Masters in Collaboration VIII- Dana Lyn meets Louis de Paor

“[Dana Lyn’s] fiddling makes you feel you are sitting there in the room with her as she plays, flowing freely and effortlessly from one tune to the next. She captures all the excitement and leaves you breathless…The overall effect is of intimate and occasionally disturbing warmth and contact as Lyn transports you. Beautiful.” – Irish Edition

“De Paor’s freshness of diction, even, and especially, when using the most transparent language, is stunning…unbelievably simple, yet possesses an equally unbelievable amount of depth.” – Nicholas Birns, Antipodes 2002, review of Cork and Other Poems

Our acclaimed Masters in Collaboration series takes a cross-disciplinary turn, pairing Brooklyn-based violinist and composer Dana Lyn with award-winning Irish poet Louis de Paor.

Lyn and de Paor will be using poetry, music, and visual imagery to present a day in the life of an imagined village somewhere in the West of Ireland, with various characters, living and dead, real and surreal, wandering in and out of each other’s lives and ours between sunrise and sunset.

Multi-instrumentalist and composer Dana Lyn inhabits a musical world somewhere inside the Venn diagram of 70s art rock, classical, traditional Irish and improvised music and has collaborated with a wide range of artists, from the edgy string quartet Brooklyn Rider to Grammy Award-winning vocalist Susan McKeown and actor-director Vincent D’Onofrio.

A key protagonist in the late 1970s Irish language poetry renaissance, Louis de Paor was the first Irish language poet to receive the leading American award for Irish poets—the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award—and his poetry has been published and celebrated around the world in both English and Irish.

Launched by IrishArtsCenter in 2008, the Masters in Collaboration series creates partnerships among artists outside the pressures of the marketplace in an effort to stimulate creativity, reward risk, and awaken a dynamic musical conversation between Ireland and the United States. Past series have included Paul Brady with Sarah Siskind, Andy Irvine with John Doyle, Bill Whelan with Athena Tergis, Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill with Gregory Harrington, Iarla Ó Lionáird with Ivan Goff, Seamus Begley with Joanie Madden, and Karan Casey with Aoife O’Donovan.