Gerry to surf the zeitgeist at Johnston’s Hall

A SOUTH Galway man will bring a taste of the 19th century salon to Clare next month but not before performing his new show in his home village of Kinvara.
Gerry Conneely will be Surfing the Zeitgeist in Johnston’s Hall at 8.30pm on Sunday.
“The show involves a trip through time using romantic poetry as a prism with which to view events. It consists of historical narrative, storytelling and recitation. It tells the story of the modern world and its impact on Ireland, in the style of a 19th century salon. Its purpose is to entertain, while at the same time, demonstrating the effectiveness of the rural arts of storytelling and recitation. It is history through story and poetry, if you like,” Gerry explained.
The show has been previewed and developed over the summer before a number of groups.
“I performed it about three times during the summer. The first time I did it was at the Cruinniú na mBád festival and there were three college professors in the audience. Then I did it for a group of American tourists on a sort of spiritual trip. Then I did it in a private house for an Irish working-class audience,” he recalled.
“The whole thing is about the destruction of the agrarian communal rural Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s and we are in a completely different area now. I would think it is for people who remember recitations and story telling but it is a different historical take and a different way of looking at poetry for young people. It is not niche but it is not Sex and the City or the X Factor so that might narrow the appeal but I would hope country people would like it because it is about the destruction of rural life, spiritually and materially,” Gerry added.
The Kinvara man intends to run the show in Druid Lane Theatre for three nights in February before touring for the remainder of 2012.
“I have been developing and touring shows for 20 years including The Importance of Being Oscar, by Michael MacLiammoir. In addition to Zeitgeist, I am currently directing an adaptation of A Christmas Carol as a Christmas show in Kinvara and acting in Religious Knowledge with Garry MacSweeney, Enda Kilroy and Tommy Tiernan,” he outlined.
Gerry takes the audience from 21st century Ireland, through the past before using poetry and recitation to navigate his way back, illustrating as he does so, the enormous changes to Irish life in recent years.
“We start in the present with a poem I wrote myself, An Ode to Paddy Coley. Then we go back to the industrial revolution and the romantic poets and what they made of urbanisation and the movement from rural to urban. So we parallel what happened in other countries and what is happening in Ireland now. Ireland has gone from industrialism to modernism to post modernism in the last 40 years, where as everywhere else in the Western world started this 200 years ago, so they have had more time to get used to it than we have had. So I look at what did Goldsmith, Byron and Shelly made of the kind of change we are experiencing at the moment. I do this with yarns and stories and it is followed by a poetry recitation. I examine, too, the effects of European romanticism on the Irish revolution and although we thought the War of Independence was an Irish thing, once you start looking at it through the prism of poetry, things look very different and we realise that European romanticism had a much bigger influence on what was happening than we might have thought. The show is kind of a fresh look at poems and stories everyone has heard before,” he concluded.
Gerry Conneely will perform Surfing the Zeitgeist in Johnston’s Hall at 8.30pm on Sunday, before taking the show to the Russell Centre in Doolin on Friday, November 18 and Glór, Ennis on Friday, November 25.