IASIL 2005 Charles University, Prague
Ireland – A Global Village?
25-28 July 2005

Corporeal Translations: Embodying Local/Global Histories in Contemporary Irish Performance

This panel presents a view of recent Irish theatre which focuses on the hybrid corporeal vocabularies of three recent productions (Conal Morrison’s production of Tomás Ó Flaithearta’s Irish translation of J.M.Synge’s tragedy Riders to the Sea, Chun na Farraige Síos, Peacock, 2004; Loose Canon’s H, Fabulous Beast’s Giselle (2003)) and an ongoing performance documentation project for Cork City of Culture 2005. As Nicholas Grene points out in The Politics of Irish Drama and The Irish Theatre Diaspora project, the texts of Irish playwrights have often performed Ireland for international audiences, have engaged in intercultural dialogues and have certainly been produced globally. We are focusing on performance vocabularies, inscribed in and through the bodies of actors. As a non-Irish speaker, Enrique Cerquoni responds to Conal Morrison’s production of an Irish translation of Synge’s canonical play, Riders to the Sea as a tragedy unfolding in ‘bodily’ terms. Recent physical theatre and dance theatre companies such as Loose Canon and Fabulous Beast have engaged in a series of corporeal explorations which merge different historical and cultural texts, performance or movement traditions and vocabularies. Finola Cronin examines Fabulous Beast’s contemporary version of the classic Romantic ballet, Giselle, and Cathy Leeney analyses Loose Canon’s investigation of Hamlet via Artaud. Berni Sweeney considers potential critical practices for the construction and development of a history of Irish performance through various modes of documentation. We will explore the implications of these corporeal fusions between histories and languages (linguistic, performative and archival), and between the embodiment of a globalised Ireland and the performance of an interrogatory tension between local embeddedness and global translations and transactions.

Chair: Anna McMullan (Trinity College Dublin)

Panellists:
Enrica Cerquoni (University College Dublin)
Neither ‘Local’ nor ‘Global’: A Phenomenological Approach to Conall Morrison’s Production of Synge’s Riders to the Sea

Finola Cronin (University College Dublin)
Pleasure and Pain: Lyrical violence in Fabulous Beast’s Giselle

Cathy Leeney (University College Dublin)
‘That Within Which Passes Show’: Reason, Unreason and Performances of the Body in Loose Canon’s H

Bernadette Sweeney (University College Cork)
Out of Touch - Remembrance and Embodiment