Toronto, Canada
Distillation (Toronto)
A performative journey which takes you to the Irish bog landscape through scent.
Distillation is a response to the recent cessation of the peat harvesting industry in Ireland. Over the past year, Luke Casserly has collaborated with renowned perfume maker Joan Woods to create a unique distillation of the Midlands bog – the place where he grew up – as the starting point for an olfactory encounter which looks at our human relationship to place. Dedicated to the future of our broken landscapes – in the hope that by listening to them, we might be able to better understand them.
Audience Role
Smeller.
Ages: All ages
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Tags
3
Events
3
Years on EI
About Luke Casserly
I am a multidisciplinary performance maker from Longford, Ireland. My work weaves together environmental research, documentary, sound art, and site as a way of carving out space for new possibilities to emerge between live performance and physical landscape. My projects have brought audiences through city streets, back gardens, train stations, beaches, and a bog in the Irish midlands. These works have led to the creation of a network of Irish wildflower meadows across Ireland (1000 Miniature Meadows, 2020) and the planting of 1000 indigenous trees in the Irish Midlands (Root, 2021). Often using autobiography as a starting point, my work attempts to stretch out new conversations around our human impact on the environment. I am interested in making work which has a positive environmental legacy beyond the moment of live encounter with an audience. I am driven to create gentle, subversive interventions in response to the climate crisis - and avoid leaning into the anxiety, greenwashing, and didacticism that often revolves around this topic in contemporary society. In 2023, I was awarded the Arts Council’s Next Generation Bursary. I was recently selected for the Norman Houston Multidisciplinary Commissioning Award with Solas Nua in Washington DC, in addition to being chosen to participate in the International Forum as part of Theatertreffen (Berlin Festspiele) 2023. I hold a BA in Drama and Theatre Studies from Trinity College, and a Certificate in Art and Ecological Practice from the National College of Art & Design, Ireland.