2012 July » Joe Salvatore

Reconnecting with Irish history through two different theatre experiences: Dalkey Castle and Sean O’Casey

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Jul 312012

Monday marked the beginning of academic week #2 on the applied theatre course. Students and staff had a chance to rest on Sunday, and students submitted their first academic journals to their tutors on Monday morning.

We made our fourth site visit of the course to Dalkey Castle and Heritage Centre. We’ve included this site on the course since 2004, and we’re always greeted with hospitality and enthusiasm by Margaret Dunne, the manager of the centre. Dalkey has a reputation as being a very wealthy suburb of Dublin. It’s been described to me as the equivalent of Beverly Hills. Several Irish artists of international fame make their homes there including Maeve Binchy, Bono, the Edge, Van Morrison, Enya, and Neil Jordan. Dalkey also has a great literary tradition, including serving as the location for chapter two of Joyce’s Ulysses.

Dalkey Castle is largely intact, and when Margaret took over as the manager of the heritage centre attached to the castle, she recognized the rich history of the castle and the town itself. Margaret talked with the group about identifying what already exists in a place where one is working. What are the raw materials? What can the artist-manager build from? In Margaret’s case, her background in theatre played a major role in how she moved forward with the centre. She successfully created the Deilg Inis Living History Theatre Company, a professional company of actors charged with animating the historical sites at the centre, which include the castle and a church to St. Begnet, the patron saint of Dalkey. We had a great experience with the actors on our tour of the sites, and it was exciting to see how theatre could be used to truly engaging an audience in the detailed history of a location. The actors engaged with us at a very high level, and I appreciated their ability to pitch their performances and their improvised interactions to a group of adults. We then had a tour of the town of Dalkey, including some of the beautiful homes and views of Dalkey Island. Once again, Margaret Dunne and Dalkey did not disappoint, as I heard several positive comments from students about how inspiring it was to meet Margaret and engage with all of the great programming she has created at the heritage site.

Students then spent their first session in the devising process with Jenny Macdonald and Declan Gorman. Over the course of six working sessions, students will now create two original works with Jenny and Declan, as a way to explore methodologies that can be used in community-engaged theatre creation processes. More details will emerge over the coming days, and I’m hoping to sneak in and see what’s happening in each of these rehearsals.

We ended the day with a performance of O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars presented by the Abbey Theatre in a production directed by Wayne Jordan. This production is a remount from two summers ago that will eventually go on tour, so I had seen it back when I was here in 2010. It is an Irish classic, exploring the experiences of men and women living in a Dublin tenement leading up to and during the Easter Rising of April 1916. At three hours, the play is long, but the work of the actors and the production team kept me fully engaged from start to finish. I had mentally prepared myself for a bit of a struggle, as I thought that my focus might wander a bit since I had seen it before. Not the case, as I found myself fully immersed in the world of the play via the excellent acting, the innovative staging, and the design elements. We saw the show in previews, so I sensed a few tempo issues that are still coming into alignment. However, those moments didn’t detract from my overall experience of the story. O’Casey’s play has an epic feel, and his characters are quite Shakespearean in their plights and their verbal expression of their feelings. The production locates the comedy interspersed with all of the pathos of a play about suffering during a revolution, and I was appreciative of this reality that Wayne Jordan achieves through his direction of the play. It’s a beautiful and painful production that left me with questions about history, choice, love, dedication, devotion. What’s the difference between dedication and devotion? Seems like Jack and Nora wrestle with that question whenever they’re on stage together. And their wrestling, particularly in the first act, is quite memorable.

Both of the above experiences allow audiences to invest in the details of specific human experiences at important historical moments in the history of Ireland. Margaret Dunne expressed an importance in staying as true to possible to the facts of a given situation, whereas O’Casey clearly created a fictional group of people living in a fictional tenement at the time of an actual event in an actual city. While somewhat different in their approaches, both experiences are unified in their unique way of exploring history through theatre.

See below for images from the trip to Dalkey.

An Irish Day of Rest . . . and Hill Climbing

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Jul 292012

Today I had lunch with my friend Andrea Ainsworth. I’ve known Andrea since 2004 when she first taught on the Ireland study abroad course. We have continued to stay in touch over the years, and we meet for lunch or dinner each time I come to Dublin. Andrea works as the Voice Director for the Abbey Theatre, so we’ll get to see her work on Monday evening via the Abbey’s production of The Plough and the Stars.

Joanna Parkes then picked me up, and we drove to a destination that has become a ritual for both of us each time I’m in Ireland for the summer. In 2006, I taught two weeks of the summer abroad course, while my then partner, the late Craig Hamrick, was back in NYC. Craig was too ill to come to Ireland that summer, and it was difficult to be away from him. Toward the end of the program, just as I was about to head back home to re-enter the care-taking role for Craig, Joanna and our friend and colleague Sharon Murphy brought me to the top of a hill in just outside of Dublin. It was a lovely hike through the woods, and at the top of the hill, I could see out into the Irish Sea and all around the city. When Craig passed away in September of that year, Joanna, Sharon, and Declan Gorman returned to the hill and made a short film and sent it to me for Craig’s memorial. Ever since 2006, whenever I return to Ireland in the summer, Joanna and I make this trek, along with other important people in my life who may be visiting. Anyone who has come there remarks how special it is. It has a name, which always escapes me, but Joanna and I like to call it “Our Mountain.” We had hoped to bring her son Dualta this time, but he elected to stay in town and rest after his long night in Bray with the fish and chips.

After our trek up, we had some tea and sweets in the little town of Enniskerry, another part of the ritual. It was a great afternoon, in spite of the weather, as we managed to dodge the rain, wind, and hail. Yes, hail. That was a first for me in Ireland.

Below you’ll find some images from the day. Click here for a 360 view from the top of the hill. The body of water is the Irish Sea, and I’m looking towards Wales. “Our Mountain” is one of my favorite places in the world. Thanks to Joanna for always being a willing and able participant!

First Irish applied theatre week in the can. Two more to go.

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Jul 282012

Today the NYU students presented their Educational Resource Packet projects (ERPs). We worked with two plays by Enda Walsh: Chatroom and New Electric Ballroom.

In the debrief following the projects, the teaching staff agreed that these were very strong presentations, and that they included some of the most theatrical moments via dramatic activities that we’ve seen in our many years of teaching this course. Beyond the creativity on display, we also noticed an exceptional level of collaboration and cohesiveness amongst the group members in each presentation. We’ve come to believe that this is a very strong group of students, but I also think that Joanna Parkes did an excellent job of unrolling the ERP model and the assignment. The clarity around expectations helped the students to achieve very strong and well-structured plans for their pre- and post-performance workshop schemes.

Additionally, Joanna and Jenny Macdonald feel that the accountability to group work has increased because of the introduction this year of the Evidence of Collaboration Assessment Sheet. Each member of a working group uses this assessment sheet to evaluate the work of every other member in the group. Students know what the expectations are in advance, and it seems to help manage the creation process. These sheets will be collected on Monday morning, and each person will receive a mark that is an average of the other group members’ assessment of her/his work. This final score on the ERP project contributes to the Preparation, Participation, Collaboration mark in the course, which is worth 20% of the overall grade. I’ve been using variations on these sheets for a number of semesters now, and I think they have consistently helped me to maintain some order in the often chaotic and frustrating world of group project work.

Following the presentations, Joanna staged a bit of a celebratory hooley with the students, as a way to honor the work that they’ve completed at the conclusion of this very intense first week. The students then went off to enjoy their free Saturday evening and Sunday, and the teaching staff traveled off to Bray for a walk along the Irish Sea and some fish and chips.

We’ve had an excellent first week on the course. Thought-provoking, cage-rattling (in a good way), and inspiring on many levels. I look forward to the coming week when we’ll travel to Dalkey Castle and Belfast for more inputs, and the students will begin their own devising work with Jenny Macdonald and Declan Gorman. One of these days I’m actually going to find a way to pull on the Irish literary tradition and write one of my plays. They’re just not coming right now. But lots of other ideas are, hence these blog posts. Maybe I should just be happy to be writing.

See below some images from the student work today and the trip out to Bray.

Lessons in minding with Louise Lowe

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Jul 272012

Today’s input on the applied theatre course came via a very exciting Irish artist named Louise Lowe, who was joined throughout the day by members of her company, ANU Productions. I met Louise last Saturday, and we’ve heard her mentioned by other practitioners in almost every session that we’ve experienced this week. I joked this afternoon that it was like the first act of Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, where we hear about Big Daddy for an entire act before he finally enters in Act Two. After experiencing Louise’s work with the students today, Act Two was well worth the wait. Louise is making work in a variety of different settings and in a number of styles. She manages to get actors and non-actors to sign on for some intense durational and environmental performance experiences, and she’s working in Dublin, Belfast, and other communities in between. Suffice it to say, there’s absolutely no grass growing under Louise Lowe’s feet.

Louise’s input followed the general outline of most of the experiences we’ve had thus far. She spent the morning discussing past works she’s created with her company, ANU Productions, and then in the afternoon session, she guided the students through ensemble-building work, and then set them to the task of creating original works inspired by the neighborhood and circumstances of her latest work, The Boys of Foley Street, which will premiere at the Dublin Theatre Festival this fall. Sandwiched between the morning and the afternoon, we received an abridged tour of the neighborhood from local historian and folklorist, Terry Fagan, and through his storytelling, we gained genuine insight into how this one city block has provided Louise with inspiration for an entire cycle of performances that she is creating with her company.

I took a lot away from observing Louise’s work with the students. Rather than do a blow by blow of all that happened in detail, I’ll list a few quotations, paraphrases, and moments, and try to illuminate from there.

1. Louise asked the students to think about three questions: where do you stand? How do you begin? What are you most afraid of? Straight out of the chute, these questions were on the table. A great way to immediately take the temperature of a potential group of collaborators. Students interviewed each other and re-presented each others’ answers. They were then asked to spend the day thinking about how they might present their partner’s answers in a performance piece. Louise completed the day’s work with a re-visit to those potential ideas.

2. Cubist dramaturgy: exposing multiple surfaces. An area that I want to research a bit more.

3. Louise paraphrased: Don’t pay attention to yourself onstage, but pay attention to everyone else around you. Really pay attention.
May sound obvious, but my own experiences tell me that it bears repeating. Constantly.

4. “Too often we get stuck having love ins as artists.”
I may get this made into a t-shirt. This notion of the love in is really dangerous. It’s linked to Bogart’s assertion that resistance is a necessary element of any creative process. I just appreciate Louise’s way of conveying it.

5. Louise paraphrased: Stop acting and look after the others. Be mindful of the others. Mind the others.
Phrases like this came up repeatedly throughout the day. I liked the sound of the philosophy, but then it kicked in when some students presented a piece outdoors and began to draw more attention to themselves than was anticipated. I witnessed Louise and four company members fan out around our group like Obama’s Secret Service corps, and embody what it means to “mind others.” Their presence immediately helped to diffuse the situation at hand, without interrupting the work of the performers or creating conflict within the community. They have embedded themselves in a studio space within the community where their current work resides, and as a result, they’ve gained some deeper connection to the location and its people. It makes me think about the notion of insider/outsider, and how Louise and her colleagues have struck a delicate balance of trust and understanding with the community, but that the delicate balance requires constant sensitivity and re-negotiation. There is no resting on the laurels of past interactions. To me this speaks volumes about how community-engaged artists need to be thinking and intentional when they enter and/or create within a community.

6. “When you mind other people, you cease to become indulgent.”
This takes practice and a lot of self-reflection. But the benefits are immense.

Spending the day with Louise and her colleagues, hearing about their work in more detail, and witnessing my students create reminded me that we all need to have our houses in order if we’re going to make work like this. I was struck that the company itself seemed to be in order as well. People commit to making the work, and the company as an entity commits to them. There’s something synergistic about how it works for these artists that’s inexplicable after just one day of being with them, but my gut tells me that it has a lot to do with the minding. Hence, the title of the blog post. How would art making change profoundly if all artists took the time to mind their collaborators? Not smother or coddle them or always agree with them, but mind them. This is something I’d like to know.

Below are some images from the day’s work.

Art is discursive: a day with Upstate Theatre

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Jul 262012

Today we worked with Upstate Theatre in Drogheda, a city of about 37,000 people in County Louth. This is our eighth summer program working with Upstate, and the company has rolled out an amazing welcome and an inspiring input each and every year. Today was no exception.

We were greeted by Upstate board member Irene White and Director Declan Mallon, and Declan proceeded to walk us through the history and ethos of Upstate Theatre. This was followed by two panel discussions with artists talking about the creation of new work with members of the Drogheda community. Feidlim Cannon and some of his company members talked about a new work called The Far Side that will premiere in November of this year, and Paul Hayes and actors from his project talked about the very successful Ship Street Revisited, a site-specific work that has its audience travel to five different houses to explore the people and history of Ship Street in Drogheda. We were also welcomed by the Mayor of Drogheda, Paul Bell, and he presented me with the coat of arms of the city (see below).

After a wonderful lunch, we walked through town to the Barbican Centre for a three-hour movement workshop with Zara Starr, a choreographer working with Upstate on a new piece about the idea of home in Ireland. Zara took the group through an intense physical process that pushed the groups’ collaboration skills to the max. She followed this with some great work to create movement phrases, what she called strings. She set the group off in pairs, and asked the partners to create 12 points where they moved around, by, and/or through each other. Once these strings were set, she then asked the performers to take the work one step further by adding various dynamics to the phrases. Following a break, Zara then split the students into four groups and gave them 20 minutes to create an original piece about home. Each of the groups shared their work, and Zara recorded the material, with the intention that it may actually find its way into Upstate’s new work.

Upstate ended the day with sandwiches and drinks at a pub in town, complete with a trio of Irish musicians. As usual, the group left with a lot to ponder based on the inspiring work that we saw and participated in throughout the day. Our work with Upstate is always a highlight for this course, as students really see the range of possibilities that exists when a company fully embraces what it means to be engaged with the community. Upstate has been doing that from its beginnings, and it is evident in the depth and scope of the work that the company creates and produces.

Here are some additional notes, thoughts, and quotations, that I took from the day’s events. I think they are worth consideration for anyone working in an applied or community-engaged way.

From Declan Mallon’s presentation:

“Cultural inclusion is an equal right to participate in the nation’s artistic and cultural life . . . a fundamental democratic right.”

“Civic aesthetic space belongs in the psychological space that we all share.”

Sometimes the methodologies we use don’t work for the communities we’re creating with. We have to change the approach so that we build trust with those participants.

“Art is discursive.”

The terms “citizen artist” and “artist citizen”

Reminder: The belief that all people are creative

In community work, people may be the most comfortable with their own stories.

“There’s no one way to skin this cat called art.”

“We are multicultural within our own communities.”

From Feidlim Cannon:

Hand over the workshop to the participants. Make it about them instead of about the artist.

“Trying to make the screen dance” as it relates to the use of video in performance.

Because the lead artist is not from Drogheda, it may be easier for him to make choices about what stories and materials stay in the play and what parts come out.

Concise steps for interviewing participants for stories: “Interview, take the testimony, go off and investigate it.”

From Paul Hayes:

Paul mentioned the “rules of dramaturgy” for his project, and it made me think of the importance of aesthetic. Being rigorous about consistency in performance is part of that.

A paraphrase: Paul is aiming his shows at people who don’t come into formal theatres.
How can we all think more intentionally about this idea? Not everyone feels comfortable coming into a traditional theatre. How can we tell stories in places other than traditional theatre? It’s happening, but it needs to happen more. It’s a new challenge for myself.

From Zara Starr:

Create a string of movement with a partner:
Around someone
By someone
Through someone

“Hold on tightly; let go lightly.”
Practice this when creating new material for a work in progress.

“If the art is good, it can hold a lot.”

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Jul 252012

The title of this post comes from something that Phil Kingston, Community and Education Manager at the Abbey Theatre, the national theatre of Ireland, said during his facilitation today. As part of an exploration of applied theatre practices in Ireland, Phil hosted a three-hour session with the students, and he invited five of his facilitators and staff to join him in the presentation.

The morning began with us meeting Phil at the front doors of the Abbey, where he proceeded to greet each of us by name with a handshake. Phil had checked out the pictures and bios of the students in advance on our online course site at LORE.com, and he had taken the time to “know” everyone before we arrived. Throughout his three hours of work with us, Phil repeatedly made specific references to past experiences that students had included in their bios. His greeting set a welcoming tone that continued throughout the entire session.

Phil’s facilitators demonstrated a number of challenging moments that they have encountered in the various community projects that they’ve been working on, and it was helpful for us to see that issues that arise in Irish culture are often similar to the kinds of challenges we face in US settings. Conversely, both settings have their own unique challenges as well. It just reminded me to reflect again about community. I encouraged everyone to consider the commonalities that a community of practitioners might share, while also thinking about how experiences might be vastly different based on geographic location, time period, etc.

Phil also provided the students with the opportunity to choose a show from the 2012 Dublin Fringe Festival program and begin to consider different education and outreach possibilities that could be created for each show. The exercise provided an excellent, somewhat related practice run for the final project in the course, a prospectus for an original applied theatre project. Students encountered various degrees of specificity and success with their brainstorming in this process, thus allowing for a very safe experiment in thinking about developing new artistic ideas.

The group also had a chance to hear about a project that Phil’s office is developing with women who work as sex workers or who have left the sex work industry. The project involves interviewing these women and learning more about their stories. These stories will eventually lead to a theatre piece with a tentative showing date in November. As this kind of work with interviews is of particular interest to me, I was excited to hear about this new development for the Abbey. Then to model this project’s process, students worked in groups of three to interview one member of their trio, and then the other two students created a short improvisational piece representing what the interviewee said. Six pairs showed work, and it was moving and respectful. Building artistic work from the stories, ideas, and beliefs of real people requires the artist-facilitator to have a heightened sense of empathy. The interviewees discussed amongst themselves how it felt to be interviewed, and I appreciated the empathy-building that occurred as a result.

I also asked the students to begin to think about what each of our facilitators is doing, and how it might be helpful for the participants (them) in these different inputs that we’ve had and will continue to have. I’ve asked the students to always stay fully engaged as artist-participants in the various processes they are experiencing, but then to reflect after the fact about how that particular process might have unfolded. This prompt of “what is happening and why is it helpful” is one way to focus observations of another’s teaching, facilitating, or directing practice.

At one point in the session Phil said, “If the art is good, it can hold a lot.” I’ve known this concept to be true, but it’s always taken me more words to say it. I appreciated the brevity of Phil’s words, and the power of their simplicity. Artists making work in communities have a responsibility to aesthetics, just like any other artist. Maybe more so. The art-making can’t primarily be about “fixing” injustices or people or societies. Or about therapy. All of these things may be byproducts of the work, but they can’t be the primary focus of the work.

“If the art is good, it can hold a lot.” Simple and to the point.

Thanks to Phil Kingston and his team for a fantastic and inspiring session today!

Settling into the academic work and a statement about community-engaged work by Declan Gorman

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Jul 242012

Very busy today with the applied theatre course. Morning session focused on continuing our discussion of community with Declan Gorman and Jenny Macdonald. Each facilitator provided a short session on how s/he might begin work with a new group of community participants. Declan also shared a statement that he wrote about reflecting on what applied and community-engaged theatre might be, and I’ve included his words below as part of this blog post.

The afternoon session with Joanna Parkes introduced the Educational Resource Packet model, which is a way of preparing a community to experience a play for the first time. The model comes out of work that Joanna helped to develop at the Abbey Theatre, and she uses this methodology as the template for our students to create packets for two plays by Enda Walsh, Chatroom and New Electric Ballroom. Students will work in groups over the next few days to develop these packets, and they will present on Saturday afternoon. Joanna delivered a four-hour session, which included the Abbey’s Archives Resource Box, an educational tool that helps communities throughout Ireland to explore and understand the history of the national theatre of Ireland.

The evening featured a performance of A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde at the Gate Theatre. We were lucky enough to score tickets to the opening, and even sat a couple rows in front of Gabriel Byrne, who was in attendance that evening. The production featured a gorgeous costume design and some very fine acting. The play itself raises some questions about Wilde was actually going for with this story, particularly in the second half. Seems like he didn’t quite know how to wrap it up, so he kept heading down a new road, then backtracking, then heading down another road. He finally found his way, and the play finishes up. But suffice it to say, it takes awhile to get there.

What follows is the short text that Declan Gorman shared with us in his facilitation. I appreciated his statements immensely, and his transparency with us about needing to move through this writing process to relocate himself in his own practice. His words helped all of us to reflect on what it is we’re doing here and what we aim to do in the future.

From Declan:

A group of people gathered in a room is not a community – not yet – even if common cause has brought them to the room and common social bonds unite them outside the room (such as race, shared geographical home, gender, disability or commitment to a given social justice principle).

The term ‘Community’, when it is truly applied, when it is intended to describe an active, conscious social organism – and not used simply as a flaccid label to describe outwardly homogenous groupings in society (the Irish Community; the Gay Community etc.) – must be earned by cohesive, collaborative action.

That can be achieved in a room or a city square or an athletic club by shared commitment to arts practices, cohesive protest, sport, collective response to tragic events or other action. It reaches its highest plane however where conscious strategies are employed and embraced actively to celebrate commonality, recognise and respect difference and above all to MAKE something.

As artists, we automatically, instinctively and systematically make, and that is why our natural work if applied consciously (and not patronisingly) is proven to add value to community building.

Our responsibility as artists is seldom to create community. It is not for any individual to create a community, however charismatic or well-intentioned. That can only ever be a collective action. But we are sometimes called upon and can offer to enhance community by enabling the most beautiful and rigorous making that the forming community can achieve.

There are many ways and methods that artists can bring to this task – there is no single correct or best one. Different artists have different ‘tools’ that they share within good collective arts practice. But the endgame is always the same – whether we are working with disaffected youth in a border town somewhere or with a group of keen students on a study abroad program – to apply our artistic skills, intuitions and methods towards creating quality art in communal settings and thus enable the growth and consolidation of that community.

The course work begins

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Jul 232012

First day of course work on the applied theatre experience in Dublin. Some quick thoughts and observations:

1. “Applied theatre” is an academic term according to Helen Nicholson in her text Applied Drama. Theatre in communities has been happening for many years prior to the emergence of applied theatre as an academic discipline. Like so many things in the academy, people gain stature through the naming process. Terms come into existence so that phenomena can be named and categorized. I appreciate the term, but I don’t always find that it’s necessary to categorize the work that I make. The term “applied theatre” provides legibility and legitimacy for certain kinds of work in the academy. Seems a bit unnecessary on many levels. I may go to academic hell for writing that, but my ticket to hell has been stamped for so many other reasons at this point that I’m not sure it makes a difference. Main point: I worry that in our urgency to name something in the academy, we sometimes dilute that thing’s core principle. In this case, applied theatre needs to be theatre with a strong artistic aesthetic. Do we need anything beyond that, regardless of who we’re making it with? That’s the core question for me at the moment.

2. Orla Hasson facilitated an opening exercise with the students and asked them to consider what it means to be a community. The session concluded with a series of post-its on the wall documenting important characteristics of any community and hopes that students had for their newly developed community here in Ireland. After witnessing Orla’s facilitation, Joanna Parkes noted how an exercise in the hands of another facilitator can unfold in a completely different way and yield different outcomes. We know this as facilitators, but it was exciting for all of us to see Orla at work. I liked so much of the language that she used and how she transitioned from one section of the exercise to the next. And she consistently reminded the group about tempo. Slow. Yes. Like it. Note to self.

3. Seeing Declan Gorman in his one-man show introduced me to a lesser known work by James Joyce and made me want to read it. Through his nuanced portrayal of multiple characters of varying ages and experiences, I was reminded of the rich history of Dublin, as well as how theatre can actually capture the essence of a community through the enactment of the people and the time in which they live. Declan created a stellar adaptation of primary and secondary source material and left the audience wanting more of his storytelling. An exciting work that more people need to see. The Dubliners Dilemma: check it out!

See the images below from our morning facilitation with Orla Hasson in the Beckett Centre at Trinity College.

Official social kick off in Ireland

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Jul 222012

This evening marked the official social kick off of the Community-Engaged Theatre program in Ireland. We had a reception pulled together by the graduate assistant on the course, Simone Burns, and we were joined by some of the Irish/UK teaching staff and guests: Joanna Parkes, Jenny Macdonald, Orla Hasson, Declan Gorman, and Chrissie Poulter. It was a great evening, complete with a well-traveled story cloak, food, and fellowship.

As all days have been thus far, this Sunday was not a day of rest but rather packed with errands in the morning and a long planning meeting in the afternoon. In between I managed a catch up lunch with Joanna Parkes, a tutor on the course, and actually the longest standing member of the Irish teaching team. Joanna has been working on the course since 2003 when it was located in Cork, and she represents a consistency and institutional memory over all of these years. She successfully mentors students while also helping to keep the course grounded in current pedagogical practices and unrolling the first major group project. I also find her sense of humor and her calm way of managing every situation a huge asset as the director of the course.

At the planning meeting I had the chance to meet our newest tutor, Orla Hasson. Orla comes on board highly recommended by the rest of the teaching staff, and her work in community-engaged theatre throughout the world continues to add layers of additional expertise to the experience for all of us. I’m always so humbled by the work of my Irish colleagues, and I can’t wait for more conversations with Orla about applied theatre and her community experiences.

Declan Gorman is another long-standing veteran of the course, and he arrived to the meeting today with his usual thoughtful questions and comments. As we planned the first two days of work, Declan and Jenny both reminded us about the notion of community and how we need to think about the NYU student group as a developing community within this particular context. Declan’s thoughts about how to move forward over the next two days helped us to hammer out a plan that really takes this notion of community into account, and I’m excited that it will be at the forefront of our course work throughout these three weeks. Orla will start us off on Monday morning with an exploration of what that word “community” even means, and the conversation will go from there. I’m also thrilled that we will see Declan’s newest artistic work, The Dubliners Dilemma, a one-man show that adapts James Joyce’s novel for the stage. Declan returns to acting after a 20-year hiatus, and that in and of itself is inspiring to me. I can’t wait to see his show!

This notion of community needs to remain at the forefront of the course work, as community-engaged theatre requires us to understand ourselves in relationship to the communities in which we work. How are we the insider or the outside, and how does that inform the way that we facilitate? How does membership in a community actually evolve? Is membership ascribed to an individual? Is an individual born into a community? How does an individual somehow place herself or himself into a community? Does that constitute membership? Is membership in a community about physical location? Psychic location? Both? How do philosophies of essentialist and constructivist identity development contribute to this dialogue? The quest for answers begins on Monday morning and lasts for three weeks. We’ll see what we can discover.

Below see some pictures from this evening’s reception, as my students met in their smaller tutor groups for the first time.

Long live Eddie and Peanut Butter

Getting my bearings in Ireland

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Jul 212012

So the picture above is of Houth, one of the many beautiful places in and around Dublin and the Irish Sea. Houth is the land off in the distance. My colleague Anne Marie took me there today for coffee and scones as we discussed all of the logistics that she planned for the upcoming three weeks. Anne Marie has been working with us in Dublin since the first year of the course in 2004, and it’s always a joy to return to her.

After meeting with Anne Marie, I met a new colleague on the course this year. Her name is Louise Lowe, and she’s making site-specific work in communities in Dublin and Belfast. After missing each other for about 25 minutes, we finally connected and proceeded to spend over two hours discussing her work and her philosophies about creating work in communities. Our conversations around a rigorous aesthetic were particularly resonant for me, as I often find that community-engaged performances can suffer aesthetically because people believe in the “reason” for making the work more than they believe in making an exemplary piece of art. Sometimes process is valued over the final product, and one place where Louise and I shared common ground came around the idea that a strong process will most often yield a strong product. I found our conversation thought-provoking and affirming on so many levels. Louise also took me to the site where she will work with my students on Friday, a somewhat forgotten city block just off of the bustling O’Connell Street. I’ll be able to be more specific about the location after her work on Friday, but suffice it to say, I’ve been to Dublin a dozen times over the last eight years, and I’d not seen this block even though I’ve walked around it many times before. Louise has a powerful personality and presentation, and she’s not messing around. She’s serious and rigorous, and I’m excited to see what comes of her work on Friday.

After Louise, I met with Chrissie Poulter, a faculty member at Trinity College, specializing in community-engaged theatre. Chrissie has worked on the NYU program since 2004, and after a three-year career break at a college in Leeds, UK, Chrissie is back at Trinity. I’ve had the privilege of witnessing Chrissie facilitate any number of workshops with students over the years, and I’ve met no other practitioner able to step into a room of people and take the group’s temperature the way Chrissie can. She’s worked in settings throughout the world, most notably at the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. When a facilitator works in that kind of conflicted area, she has to understand the temperature of the given encounter very early on in the work, and Chrissie has honed that sixth sense in a way that I hope to have some day. I’ve got a ways to go. I’m hoping to find room in our packed schedule to have Chrissie join us for a session, as her voice adds a depth and history to the work that offers a profound sense of the scope and development of the practice of applied theatre.

My final meeting of the day came over dinner with Sara Simons, a doctoral student at NYU visiting Dublin after attending the IDIERI conference in Limerick. Sara is doing some great work around using drama to train pre-service teachers in diversity and social justice education practices. She’s got a lot of passion about what she does, so it was great to share a meal and hear her takes on the international gathering of drama practitioners.

My students begin arriving in the morning, and we kick off Sunday evening at 7:00pm. We’ll see if I’m able to keep up with this blogging. Somewhere along the way I’ve got to be able to write a play here and there. And get in some exercise. And prep for all of these experiences with the students. It’s overwhelming…

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