Limerick Early Music Festival 2026: Festival Launch
Schedule
Wed, 18 Mar, 2026 at 05:30 pm
UTC+00:00Location
The People's Museum of Limerick | Limerick, LK
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The People’s Museum, Blue RoomPerformances and Reception
5:30pm
WELCOME
5:45pm–6:15
MASQUERADE: Exploring the Human Psyche through Gombrowicz, Baroque Music, and Chant
Justyna Czwojdzińska: actor
MASQUERADE is an experimental performative happening that shares an ongoing artistic and philosophical exploration of the role of masks in human existence. Inspired by Witold Gombrowicz’s thinking on form and the mask—as something unavoidable yet unstable—the happening unfolds as a live inquiry rather than a completed performance. It moves between reflection, action, sound, and silence, allowing ideas to emerge, dissolve, and re-form in real time.
Using spoken thought, fragments of text, embodied actions, and musical interventions, the artists test how identity is constructed, performed, and disrupted. A variety of masks—traditional, modern, grotesque, neutral, and ceremonial—appear as provisional tools, not fixed symbols, inviting both play and discomfort. Excerpts from Gombrowicz’s writings (Ferdydurke, diaries) surface intermittently, spoken or chanted, treated as material to be handled, questioned, and exposed.
Baroque music and Gregorian-inspired chant are woven into the happening as living elements that interact with movement and voice. At times they support structure; at others they resist it, echoing the tension between sacred aspiration and worldly entanglement, discipline and excess. Nothing is resolved in advance; the form remains porous and responsive to the moment.
MASQUERADE invites the audience to witness and inhabit a shared experiment—part presentation, part action, part thought-in-motion. It asks, without insisting on answers: Are we ever ourselves without masks, or are we always becoming through them? What remains is an open space of ambiguity, where meaning is provisional and identity continually negotiated.
6:30pm–7:30pm
MASKS AND MUSIC IN CEREMONIAL CONTEXT: Transformation and Liberation
Billy Mac Fhloinn: presenter, musician
Billy Mag Fhloinn will give a presentation and performance based on his work as director of Pagan Rave. This is an ongoing project which aims to reimagine folk traditions and calendar customs of Ireland. Using as a starting point the ancient costumed figures of Irish and European folk theatre and seasonal festivals, it seeks to operate at the margins of place and mind, and embody the transformative and liberating aspects of masks and music in a ceremonial context. The event is proposed as an illustrated talk, where elements of the project will be explored through video, image, and text. Examples of masks, costumes, and musical instruments will form part of the presentation. Some of these instruments are accurate copies of historical examples, while others have been invented as part of the project. Space will be given to audience questions and interaction, and the event will finish with a performance on the yaybahar, an acoustic instrument invented by the Turkish musician Gorkem Sen.
7:30pm–8:15pm
RECEPTION
Free ticketed event (Limited capacity—book early!)
Please note: This event is held upstairs in an historic building and is not wheelchair accessible.
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Where is it happening?
The People's Museum of Limerick, 2 Pery Square,Limerick, IrelandEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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