A cross-cultural play, which has had problems putting Arab actors on an Israeli stage, was up for discussion at the Irish Society for Theatre Research's first meeting, writes Sara Keating
There has been a pressing need over the last few years for the development of an organisation dedicated to the study of Irish drama and Irish theatre practices.
As the volume of work by Irish writers being produced worldwide has increased, and the work of Irish playwrights has begun to emanate from abroad - Frank McGuinness, Marina Carr and Tom Murphy, providing a few major examples of the trend - it is increasingly necessary to develop different ways of interrogating Irish theatre outside of an Irish theatre context.
Meanwhile, the growing influence of Culture Ireland's touring initiative, the active touring schedules of companies such as Druid Theatre and Rough Magic, and the increase in the production of classic Irish texts in different cultural contexts, are revealing the effects of cultural globalisation that have gone hand-in-hand with Ireland's economic expansion.
At the same time, traditional frameworks for studying theatre have been expanding too. Whereas the study of theatre was traditionally confined within drama modules of English literature departments, theatre studies has gradually become a separate discipline, taught and practised within university departments dedicated to the performing arts, and embracing a wide understanding of performance that includes dance, opera, and cultural performances, as well as traditional theatre.
The Irish Society for Theatre Research (ISTR), which had its inaugural meeting at Queen's University Belfast this month, was founded by a group of leading Irish and international scholars to engage with the changing conditions in Irish theatre culture.
The programme of speakers and presentations at its first meeting demonstrated a refreshingly diverse interest in theatre scholarship and performance practice. What Dr Paul Murphy, chair of the society's steering committee and a lecturer at Queen's University, calls "the full spectrum of Irish theatre from page to stage" was evident in presentations that focused on eclectic strands of the performing arts (opera, dance, virtual embodiment in internet spaces, such as the Second Life phenomenon), performance practices (the relationship between writer and director, and the relationship between community theatre and audience), and more traditional avenues of exploration (gender, cultural identity, nationalism).
One of ISTR's key goals, according to the society's manifesto, is to "provide a space for theatre practitioners to engage with scholars of Irish theatre". Although the majority of delegates this year were academics, there were some notable presentations of practice-based research.
Actress and drama facilitator Ellen Burns, for example, who works with community-theatre groups such as the International Theatre Laboratory, discussed the difficulties of assessing and recording audience responses to community theatre.
Using poems and cartoons created by participants in response to performances and workshops, Burns showed how subjective responses can illuminate the potentially powerful individual effects of performance, but that the very subjective nature of these responses can become dangerously anecdotal.
Eva Urban, a doctoral researcher at UCD, discussed similar difficulties in her work, recording the work of playwright Dave Duggan and Sole Purpose Productions, who use theatre and film to promote social dialogue in community situations in Northern Ireland in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement.
Sole Purpose's productions invite audiences to stay behind after performances and encourage individual members to redirect the stage action in accordance with their own feelings about particular situations. Duggan's most recent play, AH6905, was seen in Dublin's Dental Hospital at the Dublin Fringe Festival last year.
Duggan himself made one of the most interesting contributions to ISTR's weekend programme, participating in a panel discussion with Orna Akad, a writer and director from Tel Aviv, and David Grant, a theatre director, lecturer at Queen's, and ex-director of the Dublin Theatre Festival.
Duggan, Grant and Akad discussed a cross-cultural theatre project that they are collaborating on, which involves Arab and Jewish actors in Israel, as well as Northern Irish actors in its Belfast context.
Grant spoke eloquently about the cross-cultural influences of the collaborative project, which is working towards the development of an image-based performance that will explore the resonance between Bloody Sunday and a similar event in Israel in October 2000, although the group understand that "there are no easy parallels" between the two countries. The final performance will use texts in four languages (Arabic, English, Hebrew and Irish) and will be performed in Belfast and Israel.
However, the project has already been beset by problems, and Akad spoke movingly on the difficulties that the Haifan end of the project has encountered so far, namely the social tensions between Jews and Arabs in contemporary Israel; as Grant explained "there is nothing more controversial than putting an Arabic actor on the Israeli stage".
For the next stage of the project, Akad said, they will have to bring the Arab and Jewish actors over to Belfast to rehearse and perform, with the hope that positive publicity in Ireland might generate the necessary approval within Israel for a production to go ahead in Haifa.
Following the panel discussion, a group of students from the drama department at Queen's gave a short evocative multi-lingual performance. The use of theatrical tableaux helped to translate the Arabic, Hebrew and Irish sections of the work into the more universal language of physical movement, and showed the potential for the project to achieve both its theatrical and its social aims of shared cultural understanding.
While director Pam Brighton from Dubblejoint Productions, actor/director Sarah-Jane Scaife, writer/director Helena Enright and writer Brian McAvera also attended the conference, there was a disappointmentthat more theatre practitioners were not involved.
McAvera, whose play Picasso's Women will be produced by a newly renovated Focus Theatre at the end of this year, hopes the society will become increasingly interdisciplinary. Meanwhile, as the sole representative of dance, Sharon Phelan, who has danced professionally with Siamsa Tíre among other companies and is currently researching a PhD on the evolution of the Irish dance tradition, expressed concern that theatre was being privileged over other forms of the performing arts, although opera was also represented in the programme by Áine Sheil of Trinity College Dublin.
This was ISTR's first meeting, and at the AGM there was optimism about increased participation from the theatre community in the coming years; as any theatre scholar worth their salt will admit, it is the theatre makers, rather than the scholars, that control the future of the art. However, every theatre artist will admit it is those who document their art that ensure it lives on.
The recent news that the Theatre and Performing Arts Archive at the Linen Hall Library will close in June was discussed fervently among all of the ISTR delegates; Ireland's theatre past, as such scholarship shows us, is the key to its future posterity.
The first edition of ISTR's bi-annual publication, Irish Theatre Journal, will be published later this year
