Papers by Siobhan O'Gorman
'Negotiating Genders from the Page to the Stage: Marina Carr and Suzan-Lori Parks' explor... more 'Negotiating Genders from the Page to the Stage: Marina Carr and Suzan-Lori Parks' explores how two female playwrights, from different cultures and backgrounds, challenge oppressive traditions. It offers the first major comparative study of the theatre works of Marina Carr (1964- ) and Suzan-Lori Parks (1963- ): two significant, internationally-successful dramatists. Employing a wide range of theories in feminism and gender studies, this thesis analyses how Carr and Parks disrupt western literary traditions, national myths and accepted gender roles in liberating rather than didactic ways. Both do so not just through the written word but also through other important signifiers such as costume and gesture. Existing scholarship and criticism have tended to circumscribe each playwright within certain parameters based on form, language and national identity. However, comparing the works of Carr and Parks reveals that they belong to a generation of theatre-makers that seeks to transcend limiting categorisations. By moving from text to intertext to stage action and image, and examining the dramatists in relation to their distinct national contexts as well as the western milieu that they share, I hope to broaden our frameworks for understanding each playwright's work.2016-10-0
Palgrave Macmillan eBooks, Sep 1, 2018
This chapter argues that the modernization of design in Irish theatre can be linked to progressiv... more This chapter argues that the modernization of design in Irish theatre can be linked to progressive movements towards Baugh’s conception of ‘scenography as dramaturgy of performance,’ a phrase that forms the title of the final chapter in the second edition of his seminal monograph Theatre, Performance and Technology (2013). Baugh associates this concept with contemporary ‘post-dramatic culture[s] of performance’ (224) in which ‘scenography is no longer primarily the servant of dramatic performance; it has floated free and may create from within its own practices and research’ (239). In contemporary Ireland, such approaches are epitomized in the work of companies that centralize the collaborative work of designers and directors in theatre-making processes foregrounding scenography, for example Pan Pan Theatre, founded in 1991 by designer Aedin Cosgrove and director Gavin Quinn, and Anu Productions, established in 2009 and co-directed by visual artist Owen Boss and director Louise Lowe. The works of these companies have received considerable critical and scholarly attention within contexts such as post-dramatic theatre (Pan Pan), as well as site-specific performance and community engagement (Anu). Yet, twentieth-century Irish theatre history is punctuated by moments that indicate a gradual progression towards scenography as dramaturgy of performance. Each progression towards scenography as dramaturgy of performance helped to elevate the position of set and costume designers in particular from manifesting received interpretations towards a more collaborative inclusion within processes of theatre-making, coalescing in the 1980s with the work of designers such as Casson and Monica Frawley. In order to explore the national genealogies of the most current approaches to scenography (which also inevitably have been influenced by international practices), this chapter will home in on Casson’s and Frawley’s contributions as designers to what might be considered dramaturgies of performance.
Sabine Dargent is a French scenographer who has been working in Ireland since the late 1990s. Pri... more Sabine Dargent is a French scenographer who has been working in Ireland since the late 1990s. Prior to this, she worked in Paris with Theâtre a Grand Vitesse (TGV) – a company that has, since its inception in 1987, produced highly visual work merging performance, film and photography. Other companies with which Dargent worked in France include Theâtre de Châtillon, L’epee de Bois and Theâtre du Soleil. The experience of physical theatre that Dragent garnered from working with such companies as Theâtre du Soleil has remained central to her conception of performance design. In Ireland, Dargent began by designing theatre for young audiences with TEAM Educational Theatre Company, including Michael West’s Jack Fell Down and Frances Kay’s Burning Dreams, both in 1999. Later, she designed sets and costumes for TEAM’s production of Kay’s Last Call, a play for post-primary school students staged at the Helix in 2006. In 2003, Dargent won the ESB/Irish Times Award for Best Set Design for Conall Morrison’s version of Ibsen’s Ghosts, produced at and by the Lyric Theatre, Belfast. She went on to build a portfolio of cutting-edge design work with Fishamble, including: Michael Collins’ Tadhg Stray Wandered In at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, in March 2004; Jim O’Hanlon’s Pilgrims in the Park at the Pavilion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire, in November 2004; and Gary Duggan’s Monged in April 2005, again at the Project Arts Centre. Dargent won the Irish Times Theatre Award for Best Set Design again in 2006, for the first play by Enda Walsh on which she worked: The Walworth Farce, produced at and by the Druid Theatre in Galway that year. She went on to design Druid’s productions of Walsh’s The New Electric Ballroom (2008) and Penelope (2010). Since 2005, Dargent has worked throughout Ireland with such companies as the Abbey, Kabosh, Blue Raincoat, Barnstorm, Big Telly and Second Age. She also led design for the St. Patrick’s Festival’s City Fusion community arts participation projects from 2008 to 2010 inclusive; these annual projects produce pageants to be performed as part of the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin, with the aim of celebrating diversity and promoting integration. The following conversation reveals much about the collaborative ways in which Dargent, Walsh and director Mikel Murfi sculpted the spaces of Walsh’s The Walworth Farce, The New Electric Ballroom and Penelope. In designing these productions, Dargent drew on a range of visual stimuli from film to photography to paintings. She was also influenced by modern architecture, including Casa Malaparte in the Isle of Capri, Italy – a house built by its owner Curzio Malaparte, with the help of Adolfo Amitrano, having been originally conceived around 1937 by the famous Italian architect Adalberto Libera. The house was extensively used in the filming of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 movie, Contempt (Le Mepris). For Penelope, in particular, the work of visual artist Yves Klein (1928-1962) was a huge inspiration for Dargent. Here, Dargent also offers more general discussions of Walsh’s work, as well as her process as a scenographer.
Liverpool University Press eBooks, Apr 15, 2021
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2018
Collaboration is paramount to the theatre designer’s process, as Irish scenographer Frank Conway ... more Collaboration is paramount to the theatre designer’s process, as Irish scenographer Frank Conway argues in his insightful essay “The Sound of One Hand Clapping” (2012). However, Conway also points out that, in the discourses of Irish theatre, the specific role of theatre designers continues to be “undervalued, undermined even, a casualty of an outdated, unchallenged nineteenth-century perception [of ‘doing the backgrounds’] that is still pervasive in the industry”. Departing from several existing published considerations of design in Irish theatre that have tended to examine the role of designers via work by particular directors or writers (sometimes inadvertently reinforcing the conventional positioning of designers as subservient to writers and directors), this chapter seeks to foreground the specific contributions of designers. In addition, it seeks to trace genealogies of the designer’s increasingly co-authorial input in contemporary Irish theatre practice. In order to offer depth as well as breadth, and to trace the genealogies of contemporary practice, I will home in on the work of two designers, focussing in particular on their activities during the 1980s: Bronwen Casson and Monica Frawley. Select works by these artists (for example, their respective contributions to scripts authored by Tom MacIntyre) offer illuminating case-studies on the increasing authority and generative contribution of designers in Irish theatre-making processes, which is central to the modernisation of design in Irish theatre.
Will Chamberlain moved from Switzerland to Ireland in the late 1990s, when he took up his current... more Will Chamberlain moved from Switzerland to Ireland in the late 1990s, when he took up his current role as director of Belfast Community Circus School. Prior to this, he was a professional clown and community circus teacher for twelve years. He also worked as a more general arts practitioner and advocate for community arts, serving for three years as chair of the Community Arts Forum (CAF). CAF had been founded at a meeting of community arts activists in Belfast in 1993. The forum has since ceased operation due to cuts in Arts Council funding. The conversation below took place across from CAF’s former headquarters, in the middle of Writer’s Square, in July 2013. For three decades, Belfast Community Circus has operated as a forum for fostering the personal development of young people from some of the most disadvantaged communities in Northern Ireland. In the early 1980s, Donal McKendry and Mike Moloney had responded to diverse Northern Irish young people’s pressing needs for positive shared experiences by introducing community circus in Northern Ireland. With the help of McKendry and Moloney, Belfast Community Circus was established in 1985. Since then, the initiative has become ‘one of the most prolific arts organizations in Northern Ireland and a leading light in the international world of social circus’ (‘History’), winning such honours as the final Guardian Jerwood Award for Excellence in The Community (1999). The school itself is located on Gordon Street and offers a range of youth circus programmes for children and young people from different communities, training for professional performers and circus arts teachers, and a venue for hosting local, national and international circus productions. In 2012, for example, Belfast Community Circus School provided training for Karen Anderson, Emily Aoibheann and Elaine McCague, the trio who had formed in 2011 PaperDolls, a Dublin-based performance group specializing in contemporary circus in addition to multidisciplinary, live, immersive and experimental art. In addition, the activities of the school featured prominently in the 2013 RTE four-part documentary series, John Lonergan’s Circus, offering – with the facilitation of Lonergan, former governor of Mountjoy Prison – circus training for young people from disadvantaged regions of Dublin city as a way of boosting creativity, self-esteem, teamwork and discipline. In 2004, Belfast Community Circus launched its annual international street arts festival, the Festival of Fools. The festival has been growing from strength to strength, receiving in 2006 an Arts and Business award for work in the community undertaken with the Laganside Corporation. The ultimate mission of Belfast Community Circus is to: ‘Transform lives and communities through the power of circus arts and street theatre’ (‘Ethos and Mission’). In Chamberlain’s view, the democratic leanings of genres such as community arts and street theatre can bridge social and cultural divides by fostering a sense of togetherness in the moment for performers and audiences alike, as well as helping to overcome perceptions of the arts as the special provenance of cultural elites. He sees the potential of the arts to have an important impact on everyday lives and lived experiences, on people’s relationships with space and place, and even on commerce – although he remains steadfast in promoting the ideal of arts as an experience rather than just a commodity. In his 2004 essay, ‘Access, Authorship, Participation and Ownership,’ Chamberlain writes in detail about misconceptions concerning, and insufficient funding for, community arts. Based on this interview conducted more than a decade later, it appears that the ways in which community arts are funded and valued still need to improve. Yet, Chamberlain remains determined to fulfill a range of goals in the arts that he believes can foster positive social change.
Theatre, Performance and Design: Scenographies in a Modernizing Ireland contributes to internatio... more Theatre, Performance and Design: Scenographies in a Modernizing Ireland contributes to international scholarship in two key ways. Firstly, it proposes recently expanded understandings of scenography as frameworks for uncovering more holistic theatre and performance histories, providing a model for further-reaching genealogies of contemporary practice. Secondly, it contributes to the global field of Irish Studies by offering the first major study of scenography in relation to Irish theatre, a field in which literary critiques have, until recently, dominated historiography. As such, it satisfies an urgent need to account for Irish theatre and performance design, in addition to addressing gaps in the histories and theories of scenography more broadly. Theatre, Performance and Design acknowledges both the usefulness of broader understandings of scenography and the need to articulate its methodological distinctiveness. While it sees theatre, performance and design as distinctive but sometimes overlapping material embodied practices, it positions scenographies as conceptions of space, visuals, sounds, bodies and materials arranged for public performance – as ways of looking as well as a broader but varying collections of collaborative practices.
LIT Verlag eBooks, Mar 10, 2013
Patriarchal Motherhood in the Plays of Marina Carr and Suzan-Lori Park
O’Gorman, Siobhan and Noelia Ruiz. Performing Scenographic Sense Memories (documentary film piece... more O’Gorman, Siobhan and Noelia Ruiz. Performing Scenographic Sense Memories (documentary film piece). Dir. Steve O'Connor and Manus Corduff. Perf. Chris Baugh, Lian Bell, Denis Clohessy, Sabine Dargent, Joe Devlin, Emma Fisher, Kevin Smith, Joe Vaněk, Conleth White. Dublin: MART, 2015. Film. Created for, and screened at, the Prague Quadrennial 2015 (18-28 June); also screened at Performing the Archive International Conference, National University of Ireland, Galway (22-24 July); this will be donated to the Abbey Theatre Digital Archive (the world’s largest digital theatre archive)
By examining the work of Marina Carr and Suzan-Lori Parks, this paper explores the ways in which ... more By examining the work of Marina Carr and Suzan-Lori Parks, this paper explores the ways in which women’s writing within the western institution of theatre challenges our perceptions of femininity and exposes the performativity of gender. Each of these playwrights became more successful as her work moved towards more traditional styles of theatre. My argument is that, although the movement of these playwrights towards more ‘patriarchal’ styles can be viewed in a negative light from a feminist perspective, productive feminist meanings can still be provided by such works through their denaturalizations of gender. Drawing on Judith Butler’s essay, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’, the paper offers detailed analyses of Carr’s Portia Coughlan (1996) and Parks’s In the Blood (1999) in terms of unconventional femininity and performativity. This article argues that the protagonists of these plays fail to perform culturally acceptable femininity and consequentially suffer what Butl...
Theatre and Performance Design, 2016
Irish scenography is in urgent need of increased historicisation and critical consideration. Joe ... more Irish scenography is in urgent need of increased historicisation and critical consideration. Joe Vaněk, a set and costume designer originally from Stratford-on-Avon who has spent more than 30 years working professionally in Irish theatre, has made a significant contribution to addressing that need. He designed the exhibition Scene Change – 100 Years of Theatre Design at the Abbey for the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2004 (to commemorate the centenary of Ireland’s national theatre). His work was featured as part of Ireland’s first ever entry to the Prague Quadrennial in 2011. These were followed by the publication of his book: a large, exquisitely illustrated hardback volume that, through visual documentation and textual accounts of his stage designs, offers an alternative entry into Irish theatre history between 1984 and 2012. Following a foreword by the late playwright Brian Friel, alongside Vaněk’s very personal and evocative introduction, the book is comprised of five thematic sections.
New Theatre Quarterly, 2016
Theatre and Performance Design, 2015
Carysfort, 2016
Sabine Dargent is a French scenographer who has been working in Ireland since the late 1990s. Pri... more Sabine Dargent is a French scenographer who has been working in Ireland since the late 1990s. Prior to this, she worked in Paris with Théâtre à Grand Vitesse (TGV) – a company that has, since its inception in 1987, produced highly visual work merging performance, film and photography. Other companies with which Dargent worked in France include Théâtre de Châtillon, L’épée de Bois and Théâtre du Soleil. The experience of physical theatre that Dragent garnered from working with such companies as Théâtre du Soleil has remained central to her conception of performance design. In Ireland, Dargent began by designing theatre for young audiences with TEAM Educational Theatre Company, including Michael West’s Jack Fell Down and Frances Kay’s Burning Dreams, both in 1999. Later, she designed sets and costumes for TEAM’s production of Kay’s Last Call, a play for post-primary school students staged at the Helix in 2006. In 2003, Dargent won the ESB/Irish Times Award for Best Set Design for Conall Morrison’s version of Ibsen’s Ghosts, produced at and by the Lyric Theatre, Belfast. She went on to build a portfolio of cutting-edge design work with Fishamble, including: Michael Collins’ Tadhg Stray Wandered In at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, in March 2004; Jim O’Hanlon’s Pilgrims in the Park at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, in November 2004; and Gary Duggan’s Monged in April 2005, again at the Project Arts Centre. Dargent won the Irish Times Theatre Award for Best Set Design again in 2006, for the first play by Enda Walsh on which she worked: The Walworth Farce, produced at and by the Druid Theatre in Galway that year. She went on to design Druid’s productions of Walsh’s The New Electric Ballroom (2008) and Penelope (2010). Since 2005, Dargent has worked throughout Ireland with such companies as the Abbey, Kabosh, Blue Raincoat, Barnstorm, Big Telly and Second Age. She also led design for the St. Patrick’s Festival’s City Fusion community arts participation projects from 2008 to 2010 inclusive; these annual projects produce pageants to be performed as part of the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin, with the aim of celebrating diversity and promoting integration. The following conversation reveals much about the collaborative ways in which Dargent, Walsh and director Mikel Murfi sculpted the spaces of Walsh’s The Walworth Farce, The New Electric Ballroom and Penelope. In designing these productions, Dargent drew on a range of visual stimuli from film to photography to paintings. She was also influenced by modern architecture, including Casa Malaparte in the Isle of Capri, Italy – a house built by its owner Curzio Malaparte, with the help of Adolfo Amitrano, having been originally conceived around 1937 by the famous Italian architect Adalberto Libera. The house was extensively used in the filming of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 movie, Contempt (Le Mépris). For Penelope, in particular, the work of visual artist Yves Klein (1928-1962) was a huge inspiration for Dargent. Here, Dargent also offers more general discussions of Walsh’s work, as well as her process as a scenographer
Devised Performance in Irish Theatre: Histories and Contemporary Practice is the first collection... more Devised Performance in Irish Theatre: Histories and Contemporary Practice is the first collection to focus exclusively on devised theatre throughout the island of Ireland by bringing together a range of perspectives from both academics and practitioners. It situates the histories and contemporary practice of devised performance in the Irish theatre, responding to a decisive shift in the working approach of several prominent emerging companies including ANU Productions, Brokentalkers, THEATREclub, and THISISPOPBABY. This collection takes a historical approach that demonstrates how this contemporary surge of work builds on a physical and dance theatre movement in Irish theatre that began to coalesce in the 1990s through the work of companies like Barabbas, Macnas, Blue Raincoat, and Pan Pan which was in turn influenced by earlier community arts practice on the island of Ireland beginning in the late 1970s. Devised Performance in Irish Theatre makes visible a uniquely Irish body of work that will also further international understandings of devised performance as collaborative process and working methodology.
Like the pattern of tartan, and like its etymology, practices coming from Europe to Ireland to Sc... more Like the pattern of tartan, and like its etymology, practices coming from Europe to Ireland to Scotland, and going back in the opposite direction, can be traced between Molly MacEwen’s work at Dublin’s Gate Theatre and a range of events in Scotland – several of which were largescale European initiatives. Erika Fischer-Lichte also uses textile metaphors across several books and journal articles to illuminate historical genealogies of transnational performance traffic. The history of European theatre is, as Fischer-Lichte discusses, replete with examples of ‘the interweaving of neighbouring cultures that share a number of features.’ Modern European theatre was also increasingly influenced by Asian performing arts practices from the mid-nineteenth century, and theatre artists such as Max Reinhardt, Edward Gordon Craig, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Bertolt Brecht appropriated ‘certain elements and practices’ from Chinese and Japanese performing arts troupes who toured to Europe during the ear...
By focusing on devised performance, we embrace the flexibility and fluidity of roles, the collect... more By focusing on devised performance, we embrace the flexibility and fluidity of roles, the collectivity of creative processes, to recognize forgotten historical contributions and celebrate the work of diverse participants as theatre-makers past and present. Perhaps the lack of a sustained theorizing of Irish devised theatre’s goals, aesthetics and impacts up until now stems from the ways in which some of this work resists containment within linguistic parameters and, hence, is even more ‘ephemeral’ than the traditional ‘play.’ In Conway’s introduction to The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Irish Plays, he offers, somewhat paradoxically, that the volume entails a published record of recent productions that ‘ride in no slipstream of the identifiably Irish play’ and offer ‘a commitment to become in the theatre’ (7). Our own volume seeks to explore rigorously the slipstream that Conway identifies that indeed has changed the face and working processes of Irish theatre in 2015, as well as...
This chapter draws on conceptions of devising and collective creation to promote a renewed unders... more This chapter draws on conceptions of devising and collective creation to promote a renewed understanding of different processes of adaptation, the diverse modes of collaboration involved, and the various intersectional points at which conventionally designated and usually hierarchical roles associated with such forms as theatre overlap and bleed into each other. It suggests that the fruitful blend of adaptation and devising, which has been ongoing for some time in theatre practice, also could inform the ways in which we theorise adaptation as collaborative art more broadly. The chapter explores these ideas using as case studies different productions of the stage adaptation of Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (1992) which has been overshadowed in adaptation studies by the 1997 film version.
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Papers by Siobhan O'Gorman