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Abstract
This article analyses Sonya Kelly’s How to Keep an Alien (Dublin Tiger Fringe, 2014) and ANU Production’s Vardo (Dublin Theatre Festival, 2014) in relationship to the performative backdrop of the Irish Decade of Centenaries (2012–22) and a series of key extra-theatrical political events have that featured asylum seekers and migrants prominently in Ireland and to a limited extent in Europe at large from 2012 to 2015. Both theatrical productions centrally engage tropes of Irish national memory vis-à-vis engagement with migration through a primary focus on women’s stories and premiered against the backdrop of the Decade of Centenaries. How to Keep an Alien and Vardo’s embrace of what M. Jacqui Alexander terms “palimpsestic time” and their critical focus on gender during this moment of the Decade of Centenaries models a theatrical dramaturgy that aids in reading key theatrical and extra-theatrical events featuring asylum seekers and migrants against one another. These works reveal the relationship between these events and the ongoing redefinition of Irish national memory and political community, a process thrown into sharp relief by the present commemorative mode. They insist that a turn to the past is inseparable from querying the lived political structures of the present, structures that have repeatedly displaced as well as instrumentalised the bodies of migrant women from the post-inward migration of the mid-1990s onwards.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This work was supported by the Irish Research Council Starter Research Grant [grant number RPG2013-1].
Notes
1. UCD Decade of Centenaries, “About.”
2. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 190.
3. Gough, Haptic Allegories, 161.
4. Cullen, “Staff in Savita Halappanavar Case.”
5. Holland, “Timeline of Miss Y Case.”
6. Protests occurred between August and September 2014 at Direct Provision Centres including Mount Trenchard (Limerick), Lissywollen (Athlone), Ashbourne House Hotel (Cork), Kinsale Road (Cork), and the Montague (Portalaoise). For background, see Barry, “‘Appalled’”; English, “Asylum Seekers’ Protest.”
7. See Garner, Racism in the Irish Experience, 159; Lentin, “Responding to the Racialisation of Irishness,” 250; King, “Interculturalism and Irish Theatre,” 24; Moynihan, “Other People’s Diasporas,” 19–20.
8. Office of the Minister for Integration, Migration Nation, 7.
9. Garner, Racism in the Irish Experience, 159.
10. King, “Interculturalism and Irish Theatre,” 24.
11. Pine, Politics of Irish Memory, 14.
12. Schneider, Performing Remains, 104.
13. Kiberd, “Strangers in their Own Country,” 72.
14. Lentin, “Responding to the Racialisation of Irishness,” 250.
15. Pine, Politics of Irish Memory, 3.
16. Ibid.
17. Gough, Haptic Allegories, 9.
18. Ibid., 15.
19. Downing, “Mediterranean Migrant Crisis.”
20. Irish Refugee Council and Migrant Rights Centre Ireland, “Joint Media Statement.”
21. Schneider, Performing Remains, 37.
22. Gough, Haptic Allegories, 8.
23. Ibid., 7.
24. Crawley, “Fringe Review.”
25. Kelly, How to Keep an Alien, 6.
26. Ibid., 9.
27. Ibid., 27.
28. Ibid., 23.
29. Killeen, “Sonya Kelly Stars in How to Keep an Alien.”
30. Kelly, How to Keep an Alien, 35.
31. Ibid., 43.
32. Ibid., 28.
33. Watts and Williams, “Representing a ‘Great Distress,’” 257.
34. Lloyd, “Indigent Sublime,” 153.
35. Schneider, Performing Remains, 104.
36. Kelly, How to Keep an Alien, 33.
37. Department of Justice and Equality, “De Facto Partnership Immigration Permission in Ireland.”
38. Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 8.
39. Simon, Touch of the Past, 10.
40. ANU Productions, Vardo, 3.
41. Singleton, “ANU Productions and Site-specific Performance,” 22.
42. Publicart.ie, The Boys of Foley Street.
43. Singleton, “ANU Productions and Site-specific Performance,” 24.
44. ANU Productions, Vardo, 3.
45. Crawley, “Monto is Back.”
46. Fanning and O’Boyle, Immigration, Integration and Risks of Social Exclusion, 5.
47. Crawley, “Monto is Back.”
48. Eurostat, Trafficking in Human Beings, 10.
49. Department of Justice and Equality, Annual Report of Trafficking, 8.
50. Haughton, “Mirror, Mirror,” 154.
51. Singleton, “ANU Productions and Site-specific Performance,” 31.
52. Zaiontz, “Narcissistic Spectatorship,” 407.
53. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 190.
54. Lesovitch, Roma Educational Needs in Ireland, 30.
55. Healy, “African Migrants Lost at Sea Recalled.”
56. O’Neill and Lloyd, “Black and Green Atlantic,” xvi.
57. Pine, Politics of Irish Memory, 10.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
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