The No Show

*The No Show* is a film inspired by working-class men known not to turn up. It’s an attempt to create an opportunity to It’s an attempt to enter the experience of the absence he creates and explore his internal world? Who didn’t show up for him? To understand him, we need to meet his father; to understand his Da, we need to know his grandfather. Like Russian dolls, we complicate the narrative around men like him.

Over two years, Catherine O’Halloran and Grace Dyas worked with young men in Limerick City Build to devise a trauma-informed contemporary art film that tells the origin story of trauma experienced by working-class families by going back six generations to the Famine. The film presents visceral flickers of hunger, loss, abuse, banality, reality that celebrates our absences, emptiness, and blank spaces to bring us right into the present and allow us a window to show up for ourselves

Catherine O’Halloran is the manager of Limerick City Build. Catherine is an integrative psychotherapist, director & founder of Draw Out an awards winning Urban Art organisation as well as the Unconventional Therapist an initiative that trains professionals in the work of Trauma practice. Catherine has successfully built a reputation for innovation and gender specific trauma work. She has a masters in Humanistic & Integrative Psychotherapy and is currently conducting PhD research into the correlation between the impact of trauma and offending behaviour within Limerick Prison. Having worked extensively on the ground in community development and held various positions in the addiction services, youth provision, and family services she has gained insightful knowledge over two decades that is compounded by an academic career spanning 16 years, her wealth of knowledge is anchored in a humanistic sensibility and deep appreciation for the experience of those in abject poverty and hopelessness. She has been championing Trauma informed Awareness and practice for over a decade.  She is passionate about cultivating change and has become a leader in developing creative and innovative responses to regeneration locally. As an artist with a portfolio centred on civic transformation she approaches her work in a unique and multidisciplinary fashion. Her collaborative approach to this project has led to an increased value for the variety of artistic process available to us and its value for symbolic communication.

Grace Dyas is an established working class artist and activist with nearly twenty years of experience making socially engaged art. She works with people who have survived trauma, making work collaboratively about social justice issues through film as well as live performance (theatre), installation and conceptual art. Over the past decade creating landmark works of art which raise provocative questions about power, ethics, morality, class and social justice. This has often led her to the coalface of the most contentious issues of the time. The most contested spaces both online and off. She sees her work to date as acts of artistic mediation.

This project was funded by the Arts Council Artist in the Community Scheme and managed by Create, the national development agency for collaborative arts.