Home-made in Belfast: domesticity as creative practice in Northern Irish art and performance

ABSTRACT

Domestic performance practices tend to be shaped by or to explicitly address feminist politics. In staging the very labour of homemaking as material of creative endeavour they expand, as this article explores, what counts as women’s writing. This article, a collaboration between a curator, Ciara Hickey, and theatre scholar, Trish McTighe, surveys a selection of domestic performances that have taken place in Belfast over the last several decades. By domestic performance, we mean aesthetic events or theatrical performances that are staged in a domestic setting, usually a private home. Taking three examples of this sort of work, Hickey’s domestic curation work up to 2012, The Wedding Community Play (1999), and Big Telly Theatre Company’s The House (2021), we engage with the nature of private space in a post-conflict society as well as the status of female creativity in that context.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist curating
• feminist creative collaboration
• The Wedding Community Play
• Big Telly Theatre Company
• Jo Egan
• Zoë Seaton

Kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms: these are the sorts of private and intimate spaces in which the artworks examined in this article take place and which we explore as sites of creative labour with potential for novel forms of hospitality and collaboration. Authored by a professional curator, Ciara Hickey, and a theatre scholar, Trish McTighe, both based in Belfast, this article presents a “site of collaboration” of its own. In this non-definitive survey of art practice, we “curate,” in the spirit of Hickey’s profession, three examples of domestic artwork that have taken place in the city since 1999. Each example is also a document of the creative labour of three people and their multiple (often female) collaborators: Hickey herself opens the commentary with an exploration of her practice of domestic curation, while the subsequent two sections are co-analyses of The Wedding Community Play Project (1999, henceforth The Wedding), and Big Telly Theatre Company’s The House (2021). These analyses draw on interviews with Jo Egan, a writer and theatre-maker involved in The Wedding, and Zoë Seaton, artistic director of Big Telly. Each case study presents instances of private domestic space becoming a staging ground for aesthetic events. While private space in these works is understood as being determined by gendered and ethno-sectarian binaries, this article focuses on the creative resources that these artists discover within domestic spaces and practices with, in many cases, domesticity as the means by which an artwork gets under the skin of an issue.

Belfast is the capital city of a region that most of the world associates with conflict and its legacies. While armed conflict between Unionist and Nationalist factions came to a tacit end in 1998, the 2016 Brexit referendum reignited the region’s still simmering issues about its borders, presenting an unwieldly complexity for the UK’s decoupling from the European Union. In temporal terms, each of the case studies we have selected represents a particular moment in Northern Ireland’s recent history. The tentative end of the conflict known as the Troubles that culminated in the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 is reflected within The Wedding. The post-1998 period that saw the beginnings of renewed cultural energy and imagining of a post-sectarian future is the background out of which Hickey’s work emerges. The post-Brexit moment from 2016, in which the border and its wounds were reopened, and Northern Irish society continued to grapple with the traumatic legacies of violence and partition, is apparent in The House. Furthermore, in seeking to illuminate domestic art practices against this backdrop, we bring a feminist perspective that is sensitive to the erasures of gendered lives and the flawed cultural perception that the domestic exists “outside the dynamic of history and change,” as Rita Felski puts it.¹ The work of the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, in particular her 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art, provokes us to think beyond the simplistic binary which separates everyday labour from artistic creation. In the manifesto, Ukeles proposes to clean a museum and for that to be the work of art: “my working will be the work,” she writes.² The artworks that we explore embody this valorisation of the everyday labour of maintenance that has kept worlds and lives continuing amidst sectarian and gendered violence.

While past violence and ongoing political and economic challenges present as the never-absent hum in the background of the work we discuss here, this context is not the focus. In the spirit of scholars of northern Irish literature such as Eli Davies, Alison Garden, Caroline Magennis, and Stefanie Lehner, we explore the intimate textures of spaces, communities, and artworks shaped but not wholly determined by this context of conflict. Magennis’s recent work seeks to foreground the “intimacy that formed the backbone of social life in Northern Ireland.”³ Davies has argued that the answer to the notional separation of the domestic or the feminine from politics “is to interweave the story of these domestic struggles with the more well-known stories of the conflict.”⁴ In turning to the domestic as scene of aesthetic expression in the city, we seek to emphasise the nature of lives lived creatively, in spite of conflict. The textures of the domestic we discuss may index the traumas that structure them, but what we are most interested in is the creative work that they stage. This reflects a turn to gendered micro-histories that seeks to restore the absent stories of survival, creativity, pleasure, and the work of making – both home-making and art-making. We explore these two modes of making as resonant with each other and in the case of some of the art we discuss here, fundamentally intertwined. While previous scholarship, including Magennis and Davies, has taken account of how domesticity is an important representational space within theatre and literature, we look to the literal, material space of the domestic as site for creative work. Although there is a vibrant tradition of performance work happening outside traditional theatre spaces in Northern Ireland, including from companies like Big Telly and Kabosh, the domestic-as-aesthetic site does not appear to have been documented to the same degree as it has been in the UK over the last couple of decades.⁵ This may be due to the fact that, as Stuart Andrews notes, such projects take place outside conventional venues and “may, at times consciously, escape conventional marketing practices,” with some artists addressing their work only to local communities.⁶ In marking this strand of art production in Northern Ireland, we seek to critically document the creative and collaborative resources that domesticity has offered to artists and communities.

The modes of creativity that we encountered as we investigated the question of domestic performance work in Northern Ireland include the textual but, importantly, they present instances of collaborative practices, something from which our own process in writing this article takes its cue. We see such collaborative practices as underscored by feminist thinking, bringing the best of domestic arts to bear on the world in being hospitable, collaborative, community-sensitive, and as much attuned to the local and intimate as to the broader national and international fluctuations that shape it. This article self-reflexively attempts to embody the spirit of hospitality that Hickey’s curatorial work engages, through its collaborative co-authorship and its making room – a home even – for the collaborative work of others. We note that the following is a selective rather than comprehensive survey of domestic performance in Belfast; other notable projects include Michelle Young’s community theatre counter-memorial to the Omagh bombing and Des Kennedy’s production of Mark Ravenhill’s 2008 Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat set partly in an apartment near Belfast’s city centre.⁷

In framing these selected case studies, we are cognisant of the fact that homes are fundamentally marked by gender, by class, and present a significant tension point within feminist thinking.⁸ We take our cue here from, among others, the US literary critic Susan Fraiman who writes of the friction that emerges within feminist scholarship on domesticity between

[o]n the one hand, asserting the value of domestic cultures and women’s creative shaping of them, and, on the other, acknowledging the evils of domestic ideology as well as the unredeemable aspects of domestic labour, especially when imposed on women to the virtual exclusion of all else.⁹

Fraiman looks to examples in literature and culture of marginalised, queer and non-normative domestic arrangements as a means to expose the kinds of normative narratives and practices of domesticity that our culture naturalises.¹⁰ Her work is useful in calling attention to the unresolved nature of the home in queer and feminist contexts, as marginalised communities continue to grapple with the home as a site of ideological and material containment, a space of gendered and classed discipline, and sometimes a zone of physical violence.¹¹ Furthermore, in Northern Ireland, the complexity that marks the domestic is necessarily intertwined with sectarianism, conflict, and politics. Davies, exploring the function of home in the writings of Bernadette Devlin and Nell McCafferty, argues that:

[t]hey show the home as a place of crucial, sustaining work, while also being a space in which questions of power, domination and economic struggle make themselves plain. In describing these processes, both writers bring an uncompromising focus to the overshadowed work of women in the private sphere, women who continue to have their roles in both public and private life denigrated by mainstream political discourse in Northern Ireland

(86).

With this in mind, we proceed with cautious curiosity about how domesticity might be a site of and for creativity in Belfast. This is exemplified in Hickey’s work as a curator; in her early career in the midst of the 2008 global recession, she made work with the resources that happened to be to hand, transforming her own home into a gallery site for arts practice. As she discusses below, some of this addressed domesticity directly in deeply critical ways. Jo Egan’s community work on The Wedding engaged with this also, with feminine labour a key means by which the work came about and by which the violent tropes of “Troubles” drama become bypassed. Similarly, the creative possibilities of domestic practices were apparent in The House’s aestheticisation of domestic labour, even as its exhausting drudgery is simultaneously acknowledged. Each of our case studies and their collaborative creators draw attention to the complicated tension points that characterise domesticity. Hickey, in particular, seeks to transplant what is best and most ethical from the domestic world into her own creative practice, as the following section explores.

Working from home: curating hospitality in Belfast

The act of making a private space public and the endless potential of the home as an idea and as a site for creating immersive art experiences in Belfast has been a consistent area of interest in Hickey’s curatorial practice. In this section, Hickey explores several experimental art projects in domestic spaces over the last fifteen years that engaged the notion of “home” in different ways. These include a residential art space, Delawab, that ran in Hickey’s home between 2008 and 2010, and examples from Household, a three-day festival of contemporary art that involved over forty domestic spaces across a neighbourhood in south Belfast in 2012 and 2013. The following is recounted from Hickey’s perspective and surveys her thinking and practice as a curator of art events in domestic spaces. We have opted to do this in order to create a space within the article for reflection on practice alongside more traditionally scholarly analyses. We wish to validate practitioner knowledge and authority over the material as well as, specifically, to draw on Hickey’s expertise and privileged perspective on arts practices in Belfast, given her almost twenty years of experience curating work there. Hickey’s reflections signal to and frame many of the issues that structure our subsequent analyses of The Wedding and The House.

The initial impulse for developing exhibitions and events in my home was to create an alternative space in the city that operated outside of existing funding and institutional restrictions. In hindsight, it was a response to the period of recession that we were living in and an act of agency in the face of the funding cuts that threatened the sector. Increasingly, however, the motivation for working in the realm of the domestic space shifted to a fascination with these complex and unpredictable environments: their psychological implications, physical limitations, and participatory potential. I was inspired in my practice by Gaston Bachelard’s interpretation of domestic space as simultaneously physical and psychological, and as being profoundly interwoven with the self. With “powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind [sic],” Bachelard writes, the house functions as a “binding principle” without which the human is a “dispersed being.”¹² The home is a space as complex as it is universally understood, representing the most primitive human need and a deeply psychological space with its own intricate set of power structures. My curation has sought to engage with that complexity as well as with the feminist implications of art in domestic spaces.

In a first experiment with domestic curation, I co-ran an art space, Delawab, in a large Victorian terrace in south Belfast that I shared with my house-mates and collaborators, Claire Hall and Keith Winter. Furnished with decades worth of furniture, objects, and décor from previous tenants, the artists we worked with would often integrate their work into the fabric of the house or incorporate aspects of the materiality of the house into their work, creating new narratives and overlapping the histories of the space. Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell – most recently awarded the Turner Prize 2021 for her work, “The Druaithaib’s Ball” with Array Collective – produced the work Bedroom (2009) while on residency in Delawab.¹³ Her practice focuses on how environments affect behaviour and she is known for her complex, immersive, world building installations. At the time Bhreathnach-Cashell was interested in the everyday as a site for making art and the act of living with/in art, citing sociologist Erving Goffman as a key reference. In Bedroom, she eschewed the idea of making art within any of the familiar constructs of publicly sanctioned, formal, or communal spaces by instead creating a series of immersive experiences for individuals in the most private of all domestic spaces, the bedroom.

Over the course of two weeks, the artist invited guests from a range of backgrounds to stay overnight in the designated gallery space, that she turned into a bedroom for the duration of her residency. The room itself was drained of colour with every object and surface painted white, creating a sensory atmosphere that was both dream-like and institutional. Each day the room was completely reconstructed, altered for each guest with meticulous attention to detail, using scent, props, sound (including a specially composed piece of music played at the end of a landline telephone on one of the nights). The individual guided their own exploration of the work while inhabiting the room. These richly textured, carefully crafted bedrooms were only seen by the artist and guest and were conceived as intimate and solitary experiences. No photographic documentation of the bedrooms was made, but the work exists through a series of interviews that were filmed with each guest the morning after their stay. The individuals described an exhilarating feeling of accessing the private chamber of another, without any fear of being watched by others, while also acknowledging that this room was consciously and explicitly constructed for their eyes only and any narratives were activated by their own personal and external experiences. This artwork hovered on the boundary between the everyday and the aesthetic, between the (supposedly) real and the artificial. In transforming the bedroom into a site of performance and encounter, Bhreathnach-Cashell articulated the potential that such sites of intimacy have – for becoming aesthetic, for telling a story, for being the means of an encounter which is both private and public all in the same moment.

In 2012–13, Household Festival took place in over forty private homes over three days in the Ormeau Road area of south Belfast. The home – and indeed domesticity itself – was at the centre of the festival. Surrender Yourself (2012), exemplified the thinking on domesticity that helped inform this festival. Colm Clarke and Tonya McMullan sought to make work about the street that they lived on and asked neighbours to donate objects from their homes that they considered intimate or precious in some way. The work was arranged inside their living room at the front of the house and the display of objects was only visible through a small aperture in the window at a raised vantage point. This was accessible by a wooden ramp, ensuring only one person at a time could look. The queue of people forming to take their turn made explicit the curiosity we share about each other’s private lives and spaces. From a community perspective, the project allowed neighbours to meet for the first time and, through this loaning of precious objects, a certain collaborative trust was required between artists and locals.

This work staged the threshold between the private and the public, invoking some of the anxieties that we have about intimacy and visibility. It also embodied metaphors about privacy that rely on the domestic: what it means to “air one’s dirty laundry,” to have “skeletons in one’s closet” for instance, in ways that are echoed by The House, as addressed below. Surrender Yourself demanded that we consider the ethical implications of looking into another person’s intimate spaces; this has implications also for how we think about art practices in these sites. Although the content of the work did not directly relate to the political context of Northern Ireland, its title invoked the sectarian divides that structures life there. “No surrender” is the common refrain of Unionist communities devoted to remaining part of the United Kingdom. Here, Clarke and McMullan drew attention to the opposite gesture, not fighting or defending, but looking, seeing, and sharing. The ethics of this (and the anxieties of voyeurism) are not uncomplicated, but a relation grounded in shared notions of the intimate and domestic seemed to be proposed through this work as an alternative to the bounded thresholds of ethno-sectarian thinking. The issue of hospitality, of making room and making home for the other, for the stranger – all the more fraught in a context like Northern Ireland – is one which emerged as deeply important for me in my curatorial practice.

Hospitality is intrinsically linked to the idea of home and can be seen as the keystone in the negotiations between “host,” “guest,” and “stranger” that take place in a home on an everyday basis. The Household Festival transformed the neighbourhood for three days and the dynamic of guest and host was explored every time an audience member crossed a threshold. Art projects such as the ones explored here are valuable in enabling constant and critical re-invention of models for hospitality, offering novel ways of making home in a place where the shared sense of what counts as home is yet undecided, and is, therefore, open to being remade.

That said, as Fraiman notes, the laborious burden of hospitality has long fallen on female shoulders; maintaining space for others, as Ukeles might have it, is feminised work. Many of the artists that I have worked with have engaged with this issue and, in fact, working within a domestic space often provoked this sort of critical engagement. For example. Aideen Barry’s work at Delawab in 2010 explored the psychology of routine household chores, the obsession with cleaning and the feeling of never being entirely satisfied or at peace within the personal, private space of the home for fear of judgement. As part of a performance she created, she hosted a public tea party at which she gave a presentation on her work. The tea party was fastidiously prepared with the “good China” and tablecloths on display, and there was an excessively attentive hospitality shown towards guests. This image of anxious femininity troubled the idea of the home as a safe and comfortable space, presenting it rather as one in which standards of hospitality, care and hygiene are enforceable cultural norms, the responsibility for which is mostly borne by women.

As a female curator, I am aware of these tensions surrounding gendered labour – creative and domestic. My curation has sought to embrace the feminine role as an ethic in which spaces for creativity might be made and maintained, thereby embedding, and indeed valorising, feminised domestic labour in my practice. Barry’s work exemplifies how creative labour might be used in such cases to image the contradictions and inequalities of the home; in my curation work, I am keen to practice an ethics of care and hospitality that makes room for such work to take place. Even though I have since moved on to curate work within more traditional gallery spaces, the ethics of the early work at Delawab and Household have greatly influenced the way that I think about curation. To host and to be hospitable seem like vital actions in any artistic context, but especially so in a segregated city like Belfast.

The Wedding Community Play: Across the Thresholds

Love, between a young Catholic man, Damian Todd, and a Protestant girl, Nichola Marshall, is, as the title suggests, the topic of The Wedding. The play’s action took place in two houses, one in a Catholic area of Belfast and one in a Protestant area (Short Strand and Templemore Avenue respectively), a church, and a hotel reception venue, with audiences bussed between each. The play’s origins were collaborative. It was conceived by Jo Egan, a Belfast-based writer and dramaturg, and involved facilitation work by Egan with community groups as writers and performers, resulting in a script collaboratively written with playwrights Martin Lynch and Marie Jones. Reflecting on the process of The Wedding’s creation, Egan points out that it is very often women who are interested in this sort of community theatre work. The community cast, many of them female, was unpaid for their work on the project and often had to attend up to three rehearsals in one day, across three different venues.¹⁴ The parallels that emerge between the unpaid labour of the community dramatist and that of the housewife are striking. While Alison Jeffers deals cogently with concerns about equality and authorship in this play, for our analysis, these are inseparable from the feminist conversation about the home and its labours.¹⁵ The play, as we explore, demands a shift in perspective through a feminine-domestic lens.

If we look first at how the play navigates identity, we can see two communities struggling to think beyond the binaries that structure their lives, intimacies, and experience of space. Curiosity about “the other” is reflected within the text and shaded in sectarian tones. In Scene 1 in the Todd living room on the morning of the fictional wedding, Margaret Todd, the mother of the groom, discussed visiting her new in-laws:

GERALDINE: Is it a very loyalist house … is there any Protestant things on the walls or anything?

MARGARET: What you were expectin’? A life-size plaster cast of Ian Paisley’s arse stickin’ out from above the fire place?¹⁶

This opening scene drew the audience into the anxieties that Margaret holds about the coming marriage, and it invoked the sort of voyeurism into private space in which the audience, too, is engaging. This scene asked the audience to consider how sectarianism structures perception, as Margaret puts it: “When you’re brought up here, y’can’t see properly. You only learn how to see half of everything. You only learn to hear half of everything.”¹⁷ Using the traversal of the city spaces and the boundary-crossings that come with performance in the domestic sphere, the play deliberately staged the processes of reading and perceiving space in the city. The domestic cannot be seen as separate in this regard from the political world of which it is a part; rather it is shaped and seen through this potently bifurcated lens.¹⁸ The play acknowledged this and attempted to push back against it, as Geraldine’s fascination with the Protestant “other” is given mocking response from Margaret. Many thresholds were crossed during the performance of the play – spatial, sectarian, classed, and gendered. Audiences, at least half of whom were drawn from the communities who created the piece (as fifty per cent of tickets were reserved for community members) were bussed to parts of the city they had never visited before.¹⁹

While the ethno-sectarian binary was invoked by the spatial articulations of the event (the Catholic house, the Protestant house), it is evident that the community-authors sought to think beyond such monochromatic distinctions. For instance, the stepfather of the Catholic boy, Damian, was from a Protestant background, making the Todd family a mixed marriage of its own. We learn that Margaret Todd’s sister Elish had once been in love with the bride’s uncle, Trevor Marshall, a Loyalist ex-prisoner. Their budding romance was cut short by her family and we see this remembered in the final “Reception” scene. In the scene between the Marshall family neighbours, Sylvia and Tillie, Tillie reveals that she still visits a family member who married a Catholic though she only goes at night and accused Sylvia of lacking knowledge of Catholics: “sure what you know about the other side, sure you never go farther than Dundonald.”²⁰ While the dialogue was at points clunky and expositional, it indicated the extent to which community authors were keen to represent what they saw as an authentically complex version of their community identity, with less monochromatic distinctions between the two sides than was often depicted in, say, media coverage of the conflict at that time.²¹

Matters of identity such as these were clearly a major concern for the community authors of the play. However, a feminist analysis might find alternative emphases. Seen through a feminist lens, the potentials of a very simple scene of domestic labour as that between Sylvia and Tillie are intriguing. Tidying up and washing the dishes were the background activities against which these two women struggled to unpack the complexities of their identities. Although the progressive Tillie reverts to a more defensive stance later at the wedding reception, in this scene she attempts reconciliation. The conversation foreshadows the denouement of the play in deeply feminist ways, foregrounding how the labour of women relates to conflict and its possible resolution.

A tragic outcome to the day loomed throughout. The anger of Danny McCleave, a republican ex-prisoner and cousin of the groom’s, at the thought of celebrating alongside the Loyalist Trevor Marshall became evident early on. Although violence was threatened in the early stages of the play, it did not come to pass. In fact, the opposite was the case. The “conflict” of the play, such as it is, is brought to a head in the final “Reception” scene. Margaret Todd revealed plans for the newly married couple to emigrate to Birmingham. Mother-of-the-bride Jeannie Marshall learned of this at the reception, resulting in a confrontation between the two mothers – three mothers in fact, as Cassie, the bride’s grandmother, also becomes involved. The preceding action has made the backstory of Trevor and Elish’s love across the divide into the cross-community wedding that never was. Cassie, Trevor’s mother, was determined that her mistake in separating Trevor and Elish will not be repeated and so ended the dispute:

CASSIE: Don’t do something you will end up regretting for the rest of your life. This is their day, not yours to go plannin’ their future behind their back … you will get no thanks believe you me … what is that Margaret?

MARGARET: A Bacardi.

CASSIE: Come on the two of yis over to Winemark, the drinks are on me. (89)

The resolution, as tacit as it is, might be usefully compared with Geordie’s father of the bride speech in which he clumsily and awkwardly attempted a reconciliatory tone, “this is not the time nor the place to make up for all the wrongs.”²² The speech was poorly received by most in the room, so that the three women are given space ultimately to confront, argue, and come to some form of resolution. In a deliberate side-stepping of the tragic masculine tropes of sectarian violence, this resolution belonged to and was placed squarely in the sphere of the women – indicative of both who was doing the authoring here as well as the spaces in which this work took place.

A final example: we learn of Danny McCleave’s backstory through the eyes of his mother, Elish. Importantly, this Republican and the violence he represents was seen from the viewpoint of the community. In a move that serves to diminish the equation of masculinity and heroism with Republicanism, Elish tells Shirley about Danny crying “in front of the screws” when he got arrested for trying to shoot a police officer. He was naively innocent before becoming part of the violence, and his mind was now described by Elish as being “always on the boil.”²³ While this risks a somewhat naïve presumption of feminine peacefulness in opposition to masculine violence, there was a compelling demand to cross a perspectival threshold, literalised in the step across the two front doors in the Short Strand and Templemore Avenue, to see the world from the vantage point of the domestic. A gendered, as well as sectarian threshold is crossed here. At a time when women were struggling to have their voices heard within formal politics, the very political demands of domesticity were made clear, with the upending of the public-private binary, as Daphne Ben-Shaul notes, “a preliminary condition of the politicization of the domestic site.”²⁴ In other words, women’s creative labour made a demand here that the world be seen through the lens of the domestic sphere.

The House and the doubled edge of domesticity

As with much of the work we have discussed, The House came about through collaboration. Zoë Seaton, artistic director of Big Telly, was approached by Katy Radford of the Commission for Victims and Survivors (CVS), an organisation created to research and respond to the trauma of the Troubles.²⁵ Radford proposed a community-focused play that might animate CVS research into the legacy of violence. The resultant work is a mixture of exhibition and theatre. Radford was keen that no violence be replicated or even referenced; rather, the focus was to be on the consequences of such violence for the bodies and lives of those affected.²⁶ Once again, we see an example of domestic performance being utilised to bypass the expected tropes of post-conflict drama. The logics of hospitality and care, for actors, communities, and for audiences, came into play here as one of the central questions for the creative team became: how do we stage these affects without causing further harm? The following analysis examines how the piece interwove female creative labour and feminised domestic labour to explore intergenerational and gendered trauma.

Somewhat similarly to The Wedding, The House was staged in private homes in two different areas as part of the city’s two annual August festivals: west Belfast’s Féile an Phobhail and east Belfast’s EastSide Arts Festival. The west of the city is historically a Catholic area, while the east is predominantly Protestant. The House’s western location was at Hamill Street, near the city centre, while the east Belfast production was at Tullycarnet Estate. Importantly for Big Telly, the CVS negotiated access to the houses involved and to the communities there. Although this was not, strictly speaking, community theatre, Seaton notes that the ethics and principles of community theatre applied. With deep concerns not to facilitate poverty-tourism or voyeurism, Seaton understood that there needed to be “respect for the fact that we are doing theatre in midst of where people live their lives” and that, without the intervention of the CVS in managing and brokering their access to the spaces, they would not have attempted to do such work.

The House was a piece of promenade theatre. Audiences in small groups moved from room to room to view four performances: the living room was the scene for a dialogue about history between an older and younger man, bedrooms one and two staged a young woman’s monologue as she readied for a night out and a young teacher’s Zoom class in which he tried to field questions about Northern Irish history. The final scene was a dance performance in which an exhausted woman completed the day’s domestic labour in the kitchen. It is this final scene that is the main focus of the commentary below, however there are two notable aspects of the other scenes. First, the living room scene is compelling for what it says about the form of “Troubles” drama. The older character spoke about forgetting the past, moving on, while the younger one argued that the fight is still ongoing. If this felt like a familiar articulation of Troubles narratives, the play’s structure defied this. Immediately after finishing their “argument,” the characters switched roles and took up the opposing position, repeating the argument word for word. Seaton comments that this emerged from the CVS research showing that age was not a predictor of opinion about the conflict. This scene encapsulated a potent sense of cyclicality – of violence certainly, but also of conflict’s unending effects. Leaving the room, we understood that the conversation will continue (literally in theatre time), the two cycling the argument back and forth between them, locked into their scripts. Second, in bedroom one, we saw a deepening exploration of trauma. A young woman, seated at her nightstand with her back to the audience, readied herself for a night out. Everything in the room was feminine-coded shades of pink and white. As she put on her makeup, she told the audience about her mother’s addiction and suicide attempt. Seeing her face fractured across the three mirrors of the nightstand, we come to realise that the weekly routines never result in her leaving the house. Little direct reference is made to violence or conflict in either of these scenes, rather we see these as manifest in the most intimate details of a life, appearing at the boundaries of the everyday. Home registers as a space of safety but also of containment, a space of reflection – literally so in the mirror – but also a site where the vulnerability and fragmentation of the traumatised subject might be witnessed.

The final scene of the play continued this meditation on trauma but focused less on psychological damage in favour of creating an image of survival. In fact, in this danced kitchen scene, the work of maintenance, of keeping a home and its lives going, is what drove the performance. Audience members crammed into a corner of the tiny kitchen space, where all the appliances, pots, pans, and so forth, were askew, fixed in mid-fall off counters and shelves. While we absorbed this, a female dancer commenced a frenetic aestheticised version of everyday feminine labour. She was joined, through the window, by another female dancer, who assisted her work. Objects like sheets and plates were thrown between the two in this danced labour of maintenance. The scene may have risked valorising domestic labour in an essentialist manner, thus reiterating and confirming “women’s deeply ingrained ties to domesticity,” as Fraiman puts it.²⁷ In interview, Seaton explained that she wanted to highlight the resilience of women, even as she acknowledged the problematic clichés of the equation of woman with care. She wished to see skill in action, to represent the history of women managing during times of conflict. To reflect her perspective on them as heroic and strong, the piece had to be “strong, physical, juggling, everything in the air.” This double edge of domesticity is most visible at this point in the production. In acknowledging the oft-occluded history of the women who kept the fabric of the social world together during “the Troubles” there is the risk of confirming this as “women’s work,” echoing a question posed by Ukeles in her manifesto – “after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?.”²⁸

The dance scene in The House did not, however, present an uncomplicated image of resilience in the face of adversity. The choice to use dance in particular in this segment meant that the audience witnessed the bodily cost of this labour on both the character being performed and the body of the performer. The scene was physically exhausting. At the end the dancer sank to the floor of the claustrophobically small kitchen, cup of tea in hand; an image of every woman who has ever fought, with domestic drudge labour, to maintain a family and a home in the midst of poverty and conflict. Even though it aestheticised everyday labour, the dance showed this work to be repetitive and exhausting. Things were affectively and literally on the edge in this scene, falling – just like the broom that spilled out of the cupboard – but caught, it seemed, by the gravity-force of the dancer’s body. We were left in no doubt as to the costs involved in this maintenance of a home, and which persons are most likely to bear these costs. The dance imaged how everyday labour holds worlds – relationships, intimacies, homes – together, just about, even as we bear witness to the effects this has on the body of those doing the holding.

That this scene is organised to come at the end of the piece was significant. The trajectory of The House drew us to the domestic backstage, to where everyday labour stitches and restitches the fabric of lives. We were asked to see the first scene anew, as a gendered conversation between two male interlocutors who offered little to no way out of the circular reiteration of narratives of conflict and violence, while “behind” the door women get on with the quiet business of surviving. The production refused to separate the aesthetic and domestic, even as it refused a separation of temporalities, then from now, the supposed repetitive temporality of the domestic from the supposedly linear time of politics and the public – read: masculine – sphere. This amounted, finally, to a refusal of any narrative about the Northern Irish conflict that excludes exploration of the impact of violence on the most intimate spaces of the home and the lives it contains. The form this takes relied heavily on the resources – practical, spatial, and metaphorical – afforded by domesticity and argued for a fundamental intertwining of creative labour and domestic work, creativity and maintenance.

Conclusion: domesticity as creative resource

In general terms, one of the central ideas emerging from our brief survey of domestic art practices in Belfast is that creative engagements with domesticity may offer new lenses or frames through which to view Northern Irish society. Domestic spaces may present potent and as yet underexplored sites in Northern Irish culture for navigating alternative versions of history with sensitivity to the inequalities and differences that, as Felski puts it, “slic[e] across time rather than being enclosed within a particular period or epoch,” even as they look to, as Hickey’s work suggests, new articulations of the city’s spaces and thresholds.²⁹ The works examined here, especially The Wedding, asked its audiences to perceive the city from the perspective of the cup-washers, the caretakers, the “maintenance artists.” The creative gesture that is shared across all three case studies lay in the capacity to use domestic space as an aesthetic site and in so doing re-route our perception of both domestic labour and the political contexts in which it emerges.

More specifically, we conclude by suggesting that domestic spaces and the practices associated with them present certain resources for creative practitioners, even as they come with sets of challenges and risks. Domesticity for one thing demands a reconsideration of the separation of artistic creativity from domestic labour, in ways that are redolent of Luce Giard’s work with Michel de Certeau in volume two of The Practice of Everyday Life (1998). Giard’s interviews conducted with French women in the 1970s reveal domestic practices, especially cooking, as “arts” demanding “intelligence, imagination and memory.”³⁰ The practitioners discussed here identify what is artistic and creative within the domestic: Hickey sees a connection between arts work and hospitality, for Egan (and for Hickey also) the domestic is a site of creative connection and collaboration, and for Seaton it constitutes a means to mobilise art within the everyday. For Hickey, the labour of curation and that of hospitality intertwine, as she pushes against the binary separating housework from artwork. For Egan, the home as site of performance is radically different from the home as a representational space on stage, or in literature. It becomes one of the means by which connection to local communities might be forged, characterised by the sort of intimacy – and risk – attached to inviting strangers into one’s home. Egan sees such collaboration and connection as both the means and the result of this sort of creative labour. Seaton speaks of the work of Big Telly as “hijacking” the everyday. Sneaking politically challenging and provocative art into spaces of the familiar has been an important strand of that company’s work and she speaks of being interested in creating more work in domestic sites. As with Hickey’s and Egan’s work, the everyday labour of home and the creative labour of art-marking are brought into close conversation by Big Telly.

Domesticity also presents a set of ethics for creative practitioners, grounded in care and hospitality, wherein the best of what domesticity represents might translate into art-making. As we have explored above, Hickey’s ethos as a curator has been heavily informed by thinking of the affordances and risks of hospitality, and this notion is implicit in the work of the other artists discussed here: Egan’s understanding of the potential for community connection out of this work, for instance, and Seaton’s comprehension of the risks involved in appropriating the spaces of living communities for artistic ends.

Finally, we can conclude also that the domestic offers thematic inspiration and formal structures out of which performance work is made. This is evident in the artistic responses to domesticity that Hickey facilitated at Delawab and during Household. For Egan, the domestic spaces that were chosen for The Wedding fundamentally shaped the structure of the play. She conceptualised the piece using her box room as a guide, considering how many people would fit in the small space. Moving from what was feasible in the space led her to structure the content into the three fifteen-minute-long scenes in three rooms in each house. For Seaton, the framework of the domestic, with its borders and boundaries, and secret spaces like cupboards offered endless metaphors. It was, as she puts it, “the gift that kept on giving, with more and more things to find within it.” The House was both inspired by its spaces and shaped by what was possible, physically, within them. In terms of ethics and aesthetics then, domestic sites as sites for art represent a way of drawing close parallels between creative and aesthetic labour, resisting perceived cultural binaries that operate between home-making and art making – or maintenance and creativity in Ukeles’s terms – and ask that we see the city anew through the frame of the domestic interior.

Dedication

Sadly, during the final stages of our preparation of this article, Jo Egan passed away. We would like to dedicate this article to the memory of her rich creative labours and the many collaborative “homes” she made for the creativity of others.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Felski, Doing Time, 82.

2. Ukeles, Maintenance Art Manifesto, n.pag.

3. Magennis, Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles, 3.

4. Davies, “At least we can lock the door,” 72. See also Garden, “Troubled Love.”

5. See for instance Todd, 2011, and Gardner, 2014. Bobby Baker is notable as a performance artist who has tackled domesticity in her work since the 1980s, while Adrian Howells’s work exemplifies the turn towards intimacy and care in one-to-one performances of the 2010s.

6. Andrews, Performing Home, 7.

7. This is documented in “Remembering Omagh”; In a striking example of the coincidence of home and theatre, Belfast’s main commissioning theatre, The Lyric, was founded by Mary and Pearse O’Malley at their home on Derryvolgie Avenue in south Belfast in 1951, and functioned there as a public theatre for its first sixteen years.

8. Betty Friedan was among the first to articulate an anti-domesticity feeling within feminist currents in The Feminine Mystique (1963), Ann Oakley’s 1974 Sociology of Housework confirms female dissatisfaction with domestic labour. For a provocative historically contextualised re-reading of the figure of the housewife in the 1950s, see Johnson and Lloyd, Sentenced to Everyday Life..

9. Fraiman, Extreme Domesticity, 16.

10. Ibid., 20.

11. See Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 90; for a very provocative analysis of the supposed “safety” of the home during the COVID-19 pandemic, see Lewis, “The Virus and the Home.”

12. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 6–7.

13. https://www.sighlebc.com/bedrooms.

14. This is something that Egan has meditated on since that time and in interview spoke of since engaging in differing and more equitable models of working with amateur actors and creatives.

15. Jeffers, “Authority, Authorisation and Authorship,” 216.

16. Jones et al, The Wedding, 4.

17. Ibid., 10.

18. An historical account of the separation of domesticity from the public sphere can be found in McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity.

19. Egan, interview.

20. The Wedding, 44; Ibid., 48.

21. For a fuller account of the representational politics of the piece, see Jeffers, “Authority, Authorisation and Authorship.”

22. The Wedding, 66.

23. Ibid., 31a.

24. Ben-Shaul, “A Home Unfound,” 237. For a detailed account of the emergent role of women in Northern Irish political life in 1990s, see Sales, Women Divided; Sullivan, Women in Northern Ireland; Aretxaga, Shattering Silence.

25. See: https://www.cvsni.org/.

26. Seaton, interview. Further comments from Seaton are drawn from this source.

27. Extreme Domesticity, 16.

28. Ukeles, Maintenance Art Manifesto.

29. Felski, Doing Time, 3.

30. Giard, “The Nourishing Arts,” 151. Fraiman explores the implications of Giard’s research and writing more fully in Extreme Domesticity, pp. 11–17.