Scene - Performance and Ireland, Dec 2020

This article considers feminist performance practices in relation to reproductive rights campaigns in an Irish context. Following the successful campaign to Repeal the 8th Amendment in 2018 and the decriminalization of abortion in Northern Ireland in 2019, I explore the significance of feminist performance practices in developing discourses concerning reproductive autonomy and challenging the idealizing of motherhood. Through a discussion of key works by Áine Phillips, Amanda Coogan and myself, I outline how in deploying their bodies in their work live artists make visible the impact of oppressive gendered constructs and resist the policing and shaming of reproductive bodies in an Irish context. I demonstrate how through performing transgressive acts, live artists have ruptured the silencing surrounding both abortion and maternal experience. My article further critically reflects on the performances of the London-based direct-action performance group Speaking of IMELDA, drawing on my first-hand knowledge gained through my participation in the group’s successive performative interventions between 2013 and 2018. I discuss the group’s collective public vocalizations and, sometimes brazen, use of performance to unapologetically advocate for reproductive rights within an Irish context in a variety of social and geographical settings. I situate the performance activist aesthetics of IMELDA in voicing the intergenerational perspectives and solidarities of the London-Irish feminist diaspora as contributing to broadening understandings of Irishness. In outlining how the various performance practices discussed within this article have operated against cultural constructs of femininity and unashamedly advocated for reproductive autonomy, I locate performance as contributing to the development of feminist discourses.

This article contributes to scant literature on Irish dance praxis in Australia by demonstrating how the confluence of global and local factors have permitted Irish dance in Australia to step to the fore. Irish step dance is a globally recognizable genre that has dispersed through, first, the migration of Irish people throughout the world and, more recently, through itinerant theatrical troupes. In Australia, a significant node of the Irish diaspora, Irish step dance has managed to achieve unusual prominence in a dance landscape that has traditionally been dominated by genres from within the Western concert dance canon. Drawing on both extant literature and ethnographic data, this article examines three threads from the narrative of Irish dance in Australia. First, the general choreographic landscape of the nation is described, showing that the preferences of Australian dance audiences have been shaped to privilege styles that are popular onstage and on-screen, with the resulting marginalization of culturally-specific genera. Second, localized effects of the global contagion instigated by the development of the stage show Riverdance are explored. Here, the domains of aesthetics and decisive marketing strategies are discussed, showing how engagement with Australian audiences was achieved. Finally, the article introduces an idiosyncratic localized influence, the children’s musical group The Wiggles, which was conceived independently but which also promoted interest and enthusiasm for Irish dance in Australia by engaging with young children and presenting propriety of Irish dance as available to all, regardless of cultural ancestry.

This article uses critical race and performance studies to analyse the Gaelic games as a racialized performance of Irish national identity. As a key project of the Irish Revival, the Gaelic games are not only one of the most popular sports in Ireland but have from their inception been used as a strategic performance of Irish identity. Historically, the Gaelic games allowed Irish athletes to embody an aspirational White masculinity; since then whiteness has become nearly synonymous with Irishness. Yet this conflation of race and nation has become increasingly problematic as the demographics of Ireland shift. While the Gaelic games are often lauded as a space for the integration of new migrant communities, the reception of minority ethnic Irish athletes reveals the limitations of this inclusion. Examining the career of Asian-Irish Gaelic footballer Jason Sherlock – arguably the first ‘superstar’ of the Gaelic games – this article argues that while Irish sport offers a performative space where exclusionary definitions of Irish identity can be challenged, these spaces are often conditional and constrained by larger attitudes around race and racism in the nation at large.

This article explores how nations such as Ireland interact with each other – and seek to understand themselves – by appropriating theatre-makers and other artists, using them to perform versions of that nation to the outside world. This topic is considered through an exploration of the Irish state’s appropriation of Samuel Beckett as an icon that represents positive images of Irishness both within and beyond Ireland. This process is explored from shortly after Beckett’s death in 1989 to the launch in 2012 of an Irish navy vessel named the LÉ Samuel Beckett. The treatment of Beckett during that period is considered in the context of a broader discussion of nation-branding in Ireland. This is presented in an outline history of the Irish state’s performance of itself through its artists, which are discussed in relation to the appearance of Irish writers on banknotes during the twentieth century, among other brief examples related to the work of W. B. Yeats and James Joyce. The article concludes by considering some of the methodological challenges that arise in an investigation of national performance.

This article analyses David Ireland’s 2016 play, Cyprus Avenue, in which Eric, a middle-aged Ulster Unionist, becomes convinced that his infant granddaughter is Gerry Adams. Ireland is a Belfast-born actor and playwright whose works – Can’t Forget about You (2013) and Ulster American (2018) – have recently generated critical acclaim and debate. Cyprus Avenue, directed by Vicky Featherstone, opened in February at the Abbey Theatre Dublin as part of the theatre’s 1916 commemorative programme, before transferring to the Royal Court. With attention to the nuances of these production conditions, the ways in which Ireland’s play unravels a crisis of northern Irish identity in a post-Agreement context in relation to temporality and gender are explored. Particular attention is focused on how ontological crisis is presented through dislocated, non-linear experiences of time that are enacted within a scenographically crafted space. This crisis is at once personal and impersonal – a metaphor for a northern state of being – and is brutally distilled in acts of violence against women. I will argue that the ideological dimensions to the affective mechanisms of the play and its performance at the Abbey Theatre in 2016 and beyond are deeply ambivalent and deserve scrutiny.

This article examines Kabosh Theatre Company’s production of Dominic Montague’s A Queer Céilí at the Marty Forsythe, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during its first run in March 2019. Based on archival research and personal accounts of a weekend surrounding the October 1983 National Union of Students Lesbian and Gay Conference in Belfast, the play depicts a moment of lesbian and gay activism largely neglected in critical and popular historical accounts of the period known as the ‘Troubles’ (1968–98). Through observation of rehearsals and performances as well as in-depth interviews with audiences and artists, we argue that the play’s situation in the venue, where many of the events portrayed originally took place, and the use of archival and found photographic imagery as key scenic elements create a sense of ‘collapsed time’ that brings the past into dialogue with the present and future, particularly regarding the relationship of LGBTQ+ rights to societal reconciliation.

This article analyses how the Tenement Museum at 97 Orchard Street in Lower Manhattan uses immersive techniques to provide visitors with an opportunity to engage with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrant experiences. My specific focus is the apartment tour entitled, Irish Outsiders, a living history installation curated as part of the Museum’s Hard Times exhibit that recreates the cramped apartment of Joseph and Bridget Moore, real-life residents of 97 Orchard Street in 1869. The Moores left an Ireland traumatized by the Great Famine only to arrive at the challenges of New York City immigrant living. This immersive recreation of Joseph and Bridget Moore’s apartment staged for a Catholic wake links this specific Irish immigrant experience with that of loss, suffering, poverty and trauma. Drawing on Alison Landsberg’s concept of ‘prosthetic memory’ alongside frameworks of heritage performance, this article examines the Irish Outsiders as an immersive performance curated to reflect and shape the narrative tropes essential to the Irish immigrant experience implicit within an Irish-American heritage identity.

In a perceptive essay on Scottish national and imperial identity, Richard J. Finlay framed what he termed the ‘transplantation of “Highlandism”’ to the colonies through Scottish societies, Highland dancing clubs and Burns nights as the ‘performance of Scotland’ overseas. Using a range of documentary archival sources and written and oral personal testimonies, this essay applies Finlay’s idea to Irish communalization in the twentieth-century British dependent empire. The transient ‘imperial Irish’ diasporas that Irish soldiers, settlers, colonial servants and missionaries comprised formed an integral and generally indiscernible part of the British ruling class. However, Irishness was spatialized in colonial life through Irish clubs, societies and St Patrick’s Day celebrations which enacted a ‘stage’ performance of Ireland based on ritualized caricature and trope. This performance was also thoroughly imperialized and was directed with performative purpose. It worked to ecumenize the social, religious and political ‘varieties of Irishness’ that co-existed in British colonial life; ‘imperial Irish’ diasporas represented the heterogeneity of twentieth-century Irish identities and these performances created depoliticized spaces which emphasized commonalities rather than contrasts. Inter-accommodation of these disconsonant identities was required in the colonies where ‘British’ ethnic, political and religious differences had to be submerged to preserve the more critical distinction between colonizer and colonized on which the empire’s legitimacy and sustainability depended. The colonial performance of Ireland also served to demonstrate that Irishness and loyalty to the Crown and empire were not, by definition, dichotomous: the non-threatening, imperialized image of Irishness that they presented countered the enduring trope of the Irish as ‘natural subversives’.

This article interrogates the relationship between feminist activism and performance through an analysis of Margaretta D’Arcy’s time in the Armagh Jail during the republican ‘no-wash’ protest in 1980 in the north of Ireland. D’Arcy, who is an Irish artist, performer and activist, mirrors the performative strategies of the women prison protestors through an engagement with second-wave feminist methodologies. D’Arcy’s embodied and literal archiving of this experience constitutes a moment of performative activism that will be examined throughout the article by drawing on D’Arcy’s perspectives and intentions by engaging with her 1981 memoir of that time, Tell Them Everything, as well as supplementary interviews and archival research.

Over the last 50 years, Irish feminists have campaigned for women’s sexual health and reproductive rights, including access to contraception, legal abortion and choice in maternity care and childbirth. Recent cases like Ms. Y (2014), P. P. v. HSE (2014) and Ms. B (2016) invite a close scrutiny of the power dynamics relating to women’s reproductive bodies in Ireland. This article examines Becoming Beloved (1995) and The Touching Contract (2016), two performance-based artworks located in Dublin maternity hospitals. Both artworks centred the body as a site of production to interrogate these power dynamics while engaging with specifics of each location. This article charts the management of childbearing bodies in Ireland, looking specifically at issues concerning reproductive and sexual health, information and consent. It details how Irish performance art has responded to the political, social and cultural climate of restrictions on women’s bodies. Becoming Beloved and The Touching Contract both employed haptic encounters, multisensory perceptions composed of tactile, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive sensations that extended beyond a visual aesthetic. These haptic encounters contributed to a dimension of viewer engagement, integral in performance art to activating meaning. This article examines how these two artworks utilized haptic encounters to produce a situated, corporeal knowledge that critiqued the authority wielded over reproductive bodies by political, religious and medical establishments in Ireland.

This article examines the ‘Cilliní’ project’s interdisciplinary approach of research and filmmaking practice to explore the phenomena of cilliní. The project has created artwork that investigates and visualizes landscapes and provides a spatial narrative on the subject of cilliní, which were historic sites in Ireland used for the burial of ‘unfortunates’, principally stillborn and unbaptized infants. The article draws on the material created and experiences involved in making the short film The Lament and creating a virtual reality installation, Cilliní Tales, which, respectively, employ the technologies and approaches of drone and 360° camera filmmaking. As the article combines the perspectives of digital storytelling, cultural memory and a consideration of the ethics of undertaking such a project, it is written in the form of a triptych. This article addresses how the (re)visitings and difficult enquiries of arts-based research in the ‘Cilliní’ project contribute to an ongoing social, political and ethical reappraisal of cilliní and the implications of (re)addressing the past in the present.

Since 2016 we have developed the Eile Project, a transdisciplinary investigation of the border in Ireland that centres around site-responsive performance and audio-visual films in a process and praxis that we call border-fictioning. Through this practice, we ask how the border might be differently understood, experienced, critiqued and altered through affective encounters in the artworks produced between bodies, the earth and sovereign power. In this article, we explore (somewhat experimentally) our notion of border-fictioning in the Eile Project, specifically through one of the piece’s ‘experiments’ (#3 Territories of Eile). We draw on a specific concept, that of geopower, and a specific diffractive method. Geopower, or the forces of the earth itself, allows us to comprehend and conceptualize the geo (earthly, material, affect, power) and the human (bio, anthropic, biopolitics, body, power) together in specific ways. A ‘diffractive’ methodology sees the production of knowledge and meaning as inextricably connected to (entangled with) the social and material practices of the world. The article offers a discussion of that which emerges from a ‘diffractive’ approach to border-fictioning in light of the concept of geopower. We show that geopower enables us to see the ways in which the Eile Project border-fictioning through performance and audio-visual film constitutes a particular kind of capitalization of the earth’s forces – radically different from those of capitalism and sovereign power, and potentially resistant to colonial histories, and suggests new alliances and imaginaries that allow us to work through the complex conditions of the border and partition in Ireland through the entanglement of human (anthropic) and earthly (non-human) concerns within the tensions of the Anthropocene.

This article discusses a selection from a series of performances created between 2008 and 2019 that as practice as research (PaR) explore ideas of identity, representation and place as they relate to the intersection of what are termed ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ spaces. These include I’m Garrett Lynch (IRL) (2010), I’m Not Garrett Lynch (IRL) – Identity Badge Performance (2018–19), I’m Not Garrett Lynch (IRL) – Zazzle Store (2019), the three complementary performances of Three Wearable Devices for Augmented Virtuality (2011) and As Yet Unnamed (2019). The performance series initially occurred online and later incorporated gallery spaces and sites in six countries. From the outset, my Irish identity formed a crucial background to my practice but remained an implied rather than directly discussed perspective. This article’s purpose is to discuss practice from an Irish perspective and in so doing foreground and clarify how nationality and place were in fact essential to its development. Examining the use of written and to a lesser extent spoken language in performances, discussion explores how language is a problematizing starting point but equally enables an extension of my identity by implying my Irish nationality and Ireland as place. Irish nationality is described in this article as comparable to what is defined as ‘real’ and forms a component in the territorialization of both ‘virtual’ space and places of the phenomenological Other. Methods of moving between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ spaces, influenced by the philosophical theory of Gilles Deleuze, are described in detail and performances are employed to demonstrate how this occurs. Finally, the use of naming and how it has impacted my identity in ‘real’ space and ongoing life is explored through the discussion of a performance in 2019.