Martin Sharry

Martin Sharry is a theatre maker and poet based between Galway and Dublin. Martin received an Arts and Disability Connect Mentoring award in 2020.

Tell us about your art.
I am interested in theatre’s capacity to hold space for people. I believe in the spiritual potential of the live event. This can be discovered through clownish action and poetic storytelling. Either way you must acknowledge the enabling limitations of the form.

Where are you based? Inis Oirr, Aran Islands and sometimes Dublin.

What are you working on at the moment?
I’m developing a piece that started as On / Off, a work-in-progress staged in Project Arts Centre, 2019. It’s inspired by the cycle of Parkinson’s symptoms. I want to open it up to wider questions of identity in the context of theatre. I’m thinking of it as breaking up with performance. It’s not me, it’s me.

Confidence in the project is fragile due to the ongoing pandemic. There is a constant question over whether performance will be able to happen. Hopefully, all going well, it should be staged later in 2021.

Can you tell us a little bit about your career path as an artist? How did you get to where you are now?
I was unhappily studying English and Folklore Studies in 2007 as a mature student in University College Cork, then one day I dared myself to audition for a course – Elements of Theatre Practice with Regina Crowley. I survived my incessant inner critic and found room for something else.

Then in 2008, the Masters in Drama and Theatre Studies in National University of Ireland, Galway was practical and encouraged collaboration. That year’s class formed an ensemble, we were interested in innovating and devising original work. I learned about theatre practitioners that shared a certain aesthetic that resonated with my interests – New York City Players, Pan Pan and Tim Crouch. They admit a certain irony in the name of truth, they play closer to the edge. Irish reviewers dismiss this as ‘postdramatic’- they notice the breaking of the fourth wall and the indulgent testing of tradition. It’s like they want to cover up the trembling, naked emperor. Maybe they shop at the same store. I guess I have a problem with authority.

Together with Richard Walsh and Zita Monaghan, we formed Side-Show Productions in Galway. We brought Dreams of Love to the Dublin Fringe Festival, 2011. Then in 2012 we produced King Alfred: A Mystery Play – inspired by MGM’s movie filmed in Galway in 1968. We were interested in making experimental performance ‘before’ an audience as opposed to ‘for’ an audience. We embraced awkwardness and exhausted spectacle. There was great craic and camaraderie in amateur theatrics, I was saved from academia.

In 2012 I wrote and performed I Am Martin Sharry in Solstice, Cork and the Dublin Fringe Festival. This was my first solo show. The Dublin Fringe Festival proved to be a home from home, for my work and the inspiring work of fellow artists. Also, Project Arts Centre has been an important resource and support for my somewhat aborted career. It was there in 2010 that I saw the revelation of Richard Maxwell’s People Without History. The performance leaves space for the audience’s imagination, the poetry of the words, the way people stood and carried their bodies, how attention was guided- all combined to open something up new. I was buzzing all the way back to the island.

I availed of opportunities such as MAKE in Annaghmakerrig, The Next Stage programme at Dublin Theatre Festival and the Pan Pan International Mentorship with Tim Crouch. From 2017 to 2018, I was part of the Six In The Attic development programme at the Irish Theatre Institute and continue to benefit from being part of that community.

I’m interested in live art and was lucky enough to perform in Live Collision 2014 and exhibited work in Tulca in Galway, 2016.

If you have been a recipient of an Arts and Disability Connect Award, how has this impacted your career path as an artist?
I received an Arts and Disability Connect Mentoring award to work on poems with the mentorship of Jessica Traynor. This experience provided perspective to evaluate what is important in writing. To honour a persistent live impulse rather than worry about the future. I’ve harboured hopes of publishing poems from a young age but failed to discipline a habit. The deadlines of theatre are more concrete than those of poetry. Throw myself on stage before a few human beings for enough minutes and you have a performance. Keep their attention sufficiently occupied and you might get three stars. However as Paul Muldoon notes, poems have a much higher pressure per square inch. Punctuation’s impact is pronounced, which is apt as I feel more punctuation than statement, these days.

Conversing with Jessica and considering the potential of poems has boosted my confidence. I’ve always been rather tentative with my writings but her treatment and insight have given hope that they might have a life as objects in the world, rather than remain as private scribblings. I also appreciate the responsibility to find the appropriate accommodation for said poems. When you achieve relative success in your chosen field there’s an automatic expectation to continue with that momentum. Poetry offers a viable alternative to completely giving up.

Are there any standout moments in your career as an artist?
I walked out of a performance of Running + Walking in the Phoenix Park, which I wrote and directed in 2018. That was a big regret. The show was poorly reviewed, had low audience numbers and I had just attended a networking event where you’re expected to sell a show to people who have no interest in what you have to say. Which is fine if you have full health. A lesson learnt, get going again.

I was awarded Highly Commended Poem in Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition, 2014.

Writing and directing Playboyz in the Dublin Theatre Festival, 2017.

Overall, the joy of shared creativity is the main thing. Being in the room with talented human beings dedicated to designing an ephemeral experience, in the hope of rendering a few moments of communion or beauty.

Who or what are the most important influences on your art?
Mike Diskin, only a few weeks left to live, giving us a bollocking for our lack of promotion for a show in the Town Hall Theatre Studio, Galway. Róise Goan, Cian O’Brien, Willie White, Lynnette Moran, NUI Galway, Irish Theatre Institute and The Arts Council.

I seem to be concerned with bearing witness to disregarded things. I feel the conditions for empathy are being constantly eroded. There is an overkill of information together with a slow kettling through economic pressures that desensitize and facilitates a drift towards unfeeling politics. The conditions of the theatre and event inform how I play with a subject. With the backdrop of Ireland’s housing crisis, the act of spending time in a building might say more than any rehearsed arguments about freedom. Although, in spite of being conscious of the wider context, I do enjoy the lovely exclusivity of being in a theatre, watching a show where your focus is rewarded.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?
(1) I was 33 and asserting myself with the show I Am Martin Sharry, when I was diagnosed as having Parkinson’s. It was initially dismissed as a benign tremor in my right index finger. The subsequent shows were affected, particularly when I tried to direct work. You have enough energy to appear as if you’re not affected then you’re floored until you’re back in the next day. The cognitive deterioration and the sudden instant exhaustion is more limiting than the more obvious physical symptoms. There is less time to be creative and there is less capacity to do it. It’s frustrating trying to describe the frustration!

Lately I struggle to read which is a big loss. So I turn, slowly, to poems and graphic novels such as Rusty Brown by Chris Ware. This limitation inspired the project with Jessica and poetry – to find ways to manage my minimal attention more efficiently. I think of Matisse’s Snail.

(2) I suppose it took 26 years to overcome shyness.

Who is your favourite artist?
As part of the Arts and Disability Connect Mentoring award I maintained a blog on poetry. I read Czeslaw Milosz A Book of Luminous Things, that’s my favourite anthology of poems.

Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson, Geoff Dyer, Ben Lerner for writing. Ozu and Marc Isaacs in film. Steve Reich, Cate Le Bon in music.

What do you like to do for fun?
I walk to the shore and photograph wrack*, if I’m lucky.

*a remnant of something destroyed that washed up on the shore.

 

Biography
In 2008 Martin completed a Masters in Drama and Theatre Studies in NUI, Galway. Since then he has been involved with creating live events, setting people opposite people in real time. He is interested in questions of presence. There is the sense in which presence allows ‘integration’, as Dr Dan Siegel explores There is also the contrasting of liveness with mediation. And there is the foregrounding of disregarded subjects.

The latter has included disconnected family members that share the same name in I Am Martin Sharry. The play dealt with the downside of the Aran Islands’ idealised authenticity. His aesthetic is informed by the conditions of the theatre and the event. He is interested in the form’s shared finitude and the capacity to hold some space in this mass mediated world.

He writes, he directs and he performs. In 2012 he was diagnosed as having Parkinson’s Disease. This degenerative condition has increasingly limited his creative ability. He is getting slower and the work is less frequent. The most recent thing was a project funded by the Arts Council’s Covid Funding. He wrote and recorded a story, read by Shane Connolly, title Head Home. This project will be ongoing.

www.martinsharry.com