Reconnecting with Irish history through two different theatre experiences: Dalkey Castle and Sean O’Casey

Monday marked the beginning of academic week #2 on the applied theatre course. Students and staff had a chance to rest on Sunday, and students submitted their first academic journals to their tutors on Monday morning.

We made our fourth site visit of the course to Dalkey Castle and Heritage Centre. We’ve included this site on the course since 2004, and we’re always greeted with hospitality and enthusiasm by Margaret Dunne, the manager of the centre. Dalkey has a reputation as being a very wealthy suburb of Dublin. It’s been described to me as the equivalent of Beverly Hills. Several Irish artists of international fame make their homes there including Maeve Binchy, Bono, the Edge, Van Morrison, Enya, and Neil Jordan. Dalkey also has a great literary tradition, including serving as the location for chapter two of Joyce’s Ulysses.

Dalkey Castle is largely intact, and when Margaret took over as the manager of the heritage centre attached to the castle, she recognized the rich history of the castle and the town itself. Margaret talked with the group about identifying what already exists in a place where one is working. What are the raw materials? What can the artist-manager build from? In Margaret’s case, her background in theatre played a major role in how she moved forward with the centre. She successfully created the Deilg Inis Living History Theatre Company, a professional company of actors charged with animating the historical sites at the centre, which include the castle and a church to St. Begnet, the patron saint of Dalkey. We had a great experience with the actors on our tour of the sites, and it was exciting to see how theatre could be used to truly engaging an audience in the detailed history of a location. The actors engaged with us at a very high level, and I appreciated their ability to pitch their performances and their improvised interactions to a group of adults. We then had a tour of the town of Dalkey, including some of the beautiful homes and views of Dalkey Island. Once again, Margaret Dunne and Dalkey did not disappoint, as I heard several positive comments from students about how inspiring it was to meet Margaret and engage with all of the great programming she has created at the heritage site.

Students then spent their first session in the devising process with Jenny Macdonald and Declan Gorman. Over the course of six working sessions, students will now create two original works with Jenny and Declan, as a way to explore methodologies that can be used in community-engaged theatre creation processes. More details will emerge over the coming days, and I’m hoping to sneak in and see what’s happening in each of these rehearsals.

We ended the day with a performance of O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars presented by the Abbey Theatre in a production directed by Wayne Jordan. This production is a remount from two summers ago that will eventually go on tour, so I had seen it back when I was here in 2010. It is an Irish classic, exploring the experiences of men and women living in a Dublin tenement leading up to and during the Easter Rising of April 1916. At three hours, the play is long, but the work of the actors and the production team kept me fully engaged from start to finish. I had mentally prepared myself for a bit of a struggle, as I thought that my focus might wander a bit since I had seen it before. Not the case, as I found myself fully immersed in the world of the play via the excellent acting, the innovative staging, and the design elements. We saw the show in previews, so I sensed a few tempo issues that are still coming into alignment. However, those moments didn’t detract from my overall experience of the story. O’Casey’s play has an epic feel, and his characters are quite Shakespearean in their plights and their verbal expression of their feelings. The production locates the comedy interspersed with all of the pathos of a play about suffering during a revolution, and I was appreciative of this reality that Wayne Jordan achieves through his direction of the play. It’s a beautiful and painful production that left me with questions about history, choice, love, dedication, devotion. What’s the difference between dedication and devotion? Seems like Jack and Nora wrestle with that question whenever they’re on stage together. And their wrestling, particularly in the first act, is quite memorable.

Both of the above experiences allow audiences to invest in the details of specific human experiences at important historical moments in the history of Ireland. Margaret Dunne expressed an importance in staying as true to possible to the facts of a given situation, whereas O’Casey clearly created a fictional group of people living in a fictional tenement at the time of an actual event in an actual city. While somewhat different in their approaches, both experiences are unified in their unique way of exploring history through theatre.

See below for images from the trip to Dalkey.

An Irish Day of Rest . . . and Hill Climbing

Today I had lunch with my friend Andrea Ainsworth. I’ve known Andrea since 2004 when she first taught on the Ireland study abroad course. We have continued to stay in touch over the years, and we meet for lunch or dinner each time I come to Dublin. Andrea works as the Voice Director for the Abbey Theatre, so we’ll get to see her work on Monday evening via the Abbey’s production of The Plough and the Stars.

Joanna Parkes then picked me up, and we drove to a destination that has become a ritual for both of us each time I’m in Ireland for the summer. In 2006, I taught two weeks of the summer abroad course, while my then partner, the late Craig Hamrick, was back in NYC. Craig was too ill to come to Ireland that summer, and it was difficult to be away from him. Toward the end of the program, just as I was about to head back home to re-enter the care-taking role for Craig, Joanna and our friend and colleague Sharon Murphy brought me to the top of a hill in just outside of Dublin. It was a lovely hike through the woods, and at the top of the hill, I could see out into the Irish Sea and all around the city. When Craig passed away in September of that year, Joanna, Sharon, and Declan Gorman returned to the hill and made a short film and sent it to me for Craig’s memorial. Ever since 2006, whenever I return to Ireland in the summer, Joanna and I make this trek, along with other important people in my life who may be visiting. Anyone who has come there remarks how special it is. It has a name, which always escapes me, but Joanna and I like to call it “Our Mountain.” We had hoped to bring her son Dualta this time, but he elected to stay in town and rest after his long night in Bray with the fish and chips.

After our trek up, we had some tea and sweets in the little town of Enniskerry, another part of the ritual. It was a great afternoon, in spite of the weather, as we managed to dodge the rain, wind, and hail. Yes, hail. That was a first for me in Ireland.

Below you’ll find some images from the day. Click here for a 360 view from the top of the hill. The body of water is the Irish Sea, and I’m looking towards Wales. “Our Mountain” is one of my favorite places in the world. Thanks to Joanna for always being a willing and able participant!

First Irish applied theatre week in the can. Two more to go.

Today the NYU students presented their Educational Resource Packet projects (ERPs). We worked with two plays by Enda Walsh: Chatroom and New Electric Ballroom.

In the debrief following the projects, the teaching staff agreed that these were very strong presentations, and that they included some of the most theatrical moments via dramatic activities that we’ve seen in our many years of teaching this course. Beyond the creativity on display, we also noticed an exceptional level of collaboration and cohesiveness amongst the group members in each presentation. We’ve come to believe that this is a very strong group of students, but I also think that Joanna Parkes did an excellent job of unrolling the ERP model and the assignment. The clarity around expectations helped the students to achieve very strong and well-structured plans for their pre- and post-performance workshop schemes.

Additionally, Joanna and Jenny Macdonald feel that the accountability to group work has increased because of the introduction this year of the Evidence of Collaboration Assessment Sheet. Each member of a working group uses this assessment sheet to evaluate the work of every other member in the group. Students know what the expectations are in advance, and it seems to help manage the creation process. These sheets will be collected on Monday morning, and each person will receive a mark that is an average of the other group members’ assessment of her/his work. This final score on the ERP project contributes to the Preparation, Participation, Collaboration mark in the course, which is worth 20% of the overall grade. I’ve been using variations on these sheets for a number of semesters now, and I think they have consistently helped me to maintain some order in the often chaotic and frustrating world of group project work.

Following the presentations, Joanna staged a bit of a celebratory hooley with the students, as a way to honor the work that they’ve completed at the conclusion of this very intense first week. The students then went off to enjoy their free Saturday evening and Sunday, and the teaching staff traveled off to Bray for a walk along the Irish Sea and some fish and chips.

We’ve had an excellent first week on the course. Thought-provoking, cage-rattling (in a good way), and inspiring on many levels. I look forward to the coming week when we’ll travel to Dalkey Castle and Belfast for more inputs, and the students will begin their own devising work with Jenny Macdonald and Declan Gorman. One of these days I’m actually going to find a way to pull on the Irish literary tradition and write one of my plays. They’re just not coming right now. But lots of other ideas are, hence these blog posts. Maybe I should just be happy to be writing.

See below some images from the student work today and the trip out to Bray.

Lessons in minding with Louise Lowe

Today’s input on the applied theatre course came via a very exciting Irish artist named Louise Lowe, who was joined throughout the day by members of her company, ANU Productions. I met Louise last Saturday, and we’ve heard her mentioned by other practitioners in almost every session that we’ve experienced this week. I joked this afternoon that it was like the first act of Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, where we hear about Big Daddy for an entire act before he finally enters in Act Two. After experiencing Louise’s work with the students today, Act Two was well worth the wait. Louise is making work in a variety of different settings and in a number of styles. She manages to get actors and non-actors to sign on for some intense durational and environmental performance experiences, and she’s working in Dublin, Belfast, and other communities in between. Suffice it to say, there’s absolutely no grass growing under Louise Lowe’s feet.

Louise’s input followed the general outline of most of the experiences we’ve had thus far. She spent the morning discussing past works she’s created with her company, ANU Productions, and then in the afternoon session, she guided the students through ensemble-building work, and then set them to the task of creating original works inspired by the neighborhood and circumstances of her latest work, The Boys of Foley Street, which will premiere at the Dublin Theatre Festival this fall. Sandwiched between the morning and the afternoon, we received an abridged tour of the neighborhood from local historian and folklorist, Terry Fagan, and through his storytelling, we gained genuine insight into how this one city block has provided Louise with inspiration for an entire cycle of performances that she is creating with her company.

I took a lot away from observing Louise’s work with the students. Rather than do a blow by blow of all that happened in detail, I’ll list a few quotations, paraphrases, and moments, and try to illuminate from there.

1. Louise asked the students to think about three questions: where do you stand? How do you begin? What are you most afraid of? Straight out of the chute, these questions were on the table. A great way to immediately take the temperature of a potential group of collaborators. Students interviewed each other and re-presented each others’ answers. They were then asked to spend the day thinking about how they might present their partner’s answers in a performance piece. Louise completed the day’s work with a re-visit to those potential ideas.

2. Cubist dramaturgy: exposing multiple surfaces. An area that I want to research a bit more.

3. Louise paraphrased: Don’t pay attention to yourself onstage, but pay attention to everyone else around you. Really pay attention.
May sound obvious, but my own experiences tell me that it bears repeating. Constantly.

4. “Too often we get stuck having love ins as artists.”
I may get this made into a t-shirt. This notion of the love in is really dangerous. It’s linked to Bogart’s assertion that resistance is a necessary element of any creative process. I just appreciate Louise’s way of conveying it.

5. Louise paraphrased: Stop acting and look after the others. Be mindful of the others. Mind the others.
Phrases like this came up repeatedly throughout the day. I liked the sound of the philosophy, but then it kicked in when some students presented a piece outdoors and began to draw more attention to themselves than was anticipated. I witnessed Louise and four company members fan out around our group like Obama’s Secret Service corps, and embody what it means to “mind others.” Their presence immediately helped to diffuse the situation at hand, without interrupting the work of the performers or creating conflict within the community. They have embedded themselves in a studio space within the community where their current work resides, and as a result, they’ve gained some deeper connection to the location and its people. It makes me think about the notion of insider/outsider, and how Louise and her colleagues have struck a delicate balance of trust and understanding with the community, but that the delicate balance requires constant sensitivity and re-negotiation. There is no resting on the laurels of past interactions. To me this speaks volumes about how community-engaged artists need to be thinking and intentional when they enter and/or create within a community.

6. “When you mind other people, you cease to become indulgent.”
This takes practice and a lot of self-reflection. But the benefits are immense.

Spending the day with Louise and her colleagues, hearing about their work in more detail, and witnessing my students create reminded me that we all need to have our houses in order if we’re going to make work like this. I was struck that the company itself seemed to be in order as well. People commit to making the work, and the company as an entity commits to them. There’s something synergistic about how it works for these artists that’s inexplicable after just one day of being with them, but my gut tells me that it has a lot to do with the minding. Hence, the title of the blog post. How would art making change profoundly if all artists took the time to mind their collaborators? Not smother or coddle them or always agree with them, but mind them. This is something I’d like to know.

Below are some images from the day’s work.

Art is discursive: a day with Upstate Theatre

Today we worked with Upstate Theatre in Drogheda, a city of about 37,000 people in County Louth. This is our eighth summer program working with Upstate, and the company has rolled out an amazing welcome and an inspiring input each and every year. Today was no exception.

We were greeted by Upstate board member Irene White and Director Declan Mallon, and Declan proceeded to walk us through the history and ethos of Upstate Theatre. This was followed by two panel discussions with artists talking about the creation of new work with members of the Drogheda community. Feidlim Cannon and some of his company members talked about a new work called The Far Side that will premiere in November of this year, and Paul Hayes and actors from his project talked about the very successful Ship Street Revisited, a site-specific work that has its audience travel to five different houses to explore the people and history of Ship Street in Drogheda. We were also welcomed by the Mayor of Drogheda, Paul Bell, and he presented me with the coat of arms of the city.

After a wonderful lunch, we walked through town to the Barbican Centre for a three-hour movement workshop with Zara Starr, a choreographer working with Upstate on a new piece about the idea of home in Ireland. Zara took the group through an intense physical process that pushed the groups’ collaboration skills to the max. She followed this with some great work to create movement phrases, what she called strings. She set the group off in pairs, and asked the partners to create 12 points where they moved around, by, and/or through each other. Once these strings were set, she then asked the performers to take the work one step further by adding various dynamics to the phrases. Following a break, Zara then split the students into four groups and gave them 20 minutes to create an original piece about home. Each of the groups shared their work, and Zara recorded the material, with the intention that it may actually find its way into Upstate’s new work.

Upstate ended the day with sandwiches and drinks at a pub in town, complete with a trio of Irish musicians. As usual, the group left with a lot to ponder based on the inspiring work that we saw and participated in throughout the day. Our work with Upstate is always a highlight for this course, as students really see the range of possibilities that exists when a company fully embraces what it means to be engaged with the community. Upstate has been doing that from its beginnings, and it is evident in the depth and scope of the work that the company creates and produces.

Here are some additional notes, thoughts, and quotations, that I took from the day’s events. I think they are worth consideration for anyone working in an applied or community-engaged way.

From Declan Mallon’s presentation:

“Cultural inclusion is an equal right to participate in the nation’s artistic and cultural life . . . a fundamental democratic right.”

“Civic aesthetic space belongs in the psychological space that we all share.”

Sometimes the methodologies we use don’t work for the communities we’re creating with. We have to change the approach so that we build trust with those participants.

“Art is discursive.”

The terms “citizen artist” and “artist citizen”

Reminder: The belief that all people are creative

In community work, people may be the most comfortable with their own stories.

“There’s no one way to skin this cat called art.”

“We are multicultural within our own communities.”

From Feidlim Cannon:

Hand over the workshop to the participants. Make it about them instead of about the artist.

“Trying to make the screen dance” as it relates to the use of video in performance.

Because the lead artist is not from Drogheda, it may be easier for him to make choices about what stories and materials stay in the play and what parts come out.

Concise steps for interviewing participants for stories: “Interview, take the testimony, go off and investigate it.”

From Paul Hayes:

Paul mentioned the “rules of dramaturgy” for his project, and it made me think of the importance of aesthetic. Being rigorous about consistency in performance is part of that.

A paraphrase: Paul is aiming his shows at people who don’t come into formal theatres.
How can we all think more intentionally about this idea? Not everyone feels comfortable coming into a traditional theatre. How can we tell stories in places other than traditional theatre? It’s happening, but it needs to happen more. It’s a new challenge for myself.

From Zara Starr:

Create a string of movement with a partner:
Around someone
By someone
Through someone

“Hold on tightly; let go lightly.”
Practice this when creating new material for a work in progress.