Holding the Irish Queer Archive: An Interview with Louise Lowe and Lynnette Moran on ANU Productions’ Faultline

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. http://anuproductions.ie (accessed June 2, 2020).

2. http://livecollision.com (accessed June 2, 2020).

3. http://anuproductions.ie/work/faultline-2019/(accessed June 2, 2020).

4. Irish Statute Book’s legislation, see http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2015/ca/34/enacted/en/html (accessed June 8, 2020).

5. Including then Minister for Health and subsequently Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Leo Varadkar.

6. For a study of queer performance in and around that legislation see, Fintan Walsh, Queer Performance in Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation (London: Palgrave, 2016).

7. For a recent debate in the Irish Dáil (parliament) which demonstrates the extent of the change in government and wider public opinion specifically regarding LGBTQ+ rights see: https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/2018-06-19/32/(accessed June 8, 2020).

8. See, Kieron Rose, Diverse Communities: The Evolution of Lesbian and Gay Politics in Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993).

9. For further reading on Ireland’s LGBTQ+ history, see Sean Brady and Mark Seymour (eds), From Sodomy Laws to Same-sex Marriage: International Perspectives since 1789 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).

10. For analysis of these productions, see Miriam Haughton, Staging Trauma: Bodies in Shadow (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 117–160; Brian Singleton, ANU Productions: The Monto Cycle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

11. Not only the Irish Gay Rights Movement, but the other organizations as well (including the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network and Lesbians Organising Together, among others).

12. ANU hosted a series of private round-table discussions with invited members of the LGBTQ+ community who were part of the generation actively seeking reform during the 1980s.

13. MSM Programme Manager, HIV Ireland.

14. Tonie Walsh is a civil rights activist who was also founding editor of Gay Community News and the Irish Queer Archive. He is also a journalist and disc jockey. Stephen Quinn is a performance maker and co-founder of the regular queer performance event Spicebag.

15. And a general strike as well protesting against tax hikes.

16. In many of the ANU Productions’ performances of history, history is presented as THEN through a lens visible in the performance as NOW. These NOW THEN NOW shifts in performance provide the dramaturgy of the experience for the most part. In Faultline Nandi/Viola provided the NOW to the male THEN.