‘It's a Ghost’: The uncanny in rural Welsh identity

ABSTRACT

The AHRC-funded project led by Sally Mackey at the Central School of Speech and Drama, ‘Challenging Concepts of “Liquid” Place through Performing Practices in Community Contexts’, involves performative responses to an interrogation of place, identity and dislocation. The author is one of the co-investigators working on this enquiry. Cyrff Ystwyth has produced work by the learning-disabled choreographer Adrian Jones over several years. Jones's work is a persistent assertion of identity shaped by rural agricultural life. This article is a response to material emerging through the devising process which forms a part of this three-year research project. Adrian Jones's new work, ‘Capel: The Lights are On’, is concerned with imagery of home and family. In rehearsal a new theme emerged; Jones announced the presence of a ghost. The article considers how this sudden announcement resonates with Welsh identity. The author proposes that the work is a personal, emotionally charged response to identity that is grounded in material experiences of life in rural Wales. Jones's interest in the haunted coincides with a particular construct of Welshness that is inscribed with a mixture of history, myth and religion.

KEYWORDS:

• rural Wales
• place
• uncanny
• identity
• emotion
• Cyrff Ystwyth