We met Maz O’Connor in 2018 when we began discussions with her about being part of our In:Visible Women programme in 2019.

Featuring as one of the guest performers at our Visible Women night at the Liverpool Philharmonic, Maz’s gentle demeanour belies her determination, drive and tenacity. Maz is proof that femininity can be strong, skilled and intelligent; urgent, driven and cutting. It seems these are also aspects of the world she relishes in…

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In 1895, in a township called Ballyvadlea, near Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, Bridget Cleary was burned to death by her husband, while her family watched. They believed her to be a fairy changeling: a creature that looked and spoke just like Bridget, but was in fact a sinister substitute bringing decay to the community. The family thought that if they could chase the changeling out with fairy potions and, eventually, fire, then the real Bridget would return to them. They buried her charred remains in a shallow, unmarked grave and awaited her return. Of course, it never arrived. She was twenty-six years old.

I came across Bridget’s story in 2017 when I was approached by The Finborough Theatre to write a piece of music theatre. I’ve worked in theatre as a musician, with the Royal Shakespeare Company and with Liverpool playwright Lizzie Nunnery, and it had long been an ambition of mine to write something for theatre myself. As a singer-songwriter, I sometimes find the form I work in to be limiting. I was itching to tell a story in a longer form, as well as write for voices other than my own. After encouragement from The Finborough, I began looking around for a story to adapt. My two requirements were firstly, to find a story that suited my style of music and, secondly, to find a world in which singing was a part of everyday life. Of course, I thought of Ireland. My own experience is that an Irish family event isn’t over until somebody sings and I was excited to tell a story through traditional Irish music; not the Disneyfied version, but the dark, strange beauty of the real thing.

Bridget’s story hit me like a train. Not only was I moved by the contemporary resonances with so-called honour killings and FGM, I was intrigued by the connection between superstition, Catholicism and patriarchy and how all of these forces work together to oppress, and even kill, women. Very quickly I could hear music. I had ideas for how I wanted to musically express the idea of the fairies, her husband’s mania, violence and mass hysteria. Music is abstract; it takes us out of our everyday life, our everyday language and into a more intense, metaphorical space. It’s in this space that I felt, instinctively, that the story of Bridget Cleary would have the most impact.

About a year after I started writing the piece, I realised that I needed to take a research trip to Tipperary. I was surprised to discover that Bridget’s home was only an hour’s drive from my cousin’s farm in Co. Waterford. I spent a week exploring the area, talking to locals and searching for clues about who Bridget was, wondering how the landscape might have influenced both her and the culture that killed her. My cousin kindly drove me to all the fairy rings that he knew of. He waited in the car while I bravely marched across the threshold and into the centre of each perfect circle of trees. I wasn’t sure whether or not he was joking when he said that there was no way he’d step foot inside one himself. I closed my eyes and tried to hear what Bridget might have heard in 1895 when she took one of her frequent trips to the fairy ring near Ballyvadlea. I was struck by how alone I felt, and how easy it might be to believe that there was some supernatural force inside those forts. More than once that week I spooked myself into believing that the fairies, or the spirits of Bridget and her husband, were haunting me. Luckily, I made it back to London unscathed, more committed to the project than I had been when I’d left.

Three drafts of the piece later, I felt that I could go no further alone. I needed to collaborate. I applied to Britten Pears Arts for a week’s residency with them in Snape, Suffolk, working with a small group of musicians and actor/singers. It was an incredibly inspiring week, and the reaction from the group, and from Britten Pears Arts, told me that we definitely had something. I came away with a recording of five songs from the piece, giving a sense of the style of the music. I sent the recordings to theatres and the feedback I received was that I should get a book writer involved. Musical theatre has three elements: the music, the lyrics and the book (or script). Sometimes all three are written by the same person, as in Hamilton (Lin-Manuel Miranda) or Hadestown (Anais Mitchell), but commonly several artists collaborate across the elements. The piece, as it was, was around ninety percent sung through, but there were a few connecting scenes of dialogue needed. And that’s where the Liverpool Irish Festival came in.

I sent the recordings to Emma Smith (Festival Director), to ask if the festival might be interested in developing the piece in some way, given our existing relationship, the style of the music, and the cultural relevance of the story. Emma was enthused by the idea, and offered to help me put together a brief to recruit a book writer, as well as sharing expertise in how to manage an arts project. Up until that point, early 2020, I had been working entirely alone as composer, lyricist and producer, so it was a great relief to receive some help, even just in the form of regular conversations about the project.

And so, thanks to the help of the Liverpool Irish Festival and a £2,000 Alan James Bursary from the English Folk Dance and Song Society, I have used this lockdown period to collaborate with Irish writer Alan Flanagan. He encouraged me to write the scenes myself, supporting me as a dramaturg. In September—COVID-willing—I will be returning to Britten Pears Arts in Snape for another residency as part of their Festival of New, along with Alan, director Tinuke Craig, movement director Martin Bassindale, six actor/singers and two musicians, to workshop what we have and get the first half hour on its feet. The plan is to have a full production to be performed at the Liverpool Irish Festival in October 2021. That’s if the fairies don’t get in the way.

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The Festival sincerely hopes to bring Maz’s full production to Liverpool for #LIF2021 as part of our ongoing commitment to In:Visible Women. Bridget’s story, sadly, is one that continues to chime the world over, with murderous practices and the misuse of education versus folklore commonly centred used to the subjugate and diminish women. In supporting this piece, we not only hear a potent story for our times, but support conversations for equity and a brilliant artist progress her creative vision. Look out for this: it will be remarkable.

Kabosh were introduced to the Festival by the Commission for Victims and Survivors.

Our original intention was to bring a production to Liverpool, but “the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men, gang aft a-gley”, as Robert Burns famously stated. Instead, we take  a look at how arts exchanges can inspire, provoke and confront reconciliation principles, rated to conflict resolution.

Theatre to provoke exchange

Founded in 1994, Kabosh is a Belfast-based theatre company that creates original work -for performance- in a range of spaces. Each project is inspired by the people, spaces and places in the north of Ireland and most of the work addresses the legacy of our violent conflict. We aim to humanise those we perceive to be ‘other’, thereby challenging preconceptions. We aim to create work of high quality that provokes informed discussions around sensitive themes of reconciliation. It is theatre for positive social change.

The Kabosh canon is commissioned from professional Irish playwrights, but the method of gathering source material varies. On each project the company works with a community organisation to provide introductions. They assist with identifying source material, developing grassroots partners, co-facilitate post-show discussions, liaise with community gatekeepers to maximise engagement and provide long-term support to audiences.

Often a project is the result of a playwright creatively responding to an oral archive undertaken by a community agency. The archive then becomes the catalyst for a fictional drama. The gathered stories are not presented verbatim. This ensures both the original keeper of the story -and those who have never heard the narrative before- are challenged and encouraged to engage with it.

Individuals exchange their memories with artists, who reimagine these narratives and exchange them with audiences. This motivates informed reassessment. Attitudinal change is measured.

Arts in the aftermath of conflict is essential in opening dialogue between communities. It bears witness to those we perceive to be ‘other’, challenging perceptions and building bridges through education and shared histories. Staging an alien narrative in a community setting allows for safe conversations that examine volatile issues around lack of integration.

Difficult subject matter can be explored by professional actors, as they are perceived to be neutral, outside of the community. They can embody controversial characters, give voice to polarised thoughts and aggressively challenge what is considered acceptable, because the public don’t consider them to be from a specific community, with an inbuilt loyalty or even carry personal baggage.

Many of the projects also serve to become catalysts for new stories. Audiences recognise that their voice is under-represented and feel motivated to share. Kabosh is constantly adding to its canon of post-conflict work motivated by community interest.

In recent years Kabosh has toured work about the conflict in the north of Ireland to Nigeria, South Africa, Rwanda, Belgium, Germany and France. As with local performances, the performances led to informed, emotive conversations about the legacy of conflict, personal impact and hope for the future. Experiencing human narratives involving international conflict resolution provokes a reassessment of personal context. We remind audiences that memories are fluid, malleable; making positive change possible. In addition, methodology is transferrable across borders. It is empowering to exchange the role artists can play in challenging myths; confronting prejudice, representing trauma and ultimately assisting individuals process the legacy of conflict.

Important questions

The language of conflict and post-conflict is universal. We are dealing with the same issues: how can we move on without betraying the memory of a loved one or our community? How do we avoid passing bitterness on to the next generation and repeating a cycle of violence? Is it possible to draw a line under the past or must we forgive? Does that mean forgetting? How can we reconcile oneself with the terminology of ‘post-conflict’ e.g.,  as victim, survivor, perpetrator, etc.? Can we reimagine new possibilities for policing, justice or social structures?  Conflict can seem parochial, but is easier to consider your own history by engaging with another’s? Theatre is an ideal live, humanised, communal medium for this exchange.

Kabosh projects seek to assist communities deal with the legacy of conflict through provoking new conversations.

Paula McFetridge, Artistic Director, Kabosh
www.kabosh.net

Image credit: Vincent Higgins in Green & Blue

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Liverpool Irish Festival sincerely hope to bring Kabosh to Liverpool in future years to experience, first hand, the fruits of their work, understanding and commitment to truthful storytelling, reconciliation and care.

Case Study: Green & Blue, Laurence McKeown (2016 -)

Based on an oral archive of serving Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and An Garda Síochána police officers, Green & Blue explores the realities faced by the individuals who patrolled the Irish border during the height of the conflict.

The title of the play reflects the colour of the two police uniforms: green was worn by the RUC in the north and blue was worn by the Garda in the south. It also reflects how we see the uniform and not the person, and how the policemen see themselves as uniforms, as this extract from the play indicates:

GARDA O’HALLORAN:              At one point we took on a role that became an identity and that identity now defines us. I’m no longer Eddie nor you David. I’m a Guard; you’re a Peeler. We’re a uniform, not real people. And rightly or wrongly we now view the world from that perspective.

Green & Blue looks at the person behind the uniform and the different experiences of the individuals on either side of a man-made line in the ground; ‘…a simple but effective way of exploring two sides of one conflict’ – Belfast Telegraph

As Laurence McKeown is a Republican ex-prisoner and former hunger striker there were members of the ‘police family’ who found it difficult to come to terms with Laurence being appointed as playwright for the project. Through engagement in the two year process and/or experiencing the production over four years, many preconceptions were effectively challenged. Other communities were encouraged to engage with the narrative because of Laurence’s past. The ultimate consideration was how to nurture a trust based on integrity and an acceptance of different histories.

To date this production has toured extensively across Ireland playing prisons, theatres, community halls, historical ruins and schools, as well as being presented in London, Brussels, Edinburgh, Dresden and Paris.

Using a project feedback form we measured attitudinal change against by asking audiences to complete a before and after questionnaire, ranking their level of agreement with a series of statements:

• I have a level of sympathy with individuals who were in the police force
• I have a positive association with the police force 
• I see people serving in uniform as individuals 
• I feel comfortable communicating with police officers 
• I find police officers approachable 
• I can relate to people serving in uniform 

Based on the trends emerging from the freeform feedback, and the attitudinal changes measured, the major impact of the project is on affecting levels of sympathy and empathy with those in uniform.

A high number of comments describe the unusual position of hearing a police officer’s story, or -when that story is familiar-hearing it from ‘the other side’ and recognising that those in uniform occupy a third or ‘other’ community space/role. For example:

As the son of a garda who served on the border during this period a lot of the garda perspective resonated with me. I did get a new view of the RUC which was refreshing

I found the play extremely interesting, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard the words before, of an RUC officer and his Irish counterparts. The play is vital in the small footsteps we are taking towards dealing with the past, as well as the future. We will only embrace the future when we have given space and a voice [to those] who lived through the conflict. Until then, we are surely sweeping the past under the carpet

Audiences have also referred to how their experience has/will impact on contemporary issues such as changing their attitudes towards police officers today, seeing beyond ‘the Uniform’, and the importance of work like this in positively contributing to peace building.

Green & Blue is one of many Kabosh projects that seeks to assist communities deal with the legacy of conflict through provoking new conversations.

Paula McFetridge
Artistic Director of Kabosh since August 2006
Annually funded by Arts Council of NI and Belfast City Council
www.kabosh.net

Across the Festival, we have asked our partners, collaborators and artists to consider “exchange”. It is a means of connecting the programme to provide a cohesive message, whilst also demonstrating the benefits of coming together, even during times when this cannot be physically so. In the following article, Dr Ó Donghaile illustrates why Oscar Wilde was so ahead of his time, when it came to views on exchange and the benefit of art and culture to society. As Deaglán’s work on Wilde expands, we aim to continue sharing his research, looking more deeply in to Wilde’s enduring legacy, the lessons he left us with and how such a man might be received today.

Oscar Wilde: Art, Culture, Democracy, and Exchange
Dr Deaglán Ó Donghaile; British Academy Research Fellow, Liverpool John Moores University

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Throughout his life, Oscar Wilde believed passionately in the importance of cultural and artistic exchange. He argued that art and literature were part of the common human heritage and that they should be shared among everyone. At a very early stage in his career, and long before his most famous literary works were published, Wilde set out his ideas on literature’s centrality to culture when he gave his first lecture in the United States. In this talk, entitled Our English Renaissance (first delivered in New York City, January 1882, and then at different venues across the US), Wilde told audiences that Aestheticism –the literary and artistic movement of which he was a leading figure- was not an exclusive club. It was a movement dedicated to the sharing of artistic, cultural and literary ideas. He believed that the enjoyment of beauty should be experienced and enjoyed by all and widely exchanged.

In his lecture, Wilde pointed out that similar ideas and theories had already been proposed by poets, philosophers and painters from antiquity to the nineteenth century. His long list of international figures included Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Alighieri, Michelangelo, Albrecht Dürer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Giuseppe Mazzini, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lord Byron, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and John Keats. He also included more recent writers, artists and critics, such as John Ruskin, Algernon Swinburne, the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman and William Morris.

Wilde described Aestheticism’s renewal of culture as ‘our English Renaissance’. As an Irish writer he was clearly stating that art and culture could be shared outside limiting national boundaries. This, he insisted, could democratise art because it represented ‘a new birth of the spirit of man’ resembling the Italian Renaissance in its promise of ‘a more gracious and comely way of life’. With its modernisation of ideas of beauty and form, it promised ‘new subjects for poetry, new forms of art, new intellectual and imaginative enjoyments’.

Wilde believed that Aestheticism provided ‘a nobler form of life’ and ‘a freer method and opportunity of expression’.  Cultural exchange was critical to this, as it imbued art with its essential ‘vitality’ in ‘this crowded modern world’. For Wilde, the world was a global community in which everyone should participate in art and culture. This made his views on culture explicitly political, as he felt that the best art was both historically engaged and socially conscious. Through the exchange of artistic and cultural ideas, every rank in society could experience the best that was offered by a broad, constructive and collective culture, without sacrificing the individuality of anyone.

This idea of the importance of mutual exchange within art and culture was a radical, democratic and republican notion. Wilde explained that Aestheticism, with its ‘passionate cult of pure beauty, its flawless devotion to form, its exclusive and sensitive nature,’ drew its inspiration from the French Revolution because democracy was ‘the most primary factor of its production’ and ‘the first condition of its birth’. Because it was democratic and transnational, art could transmit ideas about the possibility of a better life through ‘noble messages of love blown across the seas’.

Social and cultural exchange was the ‘definite conception’ of art because democracy was its ‘root and flower’. The artist could present ‘a vision at once more fervent and more vivid, an individuality more intimate and more intense’, fully charged with culture’s ‘social idea’ and its ‘social factor’. Wilde argued that culture’s potential lay in this shared reality. In it was found ‘that breadth of human sympathy which is the condition of all noble work,’ allowing it to express shared ideas, ‘as opposed to… merely personal’ ones. Art’s capacity to change people and society lay in its potential to convey ‘the love and loyalty of the men and women of the world’.

Wilde believed art should connect and transform people; he regarded it as a social practice that countered the alienating and privatised logic of competition and separation being imposed by modern capitalism. Exchange was culture’s ‘method of its expression’ because art conveyed the reality of the world. This had political implications for Aestheticism. As an internationalist and an Irish republican, Wilde was very conscious of the need to share and exchange cultural and artistic ideas across borders: ‘All noble work is not national merely, but universal’ he declared; ‘the political independence of a nation must not be confused with any intellectual isolation’.

For Wilde, art, literature and culture were forces for human unity and expressions of ‘perfect freedom’. He felt that ‘devotion to beauty and to the creation of beautiful things’ was ‘the test of all great civilised nations’. Through its constant exchange of artistic and social ideas, and sharing of literary and political thought, Aestheticism could contribute to the cause of international peace because ‘national hatreds are always strongest where culture is lowest’.  His lecture also emphasised that art and culture could unite artists with the working class: ‘between the singers of our day and the workers to whom they would sing there seems to be an ever-widening and dividing chasm, a chasm which slander and mockery cannot traverse, but which is spanned by the luminous wings of love’. Wilde would return to these ideas about global peace and the urgent need to remedy class conflict nine years later in his famous essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism’.

Today, at a time when questions of cultural inclusion and national belonging are being raised in Ireland, and elsewhere, we can still learn much from Oscar Wilde’s thoughts on the importance of sharing and exchange. Describing this practice as ‘the correlation of art’, he spent the rest of his life writing about the connections that drew people together in the hope that unity and understanding would ‘sweep away’ the barriers of class and empire that separated people from one another.

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Dr Deaglán Ó Donghaile is a British Academy Research Fellow at the Department of English, Liverpool John Moores University. His latest book, Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle, will be published by Edinburgh University Press in November. He is currently writing a critical biography of Oscar Wilde entitled Revolutionary Wilde.

Image Credit: Publicity photograph of Oscar Wilde, taken in New York by Napoleon Sarony in 1882, used under creative commons licencing from the website Oscar Wilde in America: A Selected Resource of Oscar Wilde’s Visits to America. https://www.oscarwildeinamerica.org/sarony/sarony-photographs-of-oscar-wilde-1882.html, accessed 8/9/2020.

 

 

Part of our role at the Liverpool Irish Festival is to support artists. Having been in touch since 2018, Maz O’Connor has performed as one of our ‘Visible Women’ (2019) and we are now supporting her venture into musical theatre composition.

Maz has found funding to work with a writer on an incredible project, close to our hearts, so we are helping push the call. This is a paid commission, which could lead to book publications and stage shows; so, if you have an interest in working collaboratively, with a brilliant talent, we recommend reading on.

For reference, you can read Maz’s essay Chosen Daughter on page 24 of last year’s Festival newspaper, here.

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Wanted: Theatre writer (ideally Irish/Irish heritage and female) for musical theatre commission

Fee: £1800 all-inclusive fee, funded by the EFDSS Creative Bursary Scheme

Project: Musical theatre piece based on the true life and death of Bridget Cleary; killed by her husband, and family, in Tipperary (1895) on suspicion of being a faery changeling (read more…).

Musician and composer Maz O’Connor has written songs and music for the piece, combining Irish traditional music and modern musical theatre styles. See more below.

Commission requirement: This commission –a composer collaboration- will bring together the piece’s performance narrative and develop the first hour of performance (including songs).

The heart of the piece centres on the music: Bridget’s world is a musical one. Maz will work with a writer who will respond to and build on what is created through the music. It requires someone who is excited about collaborating closely with a composer to create a holistic piece of theatre. However, the individual should possess their own artistic voice and use it to help shape the story, sensitively, to be the best it can be.

Maz is flexible about the logistics, but expects a Zoom/Skype start-point and –depending on time-spans- some face-to-face meetings. The successful applicant will be

• enthusiastic about a close collaboration and peer appraisal (giving/receiving)
• interested in the source material and Irish connectivity, possibly having Irish heritage of their own
• keen to explore female roles, with an understanding of inclusive feminism
• comfortable taking the initiative and suggesting new ideas
• confident in script-developing alone
• experienced enough to present their ideas in an industry specific and professional manner.

Progress: Maz has written the first draft of the music. A group of musicians and actor/singers workshopped this (Snape Maltings Music residency, Dec 2019). A 30min video and audio recording of the informal showing of this residency is available to those interested in applying.

Plans and opportunities:

• A one-week R&D residency at Cecil Sharp House end of Aug 2020, Coronavirus permitting
• Work-in-progress showing at Snape Malting Music’s Festival of the New (Sept 2020, format TBC)
• Liverpool Irish Festival support (ongoing) and display (Oct 2020), as appropriate given piece development, timelines and Covid-19 public health guidance
• Potential for The Finborough Theatre (London) production
• Arts Council England funding application (2021) to
  • complete written piece (preferably to continue from this commission)
  • work on full stage-production (late 2021/early 2022).

Further Information: A private link to the recording of the music and a video introduction from Maz can be emailed to interested applicants. Email [email protected].

Application: Please send a cover letter and a CV, complete with an example of your writing to: [email protected]  by midnight (BST) Sun 31 May 2020. Shortlisted applicants will be offered a (chemistry test) Zoom/Skype interview in June, with a view to the collaboration starting Mon 6 Jul 2020.