New music, food and art event in Ballina

Ireland's first 'Folk’n Soup Club' opens its doors on Friday March 31st in the Washerwoman Pub in Ballina. 

Each month this not for profit live multi-media event will host a variety of local and international performers from disparate backgrounds and performance mediums. The club’s unique stage settings from amplified to semi-amplified to fully acoustic, whilst enabling a transient flow of entertainment will also help to create, immediate and intimate, but also distant and reflective spaces for audiences to engage with performers.

 

This concept of sound and performance perspective is very much at the heart of the club’s creator, ethnomusicologist, academic and performer Mike Hackett, whose own music landscape has been shaped by diverse idioms that include Blues, Rock, Jazz and traditional Irish music, and the Irish tradition of unaccompanied singing.  

 

Other vital elements of the club include the soup (of course) but also Art and Community. Hackett, a self-confessed foodie, views the soup element as a pleasing and comforting one. Soup is often the food source we turn to in times of illness due to its simplicity and warming effect. He equates music as often having the same effect acting as a salve to our lives. Combining both, he has created ‘Folk’n Soup for the Soul’.

 

The re-presenting of performance is the reason why Hackett wants to incorporate an Art element to the Folk’n Soup Club and he aims to engage with artists asking them to spend a night at the club to create their artistic ‘re-presentation’ of a night of Folk’n Soup. The hope is that willing artists will offer their pieces to the club for its yearly auction, the proceeds of which will be offered to the clubs featured charities, nominated by its audience members. The charitable side of the Folk’n Soup Club will integrate that final and important element of the venture, Community.

 

To bring about the Folk’n Soup Club, Mike Hackett has assembled a peripatetic team of artists, musicians and food creators, all of whom are giving their time gratis to help realise the club's entertainment and charitable aims. They include Paul Marshall, MFA MBA, on media and web; Our Musical Direction comes by way of Limerick pianist Aiden Boland; and the soup, well that’s the work of Ballina’s Vincent Scanlan, chef at the award winning Limerick and Tipperary Italian restaurants, Tuscany Bistro.   

 

Folk’n Soup Club Nite #1 takes place on March 31st in the Washerwoman Bar with a celebration of the Shannon Folk, who in 2017 celebrate half a century together. Entry: €10. Folk'n Soup Nite #1 is a charity night; all artists have donated their fee towards the club's nominated charities.

 

Guests include: AnTara, Tommy Hayes and Mattu Noone; The Shannon Folk, ‘Celebrating 50 Years a Folking'; Cellist Alec Brown; The Killalunatics; The Star from Behind the Bar. For more info, see www.folkandsoupclub.ie