The Irish Chamber Orchestra (ICO) this week launches a new collaborative video series titled I Create Online. The four-part series is inspired by the challenge of the pandemic and features the orchestra collaborating with thirteen individual artists and creatives in the fields of music, animation, photography, aerial dance, film, recording and producing. 

The series will start tomorrow (5 November) and run until 26 November, with a new video broadcasting on the ICO’s social media channels each week. 

The first video of the series, ‘Covid Captured’, features work with socially engaged practitioner and photographer Deirdre Power and animator Philip Shanahan with a performance by the ICO of Piazzolla’s Oblivion. The video focuses on the empty streets of Limerick, showing images of boarded up shops, churches and families chatting via video call. 

The second video features aerialist Aisling Ní Cheallaigh, who has worked with performance companies including Fidget Feet Aerial Dance, Ether Productions and Taking Flight, performing to an arrangement by ICO cellist Christian Elliott of the song ‘House of the Rising Sun’. Jazz guitarist Jimmy Smyth and pop-folk singer Karrie O’Sullivan Holmes will perform David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’ with the orchestra in the third video, with visual effects by Dominik Kosicki. The fourth video features an adapted extract from Time After Time by children’s author Judi Curtin with music from Sam Perkin. 

Commenting on the series, ICO CEO Gerard Keenan said:

We at ICO are extremely grateful to the participating artists who have worked with us throughout this creative process in extraordinary circumstances.  It has been a privilege to develop these projects and to forge new relationships with a whole new world of artists and technology.

For more on I Create Online, visit: www.irishchamberorchestra.com/i-create-online/