BIND Screening: Drop In

This innovative contemporary dance and poetry film has been created in the Armagh Robinson Library, to celebrate its 250th anniversary, and we invite you to pop-in and watch a glimpse of this beautiful film, which has a running time of approximately 25-minutes, and will be played on repeat. 

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.

This year the creative team revisited the correspondence received and, selected a handful of poignant lines to devise this beautiful homage to the legacy of the 'healing place of the soul', celebrating it in poetry, and movement. Poet Bebe Ashley selected lines to sign language, which formed the basis for development of the movement sequences. 

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. 

BIND is a collaboration between;

Choreographer: Eileen McClory

Poet: Maria McManus

Composer: Katie Richardson

Costume-maker: Una Hickey

Filmmaker: Conan McIvor

Dancers: Ryan O'Neill, Clara Kerr, Rosie Mullin

Translation of chosen lines to sign language: Bebe Ashley 

Voice-over: Roisín Gallagher

The project is supported by Arts Council of Northern Ireland through Exchequer and National Lottery Funds and by Bank of Ireland, Begin Together Arts Funds in partnership with Business to Arts. Bebe Ashley's contribution was supported by her receipt of a grant from the Santander Pay What You Wantlancer's Scheme.