Making Space: Jennifer McMahon reflects on her Navigator residency at the Ballina Arts Centre

Alas, that’s not the world that most of us live in, though we spend years trying to cultivate something like it. Having the chance to spend focused time in Ballina Arts Centre, and maybe most importantly - at this particular time, was immeasurably helpful for me. I arrived on the first day of my residency, a Tuesday morning in August, to Ballina Arts Centre. It’s a beautiful building with both a more modern structure that houses the theatre and rehearsal spaces including my room for the 8 days I would be there, and an old former religious building. In my first meeting with Paul, the director of the centre, he gave me a tour of both sides of the building. The older part still has remnants of its previous life and I noted one of the corridors still had that incense smell I remember from church as a kid. The centre has its own beautiful library and features a huge circular table in the centre of the room which I understand was also left over from its previous owners. A room for the local kids to come and rehearse was an enviable sight as I thought how I’d have loved that kind of resource growing up in Cabra, as a young musician.

The new part of the building used to be a car park and there are old photographs on the walls where you can see the building before it was extended. The old exterior wall is a feature in the new building that also boasts two beautiful spaces upstairs - one a dance studio, where I excitedly joined a workshop on my final day of residency - and the rehearsal room, a spacious room with acoustic panelling and windows that look out onto The Ridge Pool where I saw anglers wade into the water each day to catch what I believe is some of the best salmon in Europe. This would be my home for 8 days.

I had a fairly basic set up. I knew that I wanted to complete some music in progress and I brought my stage piano down that first week. I find it hard sometimes, revisiting material that didn’t get finished in the moment. There’s a sense of needing to reconnect with it. Yet somehow, being in a different environment entirely, the pieces themselves seemed fresh in this new light. I had a pretty productive first few days and though I hadn’t planned to spend so much time on Sibelius, it meant that I finished and wrote up charts for 7 pieces that I can now hand to the band in rehearsals. I would like to turn this into an EP or album in the near future and I got some simple demos down as a starting point.

Part of my practice recently has been about place. Nature, more specifically. A few years back, I began writing ‘I AM HERE’, a location based project set in The Phoenix Park. It was part of IMC’s pilot ‘Incubator’. It was influenced very much by the need to reconnect with nature; the awareness that nature passes through cycles that we quite easily miss when we’re busying ourselves and over working. I was feeling the need to reconnect with nature but also with its timing, with the very nature within ourselves, as part of this greater ecosystem.

I knew that I would like to write a piece dedicated to my time in Ballina so in that first week I invited Mayo native singer-songwriter and composer for games, Laura Ryder (aka Laura Ampersand) to join me. Laura also works with field recording and location based audio so I was keen to see how we might work together. Cheers to Ken who brought us to the local Belleek Forest where we captured some audio of the forest’s birds, the mausoleum, the riverside and general forest floor sounds. At the same time I sent myself the map coordinates so we could use that information later in the compositional process.

Back at the studio, we improvised some ideas along with the recordings, using the coordinates as a basis. Laura came up with some tasty chords and we recorded a short improvised piece to come back to.

I was excited to have access to the theatre space because we had recently performed a live set of the I AM HERE project with visuals and I figured this would be a great opportunity for us to workshop what we had but also to begin cultivating a method going forward. I invited Hugh Denman to join me. Hugh is an amazing drummer and someone I enjoy playing with. It turns out, he’s also an incredible programmer with a flare for photography and visuals! Hugh came down so we could workshop what we had - what worked, what didn’t, how we could improve it, how we would take this format to a new location in the future. We didn’t end up having the theatre as there was a group in rehearsal for their premiere that weekend but we did have a massive projector in the studio. Having the space to use the projector and to collaboratively make decisions in real time was a gift. We’re following up this week!

It had been almost a year since I’d recorded the orchestral version of a song from my first album, Beacon Home, in Athens. I’d received the masters back in June and was itching to put the song out. We had some amazing footage from both the sessions in Athens and in Dublin and I was working on the video for quite a while, not managing to get it over the line in the course of my regular schedule. My second week in Ballina allowed me to complete that project - uploading the song for release to DSPs and finishing the final edit of the video which will also be released in a couple of weeks.

Ballina is a small town but it’s got plenty of nice little cafes and eateries. I’d cook in the hostel in the evening but I really savoured wandering around the town at lunch time and by the end of the two weeks I’d found a favourite in GRUB. Swing in if you can, their coffee is great and their salads are amazing! I’d even been contacted by some local eateries to come in and have some lunch there when I was in town. I was starting to feel like a local!

When I reflect on my time during the residency, it was definitely a mix of getting things done and allowing the space for new things to emerge. I felt like I was on a mission but I’m also a little out of the practice of giving space - a product of our current time, I think. So I did consciously take time to write each day, to reflect and to find new inspiration, too. I hadn’t written an instrumental tune in a while and had fun writing and arranging a piece one day after lunch.

Apart from my own goals and aspirations for the residency, I also had the opportunity to meet some locals - a man named Gerry who stopped me on the way from the train station to see if I needed a hand with my instruments and then invited me to a session later that week! Monika, who is the social media manager for the Arts Centre was really invested and took some beautiful shots and videos for the centre’s social media.

Throughout the second week of the residency, there was a dance group in the studio next door. They were working on a show which would have its premiere the day I was leaving. On the last day, they held a workshop, a taster class in African, Brazilian, and Séan Nós dancing. I happened to meet the director, Kate, on my way back to the studio and she invited me in. This was one of the most unexpected and inspiring moments of the residency for me. I danced a lot when I was a kid and into my teens, doing shows and competitions. In fact, there was a time when dance and music were inextricably linked for me. It sparked a charge in me. And the movement, the playful rhythms, and the group aspect really brought me back into my body - a place I hadn’t realised I wasn’t inhabiting all that much when I was alone in the studio next door getting heady about music! It reminded me about the power of music and dance but also about how its greatest power is in its shared experience. I had been reflecting on how we currently share music, the good parts like live shows and community and the less good parts like creating content for the algorithm, the isolation in working alone and the value of collaboration not just for the music but for our health, and this experience really set me off in a new direction in that conversation. I’m excited to see where that goes…

Part of the residency was to provide a songwriting workshop for some local young musicians. Already in bands and part of the musical offerings at the centre, four young musicians came into the studio - three guitarists and a bassist. We chatted about their bands, what music they played, whether they wrote their own music. Together we took one approach to songwriting and went about writing our own. Having the instruments in hand means you can talk about the theory but you don’t have to. Sometimes the knowledge is already under the fingers. Using what they knew already and pushing them a little too, we put together some chords, created a song structure and encouraged improvisation as the tool to find some melodies among the chords.

Improvisation is a bit of a daunting word sometimes. It implies using a tool and if you don’t know anything about improvisation as a tool you might be under the impression it’s not available to you. Something like ‘try something over this’ seemed a more inclusive invitation and we had a kid in the room confident enough to improvise a melody, even adding some lyrics too. It was great! By the end of the hour we had something they could take away and work on or at least some tools to take into their own writing sessions.

I’m very thankful to the IMC and to Paul at Ballina Arts Centre for this opportunity. I left Ballina after 8 days of finalising, planting new seeds, launching, collaborating and getting to know a new place and its people. I’m pretty sure I’ll be back in Ballina in the near future. Hopefully, to present some music at the Arts Centre, maybe to have another delicious lunch at GRUB and definitely, to continue getting to know this lovely little city and its people.

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