53 – A Triumvirate (Or Triptych?) In London Town.

There has been something of a lull in my blogging, mainly because I am busy accosting young actresses looking for interviews (One happily responded “I like being accosted!”) and also writing academic papers. But last week, I got to bring photographs of Aideen, Frolie and Kay Swift to the University of London and show them off at the Irish Society of Theatrical Research Conference. Birkbeck is a beautiful place in the centre of Bloomsbury: all high ceilings and white sash windows, looking out on Gordon Square where the trees have been gilded by a mild English autumn. Virginia Woolf worked in an office here, and it’s easy to imagine George Moore strolling by the railings downstairs. As darkness fell, some of the rooms were still lit by the pale golden light of Vanessa Bell’s paintings. Aideen would have been impressed, putting her nose in the air and using her best English accent.

I got much fun out of imagining ‘my girls’ in these hallowed halls, giggling and nudging each other at all the talk of prostitutes (this year’s hot topic). They probably would have been more at home in the hotel (tiny room, too hot, broken TV) or in the Palace Theatre, where I managed to get a seat in the gods for The Commitments. Anyway, I won’t reproduce my paper here, because it’s now in re-writes following the discussions; but I did get to talk about dancing again. (I first talked about it here in Dancing A Jig In The Bed, which helped shape my thoughts for the paper.)

The best thing about these conferences is the people you meet over coffee, or at your (often meagrely-attended) panel. And I think it was really useful for me to be reminded that the dancing restrictions weren’t exclusive to the Emerald Isle. The furore was going on all over Europe and some wonderful academics have already written about the Ragtime dance craze in the US. In the US, the consternation over the black bottom and other flapper dances happened just after the turn of the century and continued into the 1920s. It took until the mid-1930s for it to reach Ireland, so that it landed just in time to infiltrate the constitution of the new Irish Free State. But no matter how many times I re-write that paper, the one thing I can’t get used to are the figures on Irish female emigration.

Since the 1930s, Irish women have simply upped and left, to try and make a life for themselves elsewhere. We outnumber male emigrants. We go when we’re younger than the men. We go alone and we don’t come back. In this way, Irish women are unique. Aideen was one such woman. Frolie would have been, if her family had let her. Nancy Harris, the playwright, also spoke at the conference about the opportunities afforded to her by London which she would never get in Ireland. (Despite being run over by a taxi on her first day in the city, Harris has no plans to re-locate.)

The best part of staying in Bloomsbury is that you can walk all the way home from the West End, singing the songs from The Commitments or thinking over the day’s papers. So much of this year’s conference was about Irish women ‘reclaiming their voices’, but I found myself wondering more and more: what are we going to do with those voices when we have them back? Irish women have become consumed with reacting, with looking back, with looking for redress … Where are the visionaries saying: This is who I am now, and this is who I want to be, and where I want to be?

The answer did come to me in London, in tandem with the final call for my flight home: these women are emerging. I’ve been racking my brains for the last few weeks, trying to find women in theatre facing the future with courage and vision. I had two, but had been seeking an elusive third. (I need three to write about it. This may be superstition, but something about three suggests a pattern.) Dr. Aoife McGrath of Queen’s University was generous enough to give me a third example, so that my trip to London could end with a jig-hop.

My Triumvirate Are:

1 – Stefanie Preissner. Since Solpadeine Is My Boyfriend first reduced me to a blubbering mess during the Fringe a few years ago, I’ve been campaigning for all young theatre students to see this show. Preissner’s verse carries you along, but there’s an emotional whack that you may not see coming until you reach the end. She’s embracing the ‘we’re staying here and we’re fighting on’ argument, letting her friends head for Australia while she relies on medication to see herself through the Dublin winter. (This show is on its last run, but it’ll be at the Mill Theatre in Dundrum on November 20^th. Go see it and then thank me profusely.)

2 – Sonya Kelly. I was lucky enough in the last month to get to see a preview of her upcoming show Anywhere Else But Here. Straddling stand-up comedy, social documentary and theatre, this is an exquisite and contemporary love story. In love with an Australian citizen who wants to stay in Dublin, Kelly finds herself embarking on a ridiculously bureaucratic exercise to prove their relationship. Kelly writes like a dream, and this was a tantalising dream which has yet to give up its ending. Even if it’s her lesbian lover that’s making the decision, she’s staying in Ireland and we desperately need to keep them both.

3 – Fitzgerald and Stapleton: Wage and The Work The Work. Emma Fitzgerald and Aine Stapleton have been making ‘subtly militant’ (their description) work for a while – including applying a 13.9% gap to the ticket prices to reflect the wage inequality borne by Irish women. These choreographers/dancers have been around, and I’ve read and heard about them but never truly delved into their work. They perform their dance pieces nude, challenging the representations of the ideal female form propagated by the media. They also perform with intelligence and a wry sense of humour, although this gets them rather less media attention.

As happy as I was with my triumvirate, Fitzgerald and Stapleton are something of a ‘cheat’ as they develop their work between here and New York. Like Aideen, they found in the Big Apple opportunities and creative freedom that was liberating and invigorating. But they have come back to perform – both in the Project Arts Centre and in Cork this weekend.

NONE of these shows are designed exclusively for women, but they are showing what Irish women can do and can do here in Ireland. Both Preissner and Kelly are trained actors, who decided to make their own work when parts were scarce. Aideen didn’t have that option, perhaps, in the Dublin theatre scene of the 1930s. But if she was here today I’ve no doubt she’d be on her feet, offering a standing ovation.

I would be more than happy to be corrected on this, and to hear of other women offering such vision … Please do let me know of any omissions!

In case you really want to see it, my Prezi is here: Comely Maidens Dancing In The Big Apple