ANU Productions is a theatre company based in Dublin, Ireland, It exists to create an artistically open working environment where artists can both investigate their individual practice and collaborate.
The company
ANU was founded in 2009 by 5 artists from various disciplines Owen Boss, Louise Lowe, Hannah Mullan Sophie Motley, and Sarah Jane Shiels. The company state that they are devoted to an interdisciplinary approach to performance / installation that cross-pollinates visual art, dance and theatre in an intensely collaborative way. Examples of this can be seen in Basin, Memory Deleted and World's End Lane.
As a theatre maker her work includes: Still Life Still, Come Forward to Meet You, World's End Lane, Deano, Right Here Right Now, Working on Fingal Ronain, Memory Deleted, Basin, Corners, Down The Valley, Rock, Paper, Scissors, 100 Minutes, Sunny Days, Scenes from Family Life, The Bus Project, Baby Girl, Xspired, The Spider Men and Tumbledowntown. She was Resident Assistant Director at the Abbey Theatre 2008 -2009. Assistant Directing credits include: The Pride of Parnell Street This is Our Youth Rank and The Wonderful World of Dissocia.
This is a four-part geographical project spanning the history of Foley Street and its environs over the last hundred years. The comprising productions are the already produced WORLD'S END LANE, LAUNDRY, BOYS OF FOLEY STREET and finally, VARDO CORNER Together they will reveal the interpenetration of place and culture, creating an evolving work of historical and contemporary detail. Each production spans a specific period od intensive regeneration and renaming from 1925 - 2013. World's End Lane explores the area as a notorious red light district in the days leading to its dramatic closure in April 1925. A major regeneration followed when streets previously littered with brothels were demolished and the land gifted to the church to create a Magdalene home for women known locally as The laundry. Laundry will be a major site-specific production following the real stories of some of the women who lived there. To combat the squalid conditions and intense poverty in the 1970s, most of the original tenement dwellings were demolished to make way for a new social housing, this was the world of The Boys of Foley Street when the changing lives of four young men were captured in an RTÉ radio documentary. This production will follow what happened to those boys, as they became men. Finally, on the site of the latest regeneration the company will re-install the infamous caravan of local Romany fortunetellers Lily and Terriss Lee. Theirs is the only family who have lived in the area from the 1920s through all its incarnations. At the heart of this project is the extensive family archive of the Lee's, their Romany heritage and the impact they had on generations of their community.
Awards and achievements
Nominated two Irish Times Theatre Awards for Best Production 'World's End Lane' and Special Judges Award.
Winner Best Off Site Production Award, Absolut Fringe 2010
Nominated Fishamble New Writing Award 2010
Nominated best actress award, Absolut Fringe 2010
Winner: Best Production Award, Belltable Unfringed