Sat 03 Mar 2007Soundings through the agesOnTheTown/Catherine Foley:Dorothy Cross recently
filmed an elderly shark-caller, Salam Karasimbe, singing on a
remote island in the south Pacific. The short film forms part of
her new show, Sapiens, which opened at Dublin's Kerlin Gallery this
week. Like a sean-nós singer, his song reaches back through
the ages; then, Cross explained, "in the middle of it he started to
cry".Signalling her to carry on, he tells her afterwards that it is
the secret song he sings when he's caught a shark. He cries, she
added, because of "the fracture between his tradition and modern
life, which ties in with the rest of the work".