Dr. Marie Kelly (Department of Theatre, School of Film, Music & Theatre) along with co-editors Dr. Siobhán O’Gorman (University of Lincoln) and Dr. Áine Phillips (Burren College of Art & Design) are delighted to announce the publication of:
Scene 8 Volumes 1 and 2 (2021) – Special Issue: ‘Performance and Ireland’ (Intellect)
This is the first peer-reviewed international journal since the early 2000s to focus on performance studies as it relates to Ireland. The collected articles explore a range of artistic practices as well as for studying different indigenous, migrant and diasporic Irish cultures through the lenses of performance and performativity. Collectively, across the two volumes, the articles examine the pivotal role that performance has played in constructing and negotiating Irish identities within and beyond the island of Ireland, historically as well as in contemporary life and artistic practice.
The scope of the journal is aligned with the interdisciplinary field of performance studies, particularly in relation to visuality, spectacle and display. As such, it also connects with Shannon Jackson’s claim that ‘visual culture seems to require performance for its seeing to be shown’ (2005: 164). The fourteen articles included in this double special issue offer fresh perspectives on the global field of Irish Studies by supplementing the traditional literary leanings of that field with examinations of more ephemeral, experiential and multimedia phenomena. Contributors traverse such often intersecting areas as the culture, art and activism of feminist, LGBTQ+, migrant and minority communities; gender studies, critical race theory and postcolonial perspectives; the Troubles, the Peace Process and the Irish Border; Ireland and Irishness in international and globalized contexts; site-specific performance; commemoration, memory and hidden histories and/as performance; and digitized and technologically mediated engagements with Ireland and Irishness. Several authors analyse and reflect on their own experience as artists, activists, performers and/or audience members, sometimes blurring these classifications.
CONTENTS:
Editorial
MARIE KELLY, SIOBHÁN O’GORMAN AND ÁINE PHILLIPS
Articles
Performing Ireland: Now, then, now …
MARIE KELLY, SIOBHÁN O’GORMAN AND ÁINE PHILLIPS
Performances of autonomy: Feminist performance practice and reproductive rights activism in Ireland
HELENA WALSH
Stepping to the fore: The promotion of Irish dance in Australia
JEANETTE MOLLENHAUER
‘Racy of the soil’: Jason Sherlock, Gaelic games and the performance of Irishness as a racial identity
JUSTINE NAKASE
‘It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home …’: Beckett as national performance
PATRICK LONERGAN
Commemoration, ambivalent attachments and catharsis: David Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue at the Abbey Theatre in 2016
CLARE WALLACE
Collapsing time: LGBTQ+ rights in Northern Ireland, A Queer Céilí at the Marty Forsythe
VICTORIA DURRER AND DAVID GRANT
Irish outsiders: Performing Irish heritage on the streets of New York
MARY P. CAULFIELD
‘Irish … but nothing Irish’: The performance of Ireland on the British colonial stage
SEÁN WILLIAM GANNON
Incarcerated women and feminist activism: A case study of Margaretta
D’Arcy CIARA L. MURPHY
Touch in Irish performance art: Haptic encounters in Becoming Beloved (1995) and The Touching Contract (2016)
KATE ANTOSIK-PARSONS
Cilliní: (Re)addressing the past in the present
VICTORIA ALLEN, JOE DUFFY AND GARRET SCALLY
Performing geopower: Eile and border-fictioning
PAULA MCCLOSKEY AND SAM VARDY
I’m Garrett Lynch (IRL)
GARRETT LYNCH IRL