Seán Being ~ Erin’s Intervals
Seán Being's "Erin’s Intervals" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 4, 2024 as one of 38 AEROPONIC ACTS of CHAMELEON ORBIT curated by Elisa Giuliani & Giulia Crispiani.
Here you will find the documentation of Seán Being's presentation as filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım. The written report is by Bethany Crawford and it includes a summary of the comments by esteemed guest respondents.
Erin’s Intervals
Seán Being's question: Will the new songs map out the new dreams?
Seán's introduction: Two bards representing Ireland’s rival northern and southern Gaelic clans awaken together in a ditch after a heated debate—on poetic form, ethnicity and mythology—that turned violent.
Overnight, the dismantling of Gaelic society by the British colonisers has left the bards patronless—stripped of their official social function, class position, and language. Left only with portable instruments, and having already dedicated their life to their craft, they have little choice but to allay their regional differences and band together desperately to sell their labour on the market, travelling between villages as entertainers and agitators.
Recognising the need for new work for a new reality, the band task themselves with the musical imagination of a new horizon—Ireland as a nation undivided.
Join them for their new duet, Erin’s Interval.
1“The Contention of the Bards (1616-1624)”
Bethany's report: Two figures lie in long white dresses across from each other in a grassy field. A flyer titled “Gaels Defeated: Englyshe Law Prevauls Over all Ireland” is distributed and contextulaises the performers as representing the bards from rival Gaelic clans, north and south, recovering from a violent debate on form, mythology, and ethnicity. Now, British invaders have dismantled Gaelic society, leaving them stripped of language, class, and purpose. The bards set aside ancient rivalries, forming a fragile alliance to survive. Together, they seek to forge a new bond, exploring the only language left to them that transcends division: music
A messenger on a bicycle, ringing a bell, guides the audience toward the performance space, where a bouncer checks entries, adding a layer of exclusivity and threshold. Inside, the bards exchange objects and instruments, signaling their tentative collaboration. They lay out fabric and place a flute and a whistle upon it, marking a shared center—a symbolic gathering point.
The performance begins in unison; they play a single note together, expelling their breath until exhausted. Then, shifting to separate notes, their sounds diverge, creating a more discordant, whistling texture. Each breath becomes laboured as they push and strain, embodying the struggle to find balance amidst discord. As they play lower-pitched notes, they stand and shift positions, backs turned, circling each other and repeatedly seeking harmony in their shifting sounds. They try aligning once more but remain slightly off, attempting to bridge differences with each new note.
Moving around the space, they test how different notes resonate in various locations, exploring the effects of proximity and distance on harmony and dissonance. They experiment with their instruments: the flute and the whistle clash, sometimes aligning but often drifting apart. Occasionally, they come together, creating sharp, high-pitched harmonies, yet they quickly return to discord. One performer moves through the audience, testing sound and connection with spectators, while the other distances themself, amplifying the sense of isolation and contrasting resonance.
Each attempt to play harmoniously ends only when their breaths give out, a shared exhaustion in their pursuit of union. As they approach a microphone, they produce a long, breathy note, once more trying to play each other's instruments, negotiating how to integrate different pitches, tones and timbers into a aural kinship.
Suddenly, the performance is interrupted: a group in black outfits and trilbies storms the stage, ending their fragile harmony in a violent rupture. The bards’ unresolved search for alignment collapses.
Antonia Majaca: Antonia has given her glasses and scarf to a student to respond in her place. Stand-in Antonia comments that we enter a scene with two figures crossing each other, dressed in white, and then a newsboy appears, creating a kind of “Newsies” reference. It’s a mix of musical theater, immersive theater, and a punk show all at once. We’re marked at the door, encountering these various cultural touchpoints right from the beginning. This raises the question: what kinds of “brawls” do we find ourselves in against the colonial backdrop? There are layers of psychology here, of facing siege, displacement, and two very different kinds of struggles.
So, in this space-making, we have two characters who might be fictional but are also part of a “critical fabulation.” They’re sounding out a geography for us, perhaps beginning a coalition or maybe not. The way you leave that political ambiguity open is very clever. This brings up questions about abolitionist geographies or psychic geographies, entanglements, and new relationalities. Could this new form of connection lead to overcoming the siege? What happens outside the door, in captivity? And how does that second “brawl” disrupt the beginnings of a communitarian consciousness? In your writing, you use the term “nation,” and whether this piece is sounding a new layer of protection.
Inti Guerrero: Inti begins by acknowledging the elements of the piece, particularly the concept of light—creating a sense of “daylight” for the audience. He searches for the right term, noting that it resembles a simulacra, creating an idea or parallel of daylight rather than actual daylight. This concept, he explains, brings in a sense of time, bridging past and present, with the historical context powerfully evoked through the flyer. Though serious, the piece also functions as a form of self-critical commentary, almost like a smart joke, around the act of forcing oneself to confront political trauma.
Inti goes on to discuss the art world and the impulse to present something formally, observing that it often carries an underlying sense of resentment toward authority—toward institutions, curators, and other structures of power. He reflects on the tension that can exist between artists and curators as two sides of institutional influence.
This leads him to recall the Croatian feminist collective WHW, who curated the Istanbul Biennial. For WHW, this was their first major international opportunity, yet they came from a disobedient practice and struggled with a sense of self-betrayal by entering the international art world. They used creative strategies to stay true to their rebellious roots, notably at the second press conference, held in a theater, where they stood on chairs, confusing the journalists in attendance. It was a clever use of fiction and déjà vu that disrupted conventional expectations.
In this performance, Inti sees a similar challenge to the industrialized, coded nature of the art world, with the piece poking fun at artistic jargon and buzzwords like “entanglements.” He is reminded of a piece by Pablo Guerra, which humorously critiques the bureaucratic language often found in art institutions. He notes that art programs today sometimes even teach students how to write artist statements—a development he finds sad.
In closing, Inti thanks the performers for bringing “a little dynamite” into the fiction of the art world they all navigate, expressing his appreciation for the work.
Ramon Amaro: Ramon began by saying that, in the overall scope of things, this project was one of the more explicit ones. Reading the abstract, he noted, you get the narrative right away. It’s a traditional staging of a play—you see the context and the materiality building around it.
He found it “really cool” how it was staged to navigate the audience into the space, allowing them to act within it. He thought this was beautiful because it suggested that the piece was exploring a genre as a move toward accessibility. For him, it didn’t matter if it was a parody of the genre or a genuine intervention; the fact that it attached itself to that genre was meaningful.
Given the history and contemporary issues of the region, Ramon found it interesting how the piece offered a speculative view of a future. This approach of looking back at the past and framing it as a futurist narrative wasn’t necessarily new, but he thought it was powerful in how it communicated certain ideas. There was a subtlety in the consequences of what was unfolding.
Ramon went on to say that the piece took a factual historical incident—British colonialism—and reimagined it as something that could bring potential unity instead of division. Using neutralized symbols and semiotics, it shifted the focus toward different aims. He pointed out that it wasn’t just about colonialism; there were religious and customary divides among the clans that made them vulnerable to exploitation in the first place. This raised the question of how the piece communicates a new form of relationality that goes beyond words. He saw this effort clearly in the use of music and instruments.
This led Ramon to think about the role of music and instruments in general. On the surface, the piece presented communication, resolution, and even violence. But he wanted to consider the instrument itself. He noted that, historically, instruments in contexts of war and violence often served functions beyond what they seemed. Drums, for instance, kept cadence, and bagpipes were meant to disrupt the senses so that bombs and bullets wouldn’t seem as jarring. Cellos and harps were transported in munitions cases to calm soldiers’ nerves, turning them into tools of psychological manipulation.
Ramon observed that this blending of reality and fiction created a simulacra between them, showing how instruments can be used to create something greater—something durable. They calm you down just before violence, reinforcing an endless loop. He reflected on how the piece uses instruments as a common language to negotiate connection and, perhaps, peace. While “music for peace” wasn’t a new concept, he started to think about sonic theory rather than just the instrument itself.
This brought him to a sound theorist at the University of Leeds, who explores how sound and rhythm connect people at a vibrational level, drawing them into a common space and forcing sonic interaction. Through this rhythmic intervention, people can dance and negotiate together, creating a different kind of relationality. This theorist uses genres with built-in closeness, like Jamaican dancehall, where physical proximity dissolves barriers. Ramon also saw this at rave or techno parties, where people move as one unit, blending together.
In this type of negotiation, he felt the piece was using pitch and sound to create a real-time language between two entities that may not entirely understand each other. He appreciated that the piece didn’t take things into a utopian fantasy where trauma just disappears. Instead, it maintained a balance, acknowledging both the possibility and impossibility of harmony, especially with the rupture at the end.
Returning to the desire within the piece, Ramon reflected on how instruments in war could be tools for psychological manipulation. They shape social behavior on a battlefield, beyond individual control, disrupting natural fear responses to make people act against their instincts. He suggested that this realization—understanding that war machinery is aware of an inclination toward peace and deliberately disrupts it—was significant. He compared this to the Homer Simpson trope of alcohol as both the cause of and solution to life’s problems, seeing war as both the problem and the supposed solution.
For Ramon, the use of instrumentality as a new kind of manipulation was clever, whether intentional or not. He saw it as tying into resistance, fugitivity, and a language that suggests if manipulation is this sophisticated, there are also ways to counter it. Ramon ended by expressing his appreciation for the piece and thanking the creators.
