An innovative cross art-form collaboration, directed by leading choreographer Eileen McClory, with original text by poet and producer Maria McManus. BIND explores the legacy of binds between past and present, the tension between elevation, elites and access to knowledge, progress and change, the visibility and constraints on women, and how a visionary institution contributes to progress in the modern world.

Join us for this special screening followed by a Q&A with members of the creative team such as Director and Choreographer Eileen McClory, poet and producer Maria McManus, filmmaker Conan McIvor and composer Katie Richardson.

This innovative contemporary dance and poetry film has been created in the Armagh Robinson Library, to celebrate its 250th anniversary. When he died, Archbishop Robinson requested that all his personal correspondence be burned and destroyed. In 2019, the poet Maria McManus ran an international letter-writing campaign to ‘fill the void’ left behind, with new letters. Hundreds of letters were received from people of all ages, and from across the globe. The subjects written about included contemporary issues, and also letters to the dead, the lost, the imagined, to the future, to the past, to the inner self, and to public figures.

The library has become a home for these new letters in the present, binding the past, the future and the sense of place. In 2021 the creative team revisited the correspondence received and, selected a handful of poignant lines, devised this beautiful homage to the legacy of the ‘healing place of the soul’, celebrating it in poetry, and movement.

The film explores the theme of ‘binding’ in several ways – the binding of books, as bonds across time and generations, in the costumes, and metaphorically linking corsetry to constraints on women and access to education and expression of the body, written and spoken words. The Robinson Library is also a character in the film, which was recorded there in July 2021.

Credits

BIND is a collaboration between choreographer Eileen McClory, poet Maria McManus, composer Katie Richardson, costume-maker Una Hickey, and filmmaker Conan McIvor. The dancers are Ryan O’Neill, Clara Kerr and Rosie Mullin. The poet Bebe Ashley translated the chosen lines to sign language, which formed the basis for development of the movement sequences. Voice-over is by Roisín Gallagher.

A Quotidian – Word on the Street Limited Production

Photo credit: Michael McEvoy

Thanks to funding from Arts Council NI, Arts Council Lottery and Bank of Ireland Business to Arts Fund.