It appears that those most affected by economic downturn are drama graduates- aren’t we a sorry lot? Jobs disappear, arts council funding dissolves and we are left holding our tails between our legs, having to listen to our fathers singing along to the ‘I told you so’ dance. Faced with the obvious option of working in Asda- now that they’re creating more jobs for people exactly like us- what do we do? Do we give up our theatrical ambitions and head down to the job centre, or do we face the music and make some ghetto theatre in whatever space we can get our grimy little mitts on? The latter, according to Dan Bergin, one of the founders of ‘Daguerreotype’, Trinity’s latest home grown theatre company.
Daguerreotype is not the first company to emerge from Trinity’s well renowned drama department. Many a successful Irish company has roots in the Samuel Beckett centre, including Randolph SD, the company recently responsible for the wonderful ‘Everybody Loves Sylvia’ at the Project, the director Wayne Jordan having been nominated for an Irish Times Theatre Award. Promising possibilities for Daguerreotype, then.
‘As children of the Celtic tiger, as cheesy as that inevitably sounds”, Bergin says, ‘we have an interesting perspective and things to say. We’ve seen Ireland’s economic surge and witnessed its sudden downturn. With access to new forms of communication and technology, what are we passionate about and how does our generation present theatrical work?’ It’s time to find out.
Having first worked together in first year on a player’s production, founders Colm McNally, Dan Bergin, Ed Collins and Mary Sheehan collaborated once again on a player’s seventy-fifth anniversary show ‘Infernal Machine.’ A reworking of the Oedipus myth, it was during this show that the founders discovered a shared love of the cyber punk, steampunk, aesthetic, the set being suggestive of a techno-futurist wasteland with loose computer parts and junkyard leftovers dominating the stage space.
For those of us who aren’t au fait with these terms, Steampunk is a subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction that came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date. Steampunk is often associated with cyberpunk and shares a similar fan following and theme of rebellion, but developed as a separate movement (though both have considerable influence over each other).
The vision of the company stems from a desire to make original and fresh theatrical work, and a freedom to experiment outside the confines of professional theatre. The name ‘Daguerreotype’ emerges from this notion, referencing an early type of photograph, developed by Louis Daguerre, in which the image is exposed directly onto a mirror-polished surface of silver bearing a coating of silver halide particles deposited by iodine vapour. In later developments bromine and chlorine vapours were also used, resulting in shorter exposure times. The daguerreotype is a negative image, but the mirrored surface of the metal plate reflects the image and makes it appear positive in the proper light. Thus, daguerreotype, most famously used to photograph erotic images and Edgar Allan Poe, is a direct photographic process without the capacity for duplication, much like a theatrical event, which is always completely original and of the moment.
Thus, using modern technology with a modern aesthetic, ‘Dageurreotype’ put their first project into action, ‘Wozzeck’, currently being rehearsed around college. Without giving too much away, the play, set in an accountancy firm, is based on the novel ‘Woyzeck’ by Georg Buchner, and deals with issues of paranoia and surveillance. After a performance in players in week one of trinity term, the company hope to take the show to the Dublin Fringe Festival.
Behold!, as they say, the most splendid theatrical conniptions are soon to be at your fingertips. The curious need only fear their own sense of amazement at this, the latest of mutations growing from the fine arts or the land. Daguerreotype a new theatre project birthed with much screaming, sweat, and sparks this very year 2009. Look out for fundraising events related to the company- they’ll need all the funds they can get.
Visit the company’s website on daguerreotypetheatre.com. Wonderful things await you.