hospitals.

Viriditas is a song cycle composed by renowned Irish artist and singer Ceara Conway following an extended process of engagement at Galway University Hospitals.

 

Including newly composed contemporary songs and traditional European healing songs and rhythms from Georgia and Italy, Viriditas takes the listener on a journey through songs inspired by conversations with staff and patients, and recordings of hospital equipment, plants, and the tools of sound healers.

 

Named after the Latin term meaning greening power and life force, Viriditas opens with How are you? a mesmerising embodiment of the voice of care. Guiding us through the Kartvelian, Irish, and English languages, it explores practices of healing, wellbeing, and the effects of systems on the spirit and health of those living and working within them. From Georgia,  IavnanaBatonebi and Mravalzhamieri interweave with songs in Irish that celebrate the medicinal properties of plants and lament on the current threat to their extinction. The traditional Irish names and curative qualities of Ireland’s wildflowers are eulogised in the poem Plant Chant, while the music of plants plays accompaniment in Vox Plantae.

 

Set against nature, Viriditas also considers the adverse effects of hospital noise on healing and growth, incorporating samples of hospital tea trolleys, a Doppler fetal monitor, and hazard bins in the rhythmical White Noise. The artist’s playful arrangements continue with the cycle’s up-tempo finale An Damhan Alla agus an Mhíoltóg, melding the traditional Irish folk song with the tarantella style of Italian folk music historically used to heal the bite of a spider.

 

Ceara travelled to Georgia in September 2018 to learn traditional healing songs, which she shared in a series of staff singing workshops at Galway University Hospitals in May 2019 before engaging staff and patients in her research for the work.

 

Previewed as a series of intimate performances by Ceara Conway with Anna Mullarkey through the wards and waiting rooms of Galway’s public hospitals, Viriditas is available as a limited edition CD and online for everyone. Performances are closed events and not open to the public.

This film by Tom Flanagan introduces Viriditas, a song cycle created by Irish artist and vocalist Ceara Conway for The Deepest Shade of Green, an Arts and Health programme for Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture. It includes newly composed contemporary songs, traditional European healing songs and rhythms, songs inspired by conversations with staff and patients, and songs which incorporate recordings of hospital equipment, plants, and the tools of sound healers. The album was performed as a series of intimate live performances in wards and corridors, televised to patients’ bedsides from a hospital chapel, recorded as a CD for gifting to patients across the seven hospitals of Saolta University Health Care Group, and is available for download at saoltaarts.com for everyone.

Listen to the Viriditas soundtrack now

album-art

Viriditas - Ceara Conway


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