Text to Speech Player |
Ludo Dao provides support for creative arts research and practice with a social purpose. Its ongoing series of artistic intervention projects will promote diversity and inclusion and develop the concept of social authorship and engagement with cultural heritage.
Ludo Dao aims to create the conditions for cultural collaboration across multiple-media. We are specifically concerned with developing infrastructure to support creative practitioners to explore the theme of Culture in Exile. This means we are committed to working to improve conditions for creative practice for cultural producers from diverse backgrounds and in particular migrant communities.
Ludo Dao focuses on practice based activities which produce tangible multi-disciplinary artworks which can be exhibited and distributed to the wider public. Contribution to these programmes will be beneficial in terms of reputation and also potentially royalty income for those involved. Furthermore these activities are designed to enrich cultural collaboration and promote an environment both locally and internationally that supports cultural exchange.
The work of Ludo Dao is grounded in over thirty years of activism, research and creative industry acumen. This is exemplified by the careers of its three core directors Dr. Pól Ógh Aodhagáin, Dr. Lewis Smith and Miyoshi Jenner, with each bringing a distinct but complementary perspective to the activities of the company.
Sín-Éire is a Ludo Dao multi-media project co-sponsored by Ulster University, Confucius Institute and Raidió Fáilte to explore synergies between Chinese and Irish cultural heritage. The project team has been developing audio visual content around the theme of transformation drawing upon combined aspects of Chinese/Irish cultural heritage through the prism of Critical Orientalism, engaging with the questions raised by the poet W.B. Yeats and the composer Sean O’Riada in their ‘orientation’ towards Eastern cultures as a post colonial assertion of the Irish cultural (re)imagination.
Sín-Éire has engaged a range of skilled Chinese and Irish creative practitioners to develop a short piece of content – Crossing the Sacred Stream/Treasnú an Sruth Naofa/穿越神水 (chuān yuè shén shuǐ) – drawing upon the literary and musical traditions of both cultures to produce a montage of traditional and modern soundscapes evoking the mythological journey of crossing the sacred stream, a metaphor for change and development of the cultural psyche.
As an artistic intervention Sín Éire, has conspicuously combined Mandarin and Irish, reflecting Ludo Dao concern with de-emphasising the dominant presentation of English/Béarla/英语 (Yīng yǔ) as a mediating/colonising culture of encounter. Chinese/Irish poetry and music fused as a mode of cultural provocation ultimately invokes cultural (re)orientation, inviting profound questions about who we think we are.
Ludo Dao is also concerned with issues of (re)presentation and cultural articulation, adopting an attitude of copyright as a lived practice. This is important when dealing with cultural heritage and migrancy and draws attention to infrastructures of exclusion and appropriation which have been developed under transactional models of intellectual property. Dr. Pól ÓghAodhagáin’s research into social authorship provides a framing mechanism for Ludo Dao’s advocacy for inclusive creativity, while the practical out-workings of this research are embedded within the activities of the creative team.
This draws upon the rich history of artist centred activism foregrounded by the artist management work of Peter and Sumi Jenner expressed through the vehicle of Blackhill Enterprises and also Sincere Management. Miyoshi Jenner’s contribution to Ludo Dao as a creative industry consultant also highlights the importance of archive and memory in relation to cultural expression. Hence Ludo Dao is actively involved in supporting living archives of popular culture which can directly benefit creative participants, practitioners and interested communities.
Ludo Dao’s volunteer structure has accommodated secondments from institutions as well as individual contributions from creative practitioners from a wide range of disciplines. These contributions are critical in terms of the company’s development and Ludo Dao is committed to building support infrastructure which pragmatically and practically helps volunteers to commit time and energy to the realisation of creative potential.
