CANCELLED DUE TO COVID-19

“Glorious Outsiders”: Queer Pasts and Futures in Irish Performance

O’Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance, NUI Galway.

Irish theatre has a particularly rich relationship with queerness, a performance culture brimful of moments when society’s regular rules become suspended on stage and audiences can, as Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier have phrased it in Queer Dramaturgies (2016), thereby find themselves “queerly moved”… But despite the undeniable presence of queer subjectivities in both modern and contemporary Irish theatre and their seminal role in including gay lives and queer corporealities in frameworks of recognition, there is still a limited focus on these multitudinous social, cultural and political aspects of Irish theatre and performance.

In light of this rich stew of queer theatrical heritage, “Glorious Outsiders”: Queer Pasts and Futures in Irish Performance, is a two-day conference which seeks to bring together theatre practitioners and scholars of Irish theatre and performance, who are working on representations of queerness, gender and dissident sexualities in order to interrogate and renegotiate the queer and anti-(hetero)normative potential of modern and contemporary Irish theatre. The primary focus of the conference is the exploration of queer subjectivities in Irish Performance, but it also draws on a more expansive notion of queer “as a force of disruption that simultaneously draws on historical genealogies of queer and freshly imagines ‘queer’ in the contemporary moment,” as Clare Croft articulates in Queer Dance (2015). In a post-marriage Equality Ireland and with the recent digitisation of projects in Irish theatre studies, the time seems ripe to re-examine and ask questions as to what queer performance means in contemporary Ireland. Just exactly how can we queer the canon - both mainstream and fringe - and Irish theatre historiographies in general, thereby exploring how modern Irish theatre also contributed to the representation of queer lives?

As part of this year’s conference, Hannah Tiernan will be delivering her paper Foul, Filthy, Stinking Muck. ‘Foul, Filthy, Stinking Muck’ (Hughes1977) was just one of the more colourful outcries against the Gay Sweatshop plays, Mister X and Any Woman Can when they were performed in Dublin’s Project Arts Centre in 1976. It was a time when men could be imprisoned for simply holding hands in public; a time when women had their children taken from them for revealing their sexuality; a time before AIDS; before Ireland’s first Pride march; before equal marriage and gender recognition. The 1976 presentation of the Gay Sweatshop plays was just the start of Project Arts Centre’s public support for the LGBTQ community. Over the following decades, it would go on to present many works highlighting LGBTQ issues, proving to be one of the community’s strongest platforms in which to portray their stories.

This paper highlights the more notable LGBT theatre of Project Arts Centre from 1967 to 2000. Drawing upon extensive archival research, it will reflect on how the documented works responded to social issues of the time and how they have influenced contemporary Irish theatre practice. It will also consider the ongoing role of Project Arts Centre as an artist-led organisation at the forefront of presenting cutting edge work within the context of LGBTQ activism.