BWW Reviews: HIDDEN CURRENTS at Cork Midsummer Festival

Built on a marsh, or 'corcaigh', the city of Cork owes much of its design to the system of waterways that flows underneath. To bring us closer to these hidden currents, composer Tom Lane presents an audio trail for the Cork Midsummer Festival, voiced by elemental actor Olwen Fouéré.

After collecting our headphones at the Cork Vision Centre, the ancient airs of Fouéré's voice instruct us to turn onto North Main Street. In the first few minutes nothing much remarkable happens, with the narration feeling thin and repetitive: "walk straight ahead ... keep going ... keep going ..."

But then the sweet sound of the river (recorded ingenuously with underwater microphones) trickles into our ears while Fouéré touches on local architecture and history. The effect is enough for us to imagine Grand Parade opening up to be the gushing river it once was.

As the route tears away from the busier main streets, we meditate on abstract orders: "Listen through your feet". Planting our soles thoroughly with each step, we attempt to connect with the wild waters running under the street. When brought to a stand still on top a bridge, we're faced with the incoming flow of the River Lee, painted in blue and green, sparkling in the midsummer sun, running down a slope into a thin layer of foam.

It's not Fouéré's first nautical role, having earned acclaim for navigating the River Liffey in her Finnegan's Wake adaptation riverrun, and then lending voice to it again in Lane's HARP | A River Cantata performed on the harp-shaped Samuel Beckett Bridge in Dublin. That composition was informed by musical notes that were recorded when the composer struck the bridge's supports with a microphone.

Here, music is mixed with the recorded sound of the Lee to shape and manipulate its deep depths: shakers shuffling the riverbed; a vibraphone making a beautiful melody of its murmurs. It's an extraordinarily inventive means for the performance to communicate itself.

Directing us, then, towards our own 'hidden currents', specifically those in the auditory ducts of our ear canals, feels like an under-developed beat to finish the event. It betrays the confidence of a performance sometimes tranquil and mysterious that shows how an underwater system influenced the building of a city. That influence is most effectively captured not in the piling on of conceptual ideas but rather in the flow of Lane's porous and powerful sound design.

Hidden Currents ran as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival. For more information see corkmidsummer.com.

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