Interculturalism

Abstract

In the past twenty-five years Ireland has experienced unprecedented diversification of its population. This led the Republic of Ireland to embrace a series of intercultural policies in the arts sector. The Northern Irish Arts Council also adopted intercultural arts policies, although the context in the North is defined by relations between Catholic/Republicans and Protestant/Loyalist communities in addition to the inclusion and integration of minority ethnic and/or migrant groups. This chapter presents the following three frameworks paired with relevant case studies for studying interculturalism in contemporary Irish theatre:

• Interculturalism’s Irish Historical Legacies (Conall Morrison’s The Bacchae of Baghdad (After Euripides)).

• Cross-Cultural Collaborative Relationships (Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre’s The Bull).

• Contemporary Minority-led interculturalisms (Terra Nova Productions, Arrivals Project: Arrivals 1, Arrivals 2, Arrivals 3D: Mi Mundo).

In the past 25 years, the island of Ireland has experienced an unprecedented diversification of its population (see Chapter 5). This led the Republic of Ireland to embrace an ambitious and optimistic series of intercultural policies for civil society and the arts sector from the early 2000s onward aimed at integrating minority ethnic and/or migrant populations and in doing so, broadening understanding of “Irishness” as an identity nationally and internationally. The embrace of “interculturalism” over “multiculturalism” followed a turn in European Union thinking at the time and also sought to distance Ireland from the negative stigma attached to “multiculturalism” in UK and French contexts, for example, a comparison often directly cited. The Northern Irish Arts Council in particular has adopted explicitly intercultural arts policies, although the context of interculturalism in the North is still heavily defined by community relations between Catholic/Republicans and Protestant/Loyalist communities in addition to the inclusion and integration of minority ethnic and/or migrant members of Northern Irish society.

Interestingly, long prior to its enthusiastic adoption in Irish and EU social and arts policy, interculturalism served as a central and heavily contested keyword within theatre and performance studies where it connotes as defined by Julie Holledge and Joanne Tompkins “the meeting in the moment of performance of two or more cultural traditions, a temporary fusing of techniques, styles and/or cultures” (2000, 7). When this term’s contemporary theoretical discourse coalesced in the late 1970s/1980s in the work of Richard Schechner, Erika Fischer-Lichte and Patrice Pavis among others, intercultural theatre was first synonymous with the high-art productions of Peter Brooks, Ariane Mnouchkine and Robert Wilson. Daphne P. Lei names these kinds of contemporary paradigmatic Western-led intercultural experiments aimed at fusion with “Eastern” aesthetic techniques and ideas ‘“hegemonic intercultural theatre” (HIT) practices. She defines HIT as a “specific artistic genre and state of mind that combines First World capital and brainpower with Third World raw material and labor, and Western classical texts with Eastern performance” (2011, 571). Patrice Pavis had earlier summarised this extractive dynamic as manifesting in production contexts as the relationship between a “target” and “source” culture with the “target” culture who received the performance typically being Western and the “source” culture most typically non-Western (2001, 4–5).

But Western intercultural performance’s earlier twentieth-century roots took hold in the modernist theatre experiments of William Butler Yeats, Edward Gordon Craig, Antonin Artaud and others, meaning that interculturalism (or its pursuit) had taken root on Irish shores long prior to post-inward migration policy renovations. Indeed, Yeats himself can be credited (or charged with depending on your viewpoint) with catalysing the evolution of Western/global intercultural theatre and practices over the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Outside of an Irish context, interculturalism remains one of the most charged theoretical terms in theatre and performance studies due to the evolution of this practice being bound up with the history of colonialism/imperialism and its unequal power dynamics usually enacted along a Western/Eastern or Global North/Global South split. Ireland’s complicated status as a postcolonial nation but nonetheless Western, English-speaking and majority white population makes it a particularly layered and compelling case study within these wider field debates. Furthermore, Ireland’s embrace of the rhetoric of interculturalism following the speedy and unprecedented expansion of our national racial and ethnic demographics necessarily links any discussion of Irish theatrical interculturalism to questions of race and performance as well as cross-racial performance as this chapter will evidence—a dimension more continuously emphasised in recent intercultural performance scholarship more widely. This chapter ultimately connects contemporary Irish theatre and performance to wider field debates by proposing the following three frameworks for studying interculturalism within Irish theatre and performance history:

• Interculturalism’s Irish Historical Legacies: Interculturalism may be the value that defines an unprecedentedly demographically diverse Irish future, but it also undergirds and has long operated in tension with post-revival theatrical nationalisms. This becomes particularly clear when we examine the Abbey’s early relationship to theatrical modernism, especially in the work and leadership of William Butler Yeats within that organisation at this time and most particularly through his experimentation in adapting Japanese Noh Drama to a modern Irish context in his cycle of plays for dancers.

• Interculturalism as Cross-Cultural Collaborative Relationships: Interculturalism as a lens of analysis demands attention to both production processes as well as the networks that enable them nationally and internationally and the blending of forms and resulting content/themes of the theatrical productions under examination here. Previously in intercultural theatre and performance scholarship there has been a tendency to focus on the content of single productions (or the oeuvre of individual directors who repeatedly deploy certain types of intercultural spectacles such as Brooks, Mnouchkine and Wilson) as a unit of analysis, and most often with an emphasis on the intercultural semiotics, or sign-systems, being communicated to audiences through directorial choices resulting in hybrid uses of different performance forms (or performers) identified as culturally distinct prior to fusion in this context. We suggest here that we also need to pay careful attention to inter or cross-cultural collaborations in terms of key personnel or collaborative networks over the course of contemporary Irish theatre and performance history as well as any hybrid aesthetic forms utilised within productions.

• Contemporary Minority-led “New” Interculturalisms: Ireland’s move towards interculturalism signifying expanded participation of minority communities (most with backgrounds of recent migration) aligns with wider theoretical development within intercultural performance theory where scholars in other international contexts including Ric Knowles (Canada) and Royona Mitra (UK) have called for the reinvention of interculturalism in theatre and performance as led from the grassroots by migrant and/or minority artists. Intercultural theatre and performance in Ireland today therefore ideally connotes collaboration between minority and majority ethnic theatremakers and/or projects led by minority ethnic theatremakers which in overt and/or subtle ways redefine Irishness from more diverse perspectives inflected by race, ethnicity and/or migration status as well as other identarian perspectives including but not limited to gender, sexuality, religion, (dis)ability and/or class.

These frameworks are then paired with the following case studies:

• Interculturalism’s Irish Historical Legacies (Conall Morrison’s The Bacchae of Baghdad (After Euripides)).

• Cross-Cultural Collaborative Relationships (Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre’s The Bull).

• Contemporary Minority-led interculturalisms (Terra Nova Productions, Arrivals Project: Arrivals 1, Arrivals 2, Arrivals 3D: Mi Mundo).

Interculturalism’s Irish Historical Legacies

William Butler Yeats’s collaborations with Michio Ito and Ninette de Valois on the theatrical realisation of his plays for dancers between 1916 and 1929 marks a clear modern starting point for Irish intercultural performance’s historical legacies. As Aoife McGrath contends, “At a time in Irish history when the postcolonial need for racial, sexual and religious ‘purity’ of identity was creating strict definitions of permissible bodies, Yeats’ dance plays were a wonderful site of exciting experimentation and resistance to the status quo” (2013, 51). Yeats’s investigation of non-Western aesthetics was shared in common with many of his modernist theatrical contemporaries including Antonin Artaud and Edward Gordon Craig with Artaud drawing on Balinese theatre and Craig primarily inspired by Japanese, Indian and Indonesian traditions (Tian 2007, 168). Other early-mid twentieth-century Irish theatre practitioners including Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammoir would also be heavily influenced by interculturally inflected movements in visual art, literature and dance including Japonisme, Chinoiserie and Symbolism, and seeing the work of the Ballets Russe in particular would have opened up particular stage languages to these pivotal figures who founded the Gate Theatre (Nakase 2021, 189–192; van den Beuken 2021, 11–33).

Indeed, it is Yeats himself who might be credited with first overtly articulating the precise working dynamic of what Lei would eventually define as HIT practices most succinctly, although Yeats like many other committed practitioners of theatrical interculturalism seems to view HIT tendencies as a utopian aspiration rather than colonially inflected process of exploitation. He alleged: “Europe is very old and has seen many arts run through the circle and has learned the fruit of every flower and known what this fruit sends up, and it is now time to copy the East and live deliberately” (Yeats 1961, 228). Despite the complicated politics and aesthetics of Yeats’s dance dramas in their initial and subsequent explorations by modern and contemporary Irish theatre artists including Blue Raincoat with their formal borrowings not only from Noh but South Indian Kathakali dance drama, these works did not aim to copy but rather used surface aspects of the formal aesthetics of Noh theatre as well as other cultural influences like Egyptian art to inform the invention and refinement of a new kind of indigenously Irish verse-drama, a liberationist postcolonial attempt at one level although complicated by the East–West binary on which this fusion depended. And indeed, other Irish playwrights including Padraic Colum and Ulick O’Connor would continue to attempt to evolve the Irish noh drama form in the 1960 and 1970s respectively (Sternlicht 1986, xvi–xvii; Bastos 2011, 46–47). Yet although other Irish playwrights would take up the task of adapting Noh aesthetics, Aoife McGrath demonstrates conclusively that when De Valois worked with Yeats between 1926 and 1929, they made a conscious move away from “pseudo-Oriental” aesthetics. McGrath reads this possibly as a change in fashion, but also perhaps related to the collaborators’ and the Abbey’s “desire to stress a more unambiguously ‘Irish’ national identity for the transfer from a comparatively liberal and experimental London, to an increasingly conservative Dublin” (2013, 50). Yet, as we will see shortly, many early productions at the Gate deliberately continued to embrace this pseudo-Oriental style.

Early-mid-century Irish intercultural experiments could also be analysed through the theoretical lenses of orientalism or internationalism, particularly as European modernisms leaned heavily on both as influence and impetus. In a way, theatre and performance studies’ theorisation of interculturalism as a materialist theatrical and performance practice creates an opportunity to consolidate understanding of orientalism and internationalism within theatrical modernism as interculturalism amounts essentially to these influences merged and operationalised in live collaborative performance contexts.

Orientalism was first coined by postcolonial theorist Edward Said as connoting “the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, and imaginatively” (1979, 3). Joseph Lennon in turn defines the early twentieth-century dynamics of Irish orientalism as a conviction that “the ancient and absent Celtic culture mirrors the living and present Orient” (2004, xvi). He argues that cultural nationalists (among which Yeats can be counted) “created anti-imperial and cross-colonial narratives from this” alleged “ancient semiotic connection,” and furthermore that “Irish Orientalism at one time helped imagine and cross-actualize cross-colonial ties and decolonising narratives around the globe” (xvii). McIvor and Justine Nakase define internationalism in a performance context as “…the aspiration that artists and cultural performance forms and techniques would be able to cross borders to collaborate and influence one another’s ongoing practice and development, resulting in an eventual de-hierarchization of power structures between nations and their cultures, realized through the transmission of performance” (2020, 226). “Irish” Orientalism as an animating catalyst of our unique Irish interculturalism is evidenced clearly in Yeats’s remark about turning towards the East in order to copy their aesthetic approaches quite overtly. However internationalism actually better captures the dynamics of Yeats’s actual collaborative relationships and correspondence with not only Michio Ito, the Japanese Europe-trained modern dancer (not Noh performer) but also Indian playwright and poet Rabindranath Tagore (whose support from Yeats would help complete secure the first English translation of his poetry and Nobel Prize as well as the word premiere of his play The Post Office (Dak Ghar) at the Abbey in 1913). The Abbey’s commitment to orientalism/internationalism/interculturalism would wane post-independence due to changing programmatic priorities, but the Gate Theatre would step enthusiastically into this space after its formation in 1928. But as Justine Nakase finds in her study of cross-racial performance at the Gate between 1930 and 1954 and specifically the Gate’s strand of Chinese theatre translations and adaptations by Lord Longford and others:

Unlike at the Abbey, where these Asian influences were subsumed within an Irish context due to that theatre’s particularly nationalist project, the Gate embraced the very Otherness that Chinese theatre represented. Indeed, its recurring engagement with Chinese formal aesthetics in the first five years acted as a shorthand for the very internationalism of the theatre’s mission. (2021, 192)

For the early Gate, intercultural (and cross-racial) performance was repeatedly deployed as internationalist enrichment and homage particularly in terms of how production choices played up aesthetic (and racialised) dimensions of otherness. Elaine Sisson’s recent examination of the production history of Padraic Colum’s Mogu, the Wanderer identifies the broad pop cultural influences which shaped both the inspiration for and reception of this production’s Eastern themes and setting (2021, 175–192). Siobhán O’Gorman also traces orientalist and internationalist scenographic tropes in the history of Dublin’s Pike Theatre, particularly their popular late-night revue Follies, which ran throughout the company’s existence between 1953 and 1957 (2014, 25–42). These perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately shallow or by contemporary critical standards HIT intercultural experiments where theatre and performance practitioners repeatedly look to a “source” culture for the “target” culture (and audience’s) enrichment, nationalist or otherwise, placed Irish modern theatrical innovation in line with their European contemporaries. However, these early productions contexts also established precedents that would ripple through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, as this case study of Conall Morrison’s 2005 production of The Bacchae of Baghdad (After Euripides) demonstrates.

Case Study One: Conall Morrison’s The Bacchae of Baghdad (After Euripides)

Premiered: 2006, Abbey Theatre, directed by Conall Morrison.

Morrison’s decision to adapt Euripides’ Bacchae was by the mid-2000s a familiar tactic within Irish theatre where adaptation of the Greeks (as well as other canonical Western works) had become a signature strategy of consolidating the reputation of established playwrights also including Marina Carr, Tom Murphy and Frank McGuiness with these adaptations frequently produced at the Abbey.

The Bacchae of Baghdad used Greek theatre as a vehicle through which to allegorise international/Irish attitudes towards the then ongoing U.S. led war in Iraq and comment on debates on religious and specifically Islamic fundamentalisms. This production animates Irish historical legacies of interculturalism through its thematic turn to “Otherness” and focus on cultures meeting in performance as a way to push reflection on and renewal of Irish contemporary theatrical culture.

Morrison’s early 2000s Irish treatment of Middle Eastern fundamentalisms was inflected with his own experiences of conflict in Northern Ireland which he noted “taught me something about the mechanics of” fundamentalism, which is how he summarises the fervour of the Bacchae in contemporary terms (Abbey Theatre Archive, 8 March 2006a). Morrison also employed a self-consciously multi-racial and ethnic cast of performers including Christopher Simon (Irish-Greek Rwandan descent who played Dionysus), Ruth Negga, Mojisola Adebayo, Merrina Millsapp, Tracy Harper, Donna Nikolaisen, Mary Healy, Jeff Diamond, Angela Irvine, Shereen Martineau, Simon O’Gorman and Robert O’Mahoney (Irish Theatre Playography 2023, Bacchae of Baghdad). It was the most diverse cast racially and ethnically to appear on the Abbey stage until the 2022 production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon, directed by Anthony Simpson Pike (see Chapter 5), although most of The Bacchae of Baghdad’s cast was resident in the UK at the time of production. Negga was the only cast member of colour who had appeared or would go on to appear semi-consistently in Abbey (ten productions between 2002 and 2008).

However rather than this ensemble being intended to be a reflection of Ireland’s by-then well-established growing minority ethnic population, both sides of the agonistic debate at the centre of the Bacchae (Dionysus and his followers and Pentheus and company) are cast within the production’s framing concept as Other to an Irish audience despite the Irish accents of many of the performers. The production is set in one of Saddam Hussein’s current or former Iraqi castles and pits the American-occupiers against a broadly Middle Eastern (i.e. racially other to white) ensemble.

Multi-racial/ethnic casting is not necessarily an intercultural theatre practice on its own however the casting practice executed by this production’s artistic team does make this conflation while also enforcing an East vs. West binary animated along a black/white fault line generally through the casting of actors of diverse racial and ethnic descent in the roles of Dionysus and his followers as well as the visionary Tiresias while having Irish-born actors adopt American accents. Through this strategy, “Irish” audiences (read white and Ireland-born audiences) are encouraged to look at the Others (“Middle Eastern” vs. “American”) to reflect on themselves as the obvious parallel with the legacy of conflict in the North was continually emphasised in press for the piece. However, this production concept does not only avoid setting up any meaningful conditions for intercultural exchange in the diverse ensemble due to being intended primarily for a white Irish inward looking view but sidesteps Ireland’s own neo-imperial alliances with the United States economically and militarily, not to mention showing no awareness of how minority ethnic communities in Ireland (particularly of African diasporic backgrounds, Middle Eastern descent or the Islamic faith) might receive being depicted as violent barbaric uber-Others within the overall frame of the production (Fig. 11.1).

Fig. 11.1

The chorus of The Bacchae of Baghdad (Euripides’ The Bacchae in a new version written and directed by Conall Morrison), Abbey Stage, 2006. (From l-r): Shereeen Martineau, Mary Healy, Donna Nikolaisen Ruth Negga, Merina Millsapp and Mojisola Adebayo with Negga as Chorus Leader. Courtesy of the Abbey Theatre Archive

In terms of how these casting choices translated into the staging of the play itself and particularly music and movement of the Bacchae chorus, Andrea McCall uncritically praises the production for its Orientalist flourishes in her review for the Sunday Tribune, offering that “[t]he production is a visual sensual treat, filled with the smell of incense and the sound of hi-tech, Arab-like music and the colours (thanks to Nick McCall’s lighting) of Arabia” while the chorus moves “cat-like about the stage, thumping their staff and whooping eerily” (Abbey Theatre, 8 March 2006b). The vagueness of McCall’s review description of these elements epitomises the broad intercultural strokes taken by the production team resulting in a confused mess of visual, sonic and staging choices that attempt to approximate a broadly Middle Eastern or “Arabian” (a geographical designation that does not even include Iraq, the actual setting) aesthetic without meaningfully engaging with the cultural backgrounds evoked. Karen Fricker ultimately indicts The Bacchae of Baghdad in The Guardian as “orientalism and occidentalism writ large: a didactic reduction of the original text and current political situation” meaning that “while it is certainly exciting…and overdue to see multicultural cast on the Abbey stage, there is no productive cultural work being accomplished by this bombast” (2006). Justine Nakase also identifies how the production’s operationalisation of minority ethnic female (and male) sexuality as a threatening and dangerous force is particularly tone-deaf considering the then recent outcomes of the 2004 Citizenship Referendum which removed birthright citizenship as a constitutional right, a referendum won by a large majority vote (79.17%) through a campaign that played heavily on fears regarding the number of those seeking asylum in the Irish state, increasing racial/ethnic diversity and allegations of abuse of this citizenship clause by women of African descent specifically. Nakase elaborates: “While Morrison may have been striving to comment on the unflinching rigidity of a militaristic American outlook, what he ultimately revealed was a corresponding Irish attitude that understood the black female body in terms of a national threat specifically through a morally suspect sexuality” (2019, 83–84). It is also striking that in Abbey theatre press cuttings from the production, lead actor Christopher Simpson is branded as a diva by Donal Lynch of the Sunday Independent for getting his back up about being asked about his family’s Rwandan connections, particularly how his parents met. This interviewer seems incredulous that Simpson only wants to talk about the production and its themes and not his racial/ethnic history or personal experiences of racism with the by-line for one article reading “Actor Christopher Simpson is not yet a star but he has already mastered the art of acting like a diva” (Abbey Theatre Archive, 8 March 2006c). Regardless of what interpersonal dynamics may have shaped that interview, it is telling in reinforcing that the reception of Bacchae of Baghdad and its diverse cast was as intercultural spectacle to be consumed and mined for resources rather than interrogated for its formal and thematic dramaturgical assumptions. Morrison and the Abbey’s turn to the setting of the Middle East as a source of renewal and lens for contemplation of the Irish present (via Greek theatre as a vehicle) borrows a leaf from Yeats’s early twentieth-century playbook although likely unintentionally. Nevertheless, this production’s blind spots and failings do ultimately bring Ireland’s 2006 intercultural (and xenophobic) anxieties more clearly into focus with quite unflattering results.

Interculturalism as International Collaborative Relationships

As with the previous section, contemporary Irish theatre’s arguably defining reference point for this strand of Irish intercultural performance practice too reverts to Yeats, but perhaps even more importantly, should be understood from the perspective of his original non-Irish collaborator on realising his dance plays theatrically, Michio Ito. Ito was notably a European-trained modern dancer, not a Noh performer despite being Japanese although it is alleged that he might have had some cursory training in Kabuki theatre. But as Aoife McGrath finds, although “[r]ecruited for being Japanese by [Ezra] Pound and Yeats, Ito was in fact more interested in exploring the meeting of the orient and the occident in his work” (2013, 44). Ito’s personal artistic aims, McGrath unfolds, however, did not protect him from being “doomed to a perpetual state of ‘Otherness, both in Europe, and later in the US,” despite being “often categorised under the racially ambiguous title of ‘international artist’” as he even suffered imprisonment in a US Japanese internment camp during World War II (Ibid.).

We’ve established that turning to Eastern and/or culturally “Other” theatrical and performance forms as a “source” for a “target” culture can be problematic, but the dynamics and results of collaboration between individuals and groups who identify as coming from different cultural backgrounds can be more subtle and layered as the deeper account of Yeats and Ito’s relationship attests to. In addition, a production that may not “look” intercultural on the surface at the level of performance forms utilised, content or theme can actually be deeply so if we investigate the collaborative relationships that brought the production into being more carefully, even going all the way down to the level of the individual with Ito as a paradigmatic example. Justine Nakase argues powerfully that we must look to the individual in our analysis of Irish intercultural performance practices today, or we might miss urgent and telling collaborations that advance the visibility of and our understanding of minority ethnic artists’ contributions to Irish theatre and performance. She calls on critics to practice “scalar interculturalism” and argues that by tracing intercultural performance “within and through the individual,” critics can trace more rigorously how “the body itself can act as [the] space between cultures and this site of negotiation” (2019, 3). Ito puts this in his own words when he contended “[i]n my dancing it is my desire to bring together the East and the West. My dancing is not Japanese. It is not anything- only myself” (Quoted in McGrath 2013, 44). Nakase’s intervention indeed responds specifically to what she sees as the repeated erasure of mixed-race and other minority ethnic Irish individuals in Irish theatre and broader performance histories (such as that of sport) who may not “pass” as Irish. As such, she pushes Irish theatre and performance studies to acknowledge that:

(a) the performative articulations of mixed race and minority ethnic identities can be seen and read as intercultural, (b) that this interculturalism is nested within and performed by the individual and (c) that this individual interculturalism can be revealed by analysing moments of performance through a scalar lens. (2019, 3)

In Nakase’s study, she is mainly focused on the analysis of those resident within Ireland for all or a significant part of their lives, but we would argue for the purposes of this book that we also need to use her scalar intercultural lens to keep putting pressure on the particular relationship between interculturalism and internationalism in modern and contemporary Irish theatre history, meaning that we also need to look at the terms under which international collaborators may be mainstreamed in Irish performance practices whether or not they are actually resident and what story their participation may actually tell Ireland about themselves at the time of their participation.

A focus on international (i.e. non-resident) collaborators as part of the twentieth-twenty-first century Irish intercultural performance lineage of practice reveals a few major trends that also help us to understand the evolution of this area in contemporary Irish theatre and performance. Firstly, over the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, there has been a repeated importation of non-white actors to play roles (as seen in the Bacchae of Baghdad case study above) in order to produce works for the Abbey, the Gate and elsewhere whose racially/ethnically-based casting and/or other needs are alleged to not be present in Irish-based pools of professional talent up through the present. There has also been a whitewashing (or at least erasure) of mixed-race and/or mixed-ethnicity collaborators who pass/passed as white, omission which influences the historical record on sustained participation by minority ethnic artists in Ireland over time. The second dimension of recurrent Irish participation by internationally-based artists occurs when they are brought in as collaborators on Irish projects due to specialist skills, particularly for dance and dance theatre companies. In these instances, they are not recruited on the basis of their race and/or ethnicity but their cultural difference might end up doing layered work in the context of the performance or production. This pattern of participation is particularly recurrent in Irish modern and contemporary dance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As Aoife McGrath, Barbara O’Connor and other scholars of Irish dance and dance theatre detail, training opportunities for Irish dancers in modern and contemporary techniques particularly have always been international by necessity despite Yeats’ attempt to establish an Abbey School of Ballet with Ninette de Valois between 1927 and1933. De Valois significantly had also spent time dancing with the Ballets Russes, a major intercultural influence on European artists as noted earlier (McGrath 2013, 47–52).

Since the founding of the early modern Irish theatre with the Abbey in 1904, there have however also been minority ethnic and racial characters that appeared on stage semi-regularly in mainstream and often popular theatre productions. Prior to this period, as Patrick Lonergan documents, white actors in blackface and occasionally minority racial and ethnic performers or troupes such as African-American actor Ira Aldridge who settled in Britain and performed frequently there and in Ireland from the 1830s (2023). The use of blackface and cross-racial performance involving white actors playing characters of African, South/East Asian and Middle Eastern descent on the modern and even contemporary Irish stage up through the 1970s at least is to some extent, openly documented although limited images or justification of the approach from the artistic teams exists (Brannigan 2009, 179–221; Nakase 2021). Reviews of these performances and particularly discussion of the actors in the roles however are revealing. For example, one frequently revived production of Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones with Northern Irish actor Rutherford Mayne in the title role was lauded as late as the 1970s. 1927 reviews of Mayne’s performance of Emperor Jones had American audience members quoted as saying that “Mr. Mayne’s nigger is equal to the best that its coloured interpreters have given” (The Irish Times, 26 July 1927). In 1973, Michael O hAodha, then chairman of directors at the Abbey, again reiterated that Maynes “had been reckoned by many to have been better than Paul Robeson” the acclaimed African-American actor who starred in stage and film versions “in the part” (Nowlan 1973). The emphasis here suggests focus on white Irish virtuosity in playing an “Other,” the underlying implication being that ethnic Irishness has no ties to black racial identity, foreclosing the possibility of a Black Irish performer taking up this role at the time.

But rather than focusing only on participation by Irish performers of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds as interculturalism, tracing international collaborators’ participation history and their acknowledgement, elision or erasure in Irish theatre and performance history actually goes a long way towards better understanding the influence of international/intercultural aesthetic forms in Ireland in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This strategy also provides insight into how race and ethnicity get refigured in relationship to white Irishness beyond the stark example of Maynes’ performer above during this same period particularly through the creation of the European Union and inward-migration from non-EU countries, particularly African and Middle Eastern nations. Ireland’s post-1970s integration into first the European Economic Area and then the European Union has resulted in an exponential rise of Eastern European migrants who came to Ireland post-2004, with Polish and Lithuanian populations most significantly represented (Central Statistics Office 2016). The growth of our Eastern European Irish community productively challenges and textures the meaning of whiteness in Ireland today, pushing scholars and critics of intercultural theatre not only to conflate difference with racial difference, but to think about a broader spectrum of ethnicities as well as the role of a spectrum of statuses arising from backgrounds of migration ranging from refugeeness to migrants by choice in shaping the artistic and social futures of our “new Irish” population (i.e. those who themselves or their parents emigrated here in the last 25 years).

But perhaps best well-known in an international context is modern Irish theatre’s early twentieth century mission to define a cultural nationalism that was institutionally and performatively substantial and substantiable as “Irish” at home and abroad (through the Abbey’s touring practices for example) (Harrington 2016, 593–606; Lonergan 2009). Nevertheless, during this period and beyond, European and other collaborators who brought with them a conscious expertise in non-“Irish” art forms or movements informed by their own cultural histories nonetheless shaped what we may problematically view as a seamless “Irish” performance history, “Irish” connoting being made by those who are white, born and resident in Ireland for most of their lives—criteria that the Anglo-Irish drivers of this modern Irish theatre movement, for example, such as Yeats, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge and others meet. Indeed returning yet again to Yeats’s foundational 1916 exploration of At the Hawk’s Well with Ito, the longer roster of collaborators also involved French “illustrator, musician and mask-maker Edmund Dulac” who “designed the costumes, make-up and masks and also “composed the score for drum, gong, flute and zither or harp” (McGrath 2013, 42). And even while de Valois and Yeats moved away from overt “pseudo-Oriental” overtones to their staging of his dance plays, the collaborators’ list and reception of the work abroad was decidedly internationalist. For their 1929 restaging of The Only Jealousy of Emer as Fighting the Waves, Dutch sculptor Hilda Krop and US composer George Antheil were also part of the artistic team, and a New York Times review of the Dublin premiere noted “Yeats, Dutch masks, Russian dancing and American music will constitute a combination without parallel on the Abbey stage” (Quoted in McGrath 2013, 42)—signalling international understanding of Irish theatre’s intercultural aspirations in this instance. More recent scholarship by McGrath (2013), Siobhán O’Gorman (2014), David Clare and Nicola Morris (2021) and others has also more carefully unwound the contributions of international collaborators and their historiographical implications in modern and contemporary contexts. Clare and Morris, for example, go deeper into four key Gate Theatre collaborators’ ethnic and cultural roots, looking at founding directors’ Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammoir’s “part-Irish roots,” actress Coralie Carmichael’s “Moroccan and Scottish ancestry” and “under-regarded actor, costume designer and milliner” Nancy Bekh’s background as the English-born daughter of German immigrants (2021, 75–76). Clare and Morris offer that:

forcing artists from “mixed” backgrounds into one nationality and treating that nationality in an essentialist way will prevent us from adequately understanding the power dynamics and artistic imperatives inscribed within individual and collective performances not just on the Gate Theatre stage but also on stages across the world. (2021, 95)

Clare and Morris single out “power dynamics” and “artistic imperatives” as both being potentially shaped by an individual’s racial/ethnic background and cultural influences. Therefore it is important to acknowledge that these might overlap or manifest as distinct from one other in a collaborative process. For example, those from minority racial or ethnic backgrounds might not have their own artistic imperatives linked to aesthetic forms associated with their culture of heritage background (as in the case of Ito) but they may experience differential treatment or higher risk of elision or erasure from historical records due to being outliers in the creative industries for any number of reasons related to the particular intersection of their identities (of which race/ethnicity is only one dimension).

What stands out particularly over the last 20 years for contemporary Irish theatre is that it is Irish dance and dance theatre companies who have presented work with the most racially and ethnically diverse casts most consistently. In addition, these companies often also continued to work with those artists over time rather than as a once-off, cementing dance and dance theatre practices in Ireland today as continuous “sites of interdisciplinary and intercultural physical negotiations” (McGrath 2013, 165). Companies that are exemplary in this regard include Fabulous Beast (profiled below), CoisCéim, John Scott Dance (formerly Irish Modern Dance), Liz Roche Company and Catherine Young Dance (McGrath 2013, 147–162; McIvor 2016, 133–138; Spangler 2016, 41–58).

Over time as the country has diversified, international collaborations help expose both an ongoing lack of support for the develop of or recognition of professional minority ethnic artists resident in Ireland regardless of art form and sometimes produce arguably unintentionally intercultural results (as in the case study of Fabulous Beast’s The Bull below as well as other works by the company including Rian). These cross-cultural (and usually multi-racial and multi-ethnic) collaborations often produce intercultural results which go some way to semiotically representing Ireland’s population as it is now through the bodies who get to take up space on Irish stages creating and performing “Irish” contemporary dance and dance theatre. As Justine Nakase summarises, “…as an embodied form of expression, dance can create a space in which individual dancers can contribute to and influence understandings of what the Irish body is and how it moves” (2019, 185). As such, consideration of contemporary Irish dance theatre and the international and/or intercultural collaborations that continually push forward this form are essential to understanding interculturalism in Ireland today.

Case Study Two: Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, The Bull (2005).

Premiered: O’Reilly Theatre, Dublin. Produced by Fabulous Beast (now known as Teac Damsa) in association with Dublin Theatre Festival and BITE:07, Barbican, London. For a full list of production roles in the original, you can view the entry for “Michael Keegan Dolan, The Bull” (Irish Theatre Playography 2023b).

Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre was led by director and choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan but guided by a wholly collaborative and ensemble making process during its existence as a company between 1994 and 2016, before Keegan-Dolan reformed the company as Tėac Daṁsa after moving from “the Irish midlands to the West Kerry Gaeltacht on the Southwest coast of Ireland” (Tėac Daṁsa 2024).

In an advance interview for The Bull in 2005, it was noted by the journalist that “[u]nusually for a director, Keegan-Dolan will not talk about the piece without having as many members of the company as possible to join in the conversation” (McKeon 2005). In this interview, Keegan-Dolan stresses both the internationalism and the versatile artistic virtuosity of the diverse ensemble:

You have an Irish percussionist. A piano-playing, acting composer from Rome. An actor from Norwich. An actress from the west of Ireland. A dancer-actor from Bratislava. A counter-tenor from Naples, an actor from Cork, a dancer from France … very eclectic. And nobody is good at just one thing, there are no categories. The dancers are singing, the singers are dancing, the actors are dancing, the drummers are dancing …. (McKeon 2005)

Keegan-Dolan’s collaborative relationships with dancer/performers for The Bull as well as other works produced before or after for Fabulous Beast were formed on the basis of skill and shared artistic aims, not overtly intercultural aims including any stated mission about diversifying Irish stages in terms of race, ethnicity and/or nationality. However, The Bull and other Fabulous Beast productions showcased semiotically and dramaturgically a much more representative Ireland than most other theatre productions at the time or sadly since. And while the performers’ race and ethnicity did often end up indexed dramaturgically in ways that reflected the social and political realities of these categories, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, The Bull and Keegan-Dolan’s wider body of work in no way falls back on simplistic binaries of self/other, East/West, white/non-white as The Bacchae of Baghdad did. This is particularly meaningful as The Bull very consciously plays on Irish theatrical and literary tropes throughout, referencing the 1907 Playboy of the Western World Abbey theatre riots, rural/urban conflict and anxieties over female sexuality and childbearing. The Bull’s diverse international ensemble is therefore implicated as co-architects of the contemporary relevance of Irish theatrical and performance histories and tropes, rather than exotic outsiders drafted in to ornament a production dependent on binaries at its core. We see this in the casting of Emmanuel Obeya, the Nigerian-born dancer and choreographer and long-time Fabulous Beast collaborator as Eddie, an Irish patriarch with a French wife, whose curse over their childbearing ability forms a major plot line, as well as the prominence of Eastern European characters (albeit stereotyped) and frequent reference to minority ethnic members of the local community throughout (Fig. 11.2).

Fig. 11.2

(Photo Ros Kavanagh)

The company in Michael Keegan-Dolan’s The Bull (2005), with design by Merle Hensel and lighting design by Adam Silverman

The Bull forms the middle work of Keegan-Dolan’s Midlands Trilogy which also included Giselle (2003) and James Son of James (2007). Keegan-Dolan’s trilogy-based approach reprises a familiar approach in modern and contemporary theatre employed also by Séan O’Casey, Dermot Bolger, Martin McDonagh and most significantly Marina Carr who also has a Midlands Trilogy with Keegan-Dolan likely commenting directly on Carr’s Trilogy with Fouréré in his lead role. Fouréré played and would continue to play leading roles in many of Carr’s premiere productions including Ullaloo (1991), The Mai (1994), By the Bog of Cats (1998), Woman and Scarecrow (2007) and iGirl (2023) (Irish Theatre Playography 2022). The Bull attacks and satirises the excesses of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economic boom through an adaptation of an ancient Irish prose epic, Táin Bó Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley). To do so, Keegan-Dolan goes straight for the jugular of the Celtic Tiger’s arguably most globally iconic performance, Riverdance (see Chapter 4 for background) by featuring Maeve Fogarty (Olwen Fouréré), the nouveau Celtic Tiger rich anti-heroine embroiled in the conflict with her husband over the central bull in question, as the producer of an Irish dance spectacle called Celtic Bitch and going so far as to eventually cast Colin Dunne, Michael Flatley’s first replacement and choreographer of parts of the show in The Bull, with Dunne replacing actor Conor Lovett following The Bull’s Irish premiere when the production moved to the Barbican. Aoife McGrath offers that this activation of Celtic Bitch in the production “would seem to highlight the dislocation or ‘gap’ between Irish society’s past notions of its cultural identity to be historically ‘pure’ and the ‘false’ image of Celtic Tiger Ireland indexed by commercial cultural productions such as Riverdance” (McGrath 2013, 117). We would add that The Bull’s centralisation of diverse collaborators onstage and casting choices such as Obeya’s which disrupt associations of Irishness with whiteness exclusively do further important work in troubling gaps in Irish cultural self (or outside) perception.

The Bull was highly controversial following its premiere in the 2005 Dublin Theatre Festival with heated debates on Irish radio and in the Irish Times “Letters to the Editor” section due to its explicit language, frequently gruesome violence, male nudity and savage attacks on familiar Irish tropes and figures (Mulrooney 2007, 7–8). Artistically, some audience members or reviewers complained that it was too text-heavy to be dance or alternatively too dance-heavy to be a play. Irish dance scholar Deirdre Mulrooney recognises Keegan-Dolan’s achievement with his ensemble in consolidating almost a century of Irish formal theatrical experimentation at the interface of dance and theatre into a pulsing new genre within this critical anxiety:

An eclectic mixum gatherum production, its new idiom is promiscuous in its embrace of other art forms: from contemporary dance to visual and installation art, kabuki, martial arts, film, music, opera, and – even – Irish dancing. It’s the kind of total theatre we have been slowly slowly inching towards in Irish theatre since playwright Tom MacIntyre’s mid-1980s plays at the Peacock Theatre (most notably his adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh’s great anti-pastoral poem, The Great Hunger). (2007, 8)

As this chapter has demonstrated, those experimental roots go even further back and notably, particularly when it comes to dance/dance theatre, have been consistently associated with intercultural collaborations in modern and contemporary Irish theatre history. While The Bull is not without its representational issues (as some of the gendered satire focused on women flirts with misogyny and the representation of disability is questionable at best), it is nonetheless one of the most influential and successful moments where contemporary Irish theatre/dance practitioners practiced and achieved interculturalism rigorously and productively if defined as the blending of performance forms/experiences from different cultures which results in the creation of new performance idioms and experiences. This intercultural achievement depended on collaboration with international partners but Keegan-Dolan’s working model on this and other Fabulous Beast productions through the mid-2010s does provide a process-based blueprint and some telling dramaturgical structures and casting approaches that would productively inform ongoing intercultural collaborations between majority and minority ethnic Irish-based artists.

Contemporary Minority-Led “New” Interculturalisms

This final section explores the attempts of the Irish state and contributions of minority ethnic Irish artists to creating and sustaining a “new” Irish interculturalism, in line with the grassroots, minority-led new interculturalisms documented by Ric Knowles and Royona Mitra among others elsewhere (Knowles 2010, 2017; Mitra 2015). In a post-1990s Irish context, McIvor has differentiated between social and aesthetic interculturalism in Irish state and EU policy and theatre and performance studies discourse. Social interculturalism refers to social policy led and linked initiatives that define interculturalism and intercultural dialogue as involving dynamic dialogue and collaboration between minority and majority ethnic individuals that lead to transformation for all while aesthetic interculturalism refers to artistic and in this context, theatrical and/or performance projects that consciously blend culturally diverse forms, themes and/or collaborators (McIvor 2019, 343–372). As a theoretical idea then, “new interculturalism” represents the dynamic outcomes of encounters with explicitly social and aesthetic intercultural aims. As defined by Knowles particularly, new interculturalism aspires to “a complex set of negotiations across multiple sites of difference, on stage, between the stage and the audience, and within audiences” in a context where there is national recognition that “cultural and national identities no longer coincide, and in which the performative constitution of such identities is increasingly recognised as formative” (Knowles 2017, 2). Our previous case study of The Bull arguably enacts this kind of “formative” “performative constitution” in action in terms of how we understand the production’s semiotic/cultural legacy, but this was nonetheless a collaboration initiated and led by a white Irish dance theatre company. McIvor has documented the important and seminal contributions of socially engaged white Irish artists including Donal O’Kelly, Bairbre Ní Chaoimh, Charlie O’Neill, Declan O’Gorman and others in advocating for and initiating theatre projects in collaboration with minority ethnic artists and/or representing stories of and/or from this community onstage (McIvor 2014, 37–49). However it is notable than when plays featuring minority ethnic and/or migrant or refugee characters have made it onto the stages of prominent national theatrical institutions, with the exception of Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s infamous 2007 adaptation of John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World for the Abbey, those plays have continued to be helmed by white Irish creatives. Some key examples include Gary Duggan’s Shibari, directed by Tom Creed, Abbey Theatre, 2012, which looked “at contemporary Dublin through a multi-ethnic lens” featuring characters from white Irish, Black British, Romanian and Japanese backgrounds (Meaney 2012) and Pan Pan Theatre’s The Good House of Happiness, directed by Gavin Quinn in 2017. Pan Pan’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechuan set in China began from the premise that the play was “originally performed in Switzerland with an all German speaking cast playing the Chinese parts. So for this version we wanted to source people from the correct geographical region of the world” (Pan Pan, n.d.). Pan Pan ultimately recruited a cast of performers of Asian descent living, studying and/or working in Ireland (Saruul Altantuya, Zolzaya Enkhtuya, Xier Luo, Zheyu Wei, Ashley Xie) described by the company as: “three Chinese people – A budding actor who works in a Chinese takeaway, a singer who works for a tech firm, a scholar doing a PHD in Trinity on globalisation and theatre, and two Mongolian accountants who compete in pole dancing competitions” (Pan Pan, n.d.). However, Pan Pan’s mission to “source” these performers for their original vision is telling as it potentially implies that these performers are a commodity to be used as well as this need making evident the non-integrated nature of Irish theatre in terms of an identifiable pool of racially and ethnically diverse actors/collaborators.

Since the early 2000s, minority ethnic and/or migrant-led companies including but not limited to Arambe Productions, Camino de Orula Productions, Outlandish Theatre Platform and Polish Theatre Ireland, collaborators/collectives including WeAreGriot’s Felispeaks (Felicia Olusanya) and Dagogo Hart, and individuals including Samuel Yakura, Ursula Rani Sarma, George Seremba and Mirjana Rendulic have presented work consistently as actors, playwrights and playwright/performers. However, racially, ethnically and/or culturally diverse artists more typically have been able to show their own artist-led work independently and particularly in Dublin in venues like the Project Arts Centre (Dublin), the New Theatre (Dublin) and Theatre Upstairs (Dublin, closed since 2019). Until the recent success of Felispeaks, Dagogo Hart and Samuel Yakura however (see Chapter 5), works produced by minority ethnic artists however frequently has not received Arts Council funding but rather has often been presented through self-financing, profit share models and/or state, local or city funding schemes, sometimes arts-related, but more often related more specifically to intercultural, cultural diversity and/or integration initiatives with Arambe Productions’ early work, Polish Theatre Ireland’s effort and key offerings of Camino de Orula Productions particularly fitting this mould (McIvor 2016, 85–114; 2020, 63–79). It is also important to note that across this body of work, not all productions have necessarily foregrounded the theme of interculturalism, migration and/or racial/ethnic diversity, but this is a burden of representation that minority ethnic artists should not be beholden to and that intercultural Irish theatre criticism must defend explicitly. Samuel Yakura’s one-man play A Perfect Immigrant which he wrote and performed in for the 2022 Dublin Fringe Festival challenged this burden head on with the production’s tag line stating boldly: “What else does a young Black man have to say if it isn’t about racism?” (Smock Alley 2022). Yakura’s answer is a reflection on masculinity, family and communication intershot with his own poems as he combined semi-autobiographical theatrical monologue storytelling with performance of individual poems not in “character” whose themes both fit and exceeded the narrative he was unfolding as the character Levi in his monologue.

In Northern Ireland, the production conditions for minority ethnic artists and intercultural projects have been similar, as Terra Nova Productions’ evolution and struggle to survive has evidenced (see case study below). These highly differential and recurrent production conditions have arguably led to a deprofessionalisation of minority-led intercultural arts practice over time due to relative prestige attached to funding schemes (before even considering the quality of the work itself), a dichotomisation exacerbated by wider-post-2008 Arts Council funding cuts. As Jason King observed in 2016, “the mainstream players” (by which he means the Abbey, the Gate, Druid and other core funded companies) “seem to have survived the financial crisis largely unscathed” while “emergent immigrant and minority ethnic arts practitioners” such as those associated with Arambe “have been devastated by the economic collapse and largely disappeared from the Irish professional theatre scene” (73).

The development of intercultural Irish arts practices post-1990s in the theatre and beyond has indeed been characterised by ongoing tensions between professional vs. community/participatory practices as platforms for minority-led new intercultural work, with representation of migrant and/or minority ethnic groups frequently at risk of being regarded interchangeably with representation created by these stakeholders as discussed above. This risk is particularly pronounced due to the close relationship between social and aesthetic interculturalism in contemporary Ireland in addition to systemic challenges for minority ethnic artists and/or those from a background of migration to gain access to the professional arts—an issue not unique to Ireland. The use of arts and culture from community grassroots on up were identified as key sites for developing intercultural understanding and cultural diversity by the Irish government since as early as the 2005 National Action Plan Against Racism, which lists among its key objectives to “Develop the potential of arts/culture policy to promote interaction and understanding of cultural diversity” (Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, 34). In 2010, the Arts Council of Ireland announced its first dedicated five-year policy strategy and action plan to “support culturally diverse [arts] practice into the future” (4), a project undertaken in collaboration with Create, the national development agency for collaborative arts in social and community contexts, the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform and the National Action Plan Against Racism (NPAR)—a partnership that evidences strong links between social and aesthetic interculturalism in contemporary Ireland at that time. This Arts Council policy was updated in 2019 as the Equality, Human Rights and Diversity Policy and Strategy which announces that:

The Arts Council, in everything it does, strives to respect, support and insure the inclusion of all voices and cultures that make up Ireland today, from all sections of society, from existing and new communities, and from all social backgrounds, ethnicities and traditions (1).

However, there is a good deal of slippage in Irish intercultural arts agendas over time empowering minority ethnic artists and/or those from a background of migration or refugeeness on their own professional terms and the instrumentalised use of encounters (often in a community context) between minority and majority ethnic artists and/or audiences as furthering social interculturalism and integration agendas more broadly. The almost continuous role of Create, Ireland’s national agency for collaborative arts in social and community contexts (formerly CAFE, Creative Activity for Everyone) in driving research and discourse on Irish new interculturalism is instructive here. As CAFE, they conducted the first survey of minority ethnic artists living and working in Ireland in 2002, “Artists of Distinction: Mapping Survey of Ethnic Minority Arts in Ireland, to determine their professional/practice needs and support requirements, if any” (Healy 2002, 3) and after re-forming as Create in 2003, this organisation also managed the 2009 Cultural Diversity and the Arts: Research Report. Written by Daniel Jewesbury, Jagtar Singh and Sarah Tuck and commissioned in partnership with the Office of the Minister for Integration under the Government’s National Action Plan against Racism (NPAR), this research report concretely informed the Arts Council’s first 2010 policy document in this area. The Arts Council still classifies “cultural diversity” as linked most strongly to “the area of arts participation” (“Cultural Diversity and the Arts,” n.d.) Arts participation refers to “a broad range of practice where individuals or groups collaborate with skilled artists to make or interpret art” although it “is recognised as a value and an opportunity across all artforms and arts practices” (“Arts Participation,” n.d.). With rare exceptions, arts participation projects involving minority ethnic and/or migrant or refugee communities usually position white Irish artists as the “skilled” stakeholders. The Abbey Theatre’s recent 5X5 project which ran run between 2018 and 2020 did attempt explicitly to bridge this gap by operating as a “development series for community theatre projects…that enables these communities to engage with their national theatre for the first time” (Abbey Theatre 2020). It offered participant projects €5000 in development monies, and five days of space and technical assistant at the Abbey. Across the three cycles, multiple groups involving minority ethnic and/or migrant participants were involved (Discovery Gospel Choir, Tailtiu Theatre Company, SoloSIRENs, Grand Theatre Project & Tina Noonan) as well as those taken onto the scheme encompassing a wider range of intersectional identity positions encompassing gender, sexuality, disability, membership in the Travelling community, minority language status (Irish as first/primary language specifically) and age. This scheme makes the relationship between “community” and identity position in the professional Irish theatre scene explicitly clear with most projects being led according to the arts participation model cited above: “skilled” (usually white Irish) artists leading a community group. This is not to say that this kind of initiative as a developmental step is not important, and the legacy of the 5X5 scheme and its medium and long-term outputs are too early to call. Nevertheless, its central assumptions and rehearsal of familiar power relationships in the context of the Republic of Ireland’s national theatre do need to keep being called attention to and questioned for the barriers they may unwittingly reinforce.

Ric Knowles’s call for attention to broader performance ecologies in understanding and analysing new intercultural theatre networks over time rather than attention only to the demonstrable and influential impact of exceptional plays, companies and/or individuals (as has often been the case within Irish theatre studies) is particularly helpful in the Irish context where the boundaries between professional and community/participatory work have been consistently intentionally blurred for minority ethnic and/or migrant artists meaning that this work might be more difficult to find and archive. Knowles uses “performance ecology” to “talk about the complex ecosystem that is constituted by a city’s shifting network of actors- performers, performances, institutions, audiences, artists, administrators, and audience- organized variously into companies, caucuses, committees and communities” (2017, 5). Even before the devastating impact of Covid-19 on the Irish theatre and creative industries, there had been a widening post-2008 gap between companies like the Abbey, Druid, Pan Pan, Rough Magic and the Gate who have their ongoing core costs funded and independent companies and artists who work project to project or through other more limited funding streams, and this is why well-intentioned schemes like the Abbey Theatre’s 5X5 programme may have more complex ripple effects than first appear to be the case in terms of continuing to reify a professional vs. “community” theatre divide. As Miriam Haughton observes, “Covid-19 brought the economic livelihood of the state and the arts sector to the cliff edge at the same time, forcing a conversation regarding survival and stability,” a state of double jeopardy even more exacerbated by those artists who struggle to maintain professional status let alone get paid as professional artists (Haughton 2021, 50).

Ultimately generally challenging and uneven industry conditions for new, emerging and established theatre artists post-Covid-19 make it even more challenging for minority ethnic and/or migrant artists to break through truly to the professional theatre sphere. However, there is hope in that the #WakingTheFeminist movement’s recent legacy of demanding formal careful and ongoing audit of infrastructural and institutional gender-based inequalities provides a base on which to build in addition to an injection of energy around anti-racism and Equality/Equity, Diversity and Inclusion work in the arts sector following the renewed post-2020 impact of the global #BlackLivesMatter movement after George Floyd’s murder which in turn exacerbated pressure on the Irish arts and theatre industries to re-examine issues of representation. The Arts Council in the Republic released the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Toolkit: Building a Policy for Inclusive Arts Practice in 2022 as a follow-on to their new 2019 Human Rights, Equality and Diversity Strategy but it proved to be opportune timing for organisations like Fishamble Theatre and Baboró the international arts festival for children among others who wanted to engage with this amplified post-2020 awareness of these inequities within the Irish theatre sector. They launched schemes like Fishamble’s 2022 Transatlantic Commissions Programme (in partnership with New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre) and Baboró’s 2022 pilot LEAP programme, both of which target upskilling for and engagement with racially and ethnically diverse artists and/or those from backgrounds of migration, playwrights in the case of Fishamble (Kwaku Fortune, Jade Jordan, Felicia Olusanya, and CN Smith), but multidisciplinary artists for Baboró (Alexandra Crăciun, Fernanda Ferrari, Justyna Cwojdzińska, and Justin Anene). That being said, these promising programmes remain focused on development which is an often limited pathway particularly for minority ethnic artists, and in this context, the longer trajectory of Terra Nova Production and artistic director Andrea Montgomery’s work in Northern Ireland over the last fifteen years is both instructive and inspirational.

Case Study Three: Terra Nova Productions, The Arrivals Project (Arrivals 1 (2014), Arrivals 2 (2015), Arrivals 3D: Mi Mundo (2016, remounted in 2017), Me You Us Them (2018) and the Intercultural Shakespeares (The Belfast Tempest [2016] and A Midsummer Night’s Dream [2019]).

Premiered: Belfast, various venues.

This chapter and the book’s final case study is Terra Nova Productions who undertake an integrated approach to creating a Northern Irish intercultural theatre ecosystem that for over a decade has operated through combining community consultation and engagement with creating new professional work and championing emerging minority ethnic Northern Irish theatre artists. Founded in 2007 by Andrea Montgomery, Terra Nova Productions defines interculturality as “what happens at the points where the culture rubs together, like tectonic plates, sparks fly and something new is forged”(“Intercultural Practice,” n.d.) Terra Nova’s situation within post-conflict Northern Irish society further textures Terra Nova’s attempts to forge a new interculturalism through their ambitious projects as cultural diversity in the North not only refers to those from a background of migration and/or non-Western European racial or ethnic background, but also to the differences in perspective of those from Catholic/Republican versus Protestant/Loyalists backgrounds. They position themselves explicitly against assimilationist or narrow understandings of both multiculturalism and interculturalism, insisting that the intercultural art they make rejects insisting that “people are integrated into the dominant culture” or that the host culture (in this case, post-Conflict Northern Ireland) “should abandon its identities, values, joys, sorrows or memories” (Terra Nova, “Intercultural Practice,” n.d.)

While Terra Nova’s work with a wide network of Northern Irish and internationally-based colleagues, the company’s vision has been driven primarily by artistic director and founder Andrea Montgomery. She is a Canadian-born migrant to Northern Ireland herself initially moving there to serve as the artistic director of Riverside Theatre. She describes herself as “from the global north” but having grown “up largely in the global south” with diplomat parents, identifying now “as a third culture individual influenced by United Nations policy” (Terra Nova Productions, “Intercultural Practice,” n.d.). From the beginning of Terra Nova’s work, Montgomery and her collaborators sought to make intercultural theatre in Northern Ireland by engaging with culturally diverse individuals and community groups to shape the theatre they wanted to make and see. Montgomery describes their work as having three overlapping circles integral to Terra Nova’s vision: community engagement, emerging artists and professional arts. But as she observes, “If you don’t have that third circle, you’re ghettoizing people” (Montgomery, interview with Charlotte McIvor, July 27, 2017). Nevertheless, Terra Nova continually faces this same pigeonholing of their mission and characterisation of their work, with Montgomery being candid that they are most successful in being funded to do process-based community workshops around intercultural dialogue, rather than to actually produce professional theatre—a recurring experience that bears out our claims about the impact of the professional vs. community/participatory bind that has shaped the ability of intercultural Irish arts practices to actually find stable footing as led by minority ethnic and/or migrant artists (Montgomery, interview with Charlotte McIvor, July 27, 2017).

Rather than focus on one Terra Nova production, we have chosen to situate their Arrivals Project and intercultural Shakespeare stream within their mission and a larger all-island Irish intercultural performance ecology in order to offer a tangible case study of the kinds of structural supports and ongoing labour actually needed to create and sustain performance ecologies of minority and migrant-led new intercultural theatre practices given the island-wide challenges, resourcing issues and policy blindspots identified in the previous section. Both projects encompass multiple productions directly shaped by ongoing community consultation as well as participation by professional and emerging artists. Of all the nascent intercultural and/or minority-led theatre companies started in the Republic or the North post-1990s, Terra Nova has had the most staying power and explicitly ecological approach evident on the island of Ireland in working not only for its own survival but the future of intercultural, minority ethnic and/or migrant-led theatre individuals practice more broadly. Terra Nova’s persistence has not come without struggle and frequent frustration at how the company’s attempts to build and professionalise a minority ethnic/intercultural theatre community has been counted against the assessments of the overall professional quality of their work leading to funding hurdles which have repeatedly threatened their survival as discussed above.

Their body of work includes It’s Not All Rain and Potatoes (2007), Macau Young Creative Voices, a three-year international drama project with Macwac Theatre and young people from the SAR on the theme of decolonisation in Macau (2007–2009), the Ulster Kama Sutra—a puppet show addressing sexuality based on interviews across Northern Ireland (2011–2013), the El Akl Festival in Minya, Egypt (2017) and the Arrivals series (Arrivals: 2014, Arrivals2: 2015, Arrivals3-Mi Mundo 2016–2017, Me You Us Them: 2018). The Arrivals Project was created “to bring together writers, actors and members of Northern Ireland’s new multicultural communities to share experiences and support each other to create a new intercultural canon” (Terra Nova Productions, “Arrivals Project,” n.d.) of original theatrical works which ranged from one-acts, to an immersive play followed by a workshop on intercultural dialogue for audience members, to a two-hander explicitly focused on race and racism in Northern Ireland. They have also presented large scale intercultural Shakespeare projects combining professional and community participants including the Belfast Tempest (2016) which was “Northern Ireland’s largest ever Shakespeare production,” and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2019), “the largest Shakespeare event ever organised in Ards and North Down: a specially created Midsummer Night’s Dream featuring culturally diverse community participants living in Belfast and beyond” (Terra Nova Productions, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream, n.d.)

Montgomery’s perception that the Northern Irish stage was closed to any stories that were not “predominantly white, Irish, male, and straight” spurred the Arrivals Project which directly confronted this issue through their commissioning and production of new plays (Terra Nova Productions, “Arrivals,” n.d.). The Arrivals Project’s model was to:

work on storytelling empowerment workshops with our community contacts in Northern Ireland’s new immigrant communities, and thereby to discover the individuals who were willing to work more intensely with us to get their stories on stage. At the same time, we put out a call to writers of any background who wanted to be supported to create intercultural theatre. (Terra Nova Productions, “Arrivals,” n.d.)

The playwrights and community participants continued working together in the room in masterclasses, with the injunction to write explicitly for the minority ethnic actors cast in the first two Arrivals productions. However, this was not a verbatim or documentary theatre process, rather a testing and workshopping of stories, themes and concerns that filtered into the final works, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. The first two instalments consisted of evenings of short plays written by Northern Irish playwrights including Shannon Yee, Paul McMahon, James Meredith, John Morrison, Deirdre Cartmill and Maggie Cronin, Fionnuala Kennedy and Darragh Carville while Montgomery wrote the final two instalments. Mi Mundo featured only one central storyline of a white Northern Irish and Brazilian couple’s struggles to keep their family together and the experience concluded with an intercultural workshop experience for audience members, while Me You Us Them is a combination of scenes and monologues explicitly addressing racism with some interweaving stories at its core. Across these plays, the characters represent a spectrum of racial and ethnic identities that are often contested by the individual’s personal affiliations and lived experiences: Black British (of Indian and African descent), Asian British (of Chinese descent), mixed-race Northern Irish (of Chinese and African descent), Protestant Black Ghanaian, Romanian, Hong Kong Chinese, Peruvian, Polish and white Northern Irish characters from Catholic and Loyalist backgrounds who profess varying levels of involvement or investment in sectarian politics. Unlike most of the plays presented on these themes in the Republic since the late 1990s, these plays mostly concern individuals who migrated by choice for education and opportunity rather than through forced displacement and many characters (including those of mixed race/ethnicity) who were born and grew up in Northern Ireland. Rather than eliding issues of forced displacement, refugeeness and Northern Ireland specific issues with seeking asylum and refugee status, the negotiated choice between Terra Nova, the community participants and professional artists to tell these other stories productively expands the canon of minority ethnic, migrant and/or intercultural Irish theatre in a more demographically representative way as those seeking asylum and refugee status account for much smaller percentages of the rise in Third-Country nationals than their stage representation would suggest. The plays range from taking on everyday mundane encounters (such as debates about relative oppression experienced by the Irish versus other minorities among a diverse group in a pub one night in John Meredith’s Don’t Get Me Wrong) to more climactic ones (such as Mi Mundo’s explicit examination of family reunification and UK immigration policy). Each instalment of the Arrivals Project has toured throughout Northern Ireland and featured a majority of professional minority ethnic performers.

Terra Nova’s intercultural Shakespeares The Belfast Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream blurred professional and community/participatory boundaries even more aggressively on the stage itself as each production paired professional actors in the lead roles with interludes by community participants and/or emerging artists who had been worked with over months to shape their contributions. The Belfast Tempest engaged “750 people across 18 months, from which a community cast and volunteer team of over 180 Northern Irish residents, originally from 52 different cities across the globe, joined 40 professional artists to create a giant temporary theatre in T13 warehouse in Belfast’s Titanic Quarter” for the performance as part of Northern Ireland’s celebrations for Shakespeare’s 400th birthday (Terra Nova Productions, “The Belfast Tempest,” n.d.) (Fig. 11.3).

Fig. 11.3

(Photo Neil Harrison)

The combined professional and community cast in Terra Nova Productions’ The Belfast Tempest staged in a warehouse at the Belfast docks, 2016

For A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “82 community participants from 6 to 82” ultimately joined the professional performers onstage with many hundreds more having been engaged through a two-year exploratory workshop process proceeding the production (Terra Nova Productions, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” n.d.). While many of the individuals who participated in the development of each process did not ultimately make it onstage and those who did may not have achieved “professional” standards of performance, these processes Terra Nova undertook are nonetheless essential to changing the performance ecology in Northern Ireland over time, as the possibility of arts participation was introduced through such a concrete series of experiences.

Ultimately, Terra Nova sought not only to diversify participation and casting through these epic events alongside their programmes of audience and community engagement, but they also explicitly set out to contribute to the history of Northern Irish Shakespeare performance overall due to the unprecedented scale of participation they intended and achieved for each work, regardless of the background of those participants. By setting out those kind of ambitious aims, Terra Nova specifically positioned minority ethnic and/or migrant communities at the vanguard of pushing forward the remit and ambition of Shakespearean performance and performance more generally forward in Northern Ireland. This is a powerful statement about the place and contributions these communities can and will make to Northern Irish arts if given the resources to do so. Terra Nova’s ongoing and tireless confrontation of the community/professional binary in Northern Irish theatre has generated ground-breaking projects and novel methodologies that deserve to be not only supported but more broadly adapted across the island of Ireland in order to catalyse and nurture the kind of nascent intercultural performance ecologies their work proves it is possible to lay down roots for.

Conclusion

Ireland’s future is intercultural based on our current population demographics in the Republic and the North. The Republic’s continuing membership in the European Union too means that questions of intra-EU interculturalism vis-à-vis member states as well as our mutual obligations to those seeking refugee status will continue to shape “Irish” identity’s future parameters. But as this chapter, and indeed, this entire book has revealed, our Irish theatre history too is persistently intercultural, in the connections internationally we sought and imagined, the collaborations we built over time, and the possibilities nascent in our current performance ecology.

This chapter ultimately invites you to pick up the thematic strands that we have introduced here to continue to examine actively Ireland’s past, present and future including our theatrical and performance histories. The purpose of this book has been to situate Irish contemporary theatre from the 1950s to the present within historical and theoretical contexts. But as the evolution of our chapters and arguments have shown, history refuses to be linear, and the deeper you dig, the more connections and contradictions emerge particularly when it comes to interculturalism’s role in the past, present and future of contemporary Irish theatre.