Performing Social Change on the Island of Ireland

This book examines the relationship between moments of significant social change on the island of Ireland and performance practice during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It examines how moments of significant change influence not only the content of performance practice but also the form and function of theatre production and reception. This book investigates how the Troubles and subsequent Peace Process, Second-Wave Feminism, the Celtic Tiger and neoliberalism, social revolution, and the COVID-19 pandemic impacts the form and function of performance practice across the island of Ireland. Although these forms of theatre and performance making refer to varied and distinct lineages of practice internationally, there are key parallels that compel a study of their inter-relationality in a specific Irish context. This book explores how the performance of Ireland illuminates histories and stories that are on the margins, illuminating the lived realities of everyday life through the presentation of moments of violence, oppression, and trauma as something that is as important as the larger narratives often ascribed to nationhood. This book asks how performance practice engages with and informs moments of major social change on the island of Ireland through the distinct yet intersecting lenses of place, performance form, and social context over the course of almost a century of Irish theatre and performance practice.

Ciara L. Murphy is an Assistant Lecturer of Drama and Theatre at Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland.

Acknowledgements Introduction: States of Change Temporal Switch Points The Politics of Naming Space A Spectrum of Participation Public Space as Performance Space Structure and Design Chapter Summaries Chapter 1. Storytelling and Performance Post-Good Friday Agreement A Marriage of Equals? Troubled Spaces Chapter 2. Tourism as Performance: Moving into a new Millennium Papering Over the Cracks The Trouble with Tourism Performing the Legacy of the Past Chapter 3. 'A Bevy of Beauties': Feminism, Double Jeopardy, and Charabanc Theatre Company Creating Space for the Personal A Feminist Approach to Creating Performance Charabanc Theatre Company Double Jeopardy: Women's Experience in the North of Ireland Lay Up Your Ends (1983) and Gold in the Streets (1986) Community Spaces Chapter 4. 'Soujourned in Her Majesty's Prison': The Performative Actvism of Margaretta D'Arcy The National Question The Collision of Activism and Performance Dirty Protest Writing as Cultural Resistance A 'Feminist Tour of Duty' Chapter 5. Reclaiming Personal Histories Through Performance A Volatile Nation Radical Commemoration Public and Embodied Sites of Practice Moments of Communion Chapter 6. A Dying Tiger: Performing Ireland's Housing Crisis Neo-liberal Theatre Production Critique as Commemoration Hideously Inequitable Nation Chapter 7. "Virtual Reroutings": Performing Ireland's Social Revolution Pantigate #WakingTheFeminists Maser's Mural Chapter 8. "Survival is Insufficient": Ireland's Pandemic Performance #CovideoParty: Creating a Community Audience Online. Dear Ireland (2020) - A Postcard from Pandemic Ireland To be (or not to be) a Machine Index