Casement, choreography and commemoration

ABSTRACT

The Casement Project was the largest of the Arts Council’s commissions in its ART:2016 commemorative programme. The project was distinctive in putting dance and embodiment at the heart of the centenary response to what was previously branded “A Poet’s Rising”. As part of an effort to reconceptualise the Irish national body and to embody alternative forms of individual and collective corporeality, the choreography used as resource the queer body of former British knight, Irish rebel and international humanitarian, Roger Casement.

KEYWORDS:

• Dance
• choreography
• Casement
• commemoration
• 2016
• Arts Council

Introduction

The substance of this article formed part of my PhD thesis submitted in 2017. Much of the knowledge that I hope the thesis demonstrated came from practical embodied experience of being a choreographer working in the field of contemporary dance in a variety of creative and strategic capacities, in Ireland and internationally. Though Kobayashi cautions that reflexive research practice may be self-indulgent on the part of the researcher because it directs attention away from “subjects in the field”, the reality is that this researcher is a subject in the field and by being so has played a part in shaping that field.¹ My academic work aims to extend the impact of dance in Ireland, without yielding its embodied particularity. When I accepted the invitation to write this article, I did so as a way to share the values that animated The Casement Project, a project that used as guide and inspiration the radical permeability and mobility of Roger Casement’s body to understand and model alternative forms of citizenship and identity in Ireland. As I prepare this article from lockdown in 2020, however, my experience of corporeality is fundamentally different. The Covid-19 pandemic has, in Ireland and elsewhere, imposed physical restriction, social distancing, isolation and immobility. How dance will function in the future, practically and economically, isn’t clear. What the article communicates therefore is a response to the particular circumstances of the official centenary commemorations of the Easter Rising. It examines the commemorations as an opportunity to refocus attention on embodiment in the articulation of Irish identities and in doing so, to propose and perform more inclusive choreographies of citizenship. While the specific strategies it outlines may not be replicable in the current circumstances, the principles and approach offer hope that dance artists still generate and communicate knowledge that will be of benefit as we navigate our way through the impacts of this pandemic.

“Chief signifiers of the state”

Reflecting on the centenary commemorations, in a review of the cultural highlights of 2016, journalist and cultural commentator, Fintan O’Toole asserted that “Fearghus Ó Conchúir and many others showed that it is still artists who give the nation its voice. And the Government actually noticed.”² As a choreographer of contemporary dance in Ireland, such recognition alongside other leading artists – poets, visual artists and theatre makers – is not something to be taken for granted for, as Aoife McGrath has asserted, “Irish-based dance practice has a long history of being culturally undervalued, underfunded and marginalized.”³ I might have preferred that O’Toole had recognised my work as an endeavour to embody rather than simply voice complex and constitutive relationships to the nation. Nonetheless, that O’Toole noticed that the Government noticed, suggests that the contemporary dance artist in Ireland could deploy an artistic practice whose impact would be felt on “official Ireland”. Though “official Ireland” is not by any means the sole audience to which I direct my work, what O’Toole’s comment reveals is a complex relationship between artist and nation that acknowledges that it is in the gift of “official Ireland”, including its celebrated journalists, to notice, or not, and that though such recognition may impact on the viability of their existence, artists retain a formative agency in the expression and performance of the nation:

[W]hilst commemorative practices appear to be about the past, they are actually about the present and the future. […] Consequently, the nature of contemporary acts of commemoration is better understood by exploring the relationship between identity and contemporary politics than by examining the event being “remembered”.⁴

In December 2016, reflecting on the Arts Council’s Art:2016 programme that invited artists to respond to the centenary commemorations, Arts Council Director, Orlaith McBride proposed that: “It would be a lasting tribute to the memory of those who dreamed of a different Ireland in 1916 that our artists and image makers of 2016 become the chief signifiers of the State.”⁵ McBride’s unusual linking of “artists” and not-clearly-defined “image makers” pointed to the defining role that The Arts Council envisaged for artists as shapers of national identity in 2016. McBride and others, such as then Taoiseach Enda Kenny, justified the call for a contemporary centrality of artists with reference to the historical significance of their antecedents in the Easter Rising: “Our Arts were central to the revolutionary generation. The poets and playwrights, the revivalists and the writers, had a vision that was as much about cultural freedom as political independence.”⁶

However, in foregrounding the artistic credentials of those involved in the Easter Rising, the conventional reference points were in the poetry and playwriting of Plunkett, McDonagh and Pearse, and, at a stretch, in the piping of Ceannt.⁷ The branding of the rebellion as a Poet’s Rising reinforced the hegemony of the literary arts in the Irish cultural imagination. Francis Ledwidge’s “Lament for the Poets: 1916”, written soon after the execution of the Rising’s leaders made the connection between the revolutionaries and their literary skills.⁸ A hundred years later, one of the other ART:2016 projects, proposed by the Irish Writers’ Centre, was titled A Poet’s Rising.⁹ To engage productively with the State’s commemorative programme and reveal the subversively corporeal and the choreographic at the genesis of the Irish Republic, I looked for resources elsewhere in the 1916 legacy – in the queer life and afterlife of Roger Casement.¹⁰

If conventional commemorative practices prescribe acceptable choreographies for citizens to perform in sanctioned locations at appropriate times, thereby naturalising and stabilising contested histories and identities,¹¹ the mechanism that made it possible for me to reveal, imagine and embody alternative citizen movements was the Arts Council’s Open Call to the Irish imagination.¹² Because The Casement Project – my successful response to that call – became the largest project in the Arts Council’s commemorative programme, its conception and realisation provides material for investigating the production of nation and identity in the twenty-first century and the relationship that production entails between dance artists and the State.¹³ To offer a contemporary account of Irish bodies requires a sensitivity to how bodies have been constructed and represented, but also, a sensitivity to how they are experienced. This is not an attempt to privilege a phenomenological account of the corporeal over a social-constructionist or representational model. It is rather to follow the implications of thinking developed by post-humanists such as Karen Barad and Rosa Braidotti, to articulate how the material and the discursive are in a relationship of “mutual entailment”.¹⁴ The analysis here builds on such a material-discursive conception of Irish bodies and draws on my perspective as both choreographer and scholar to offer a knowledge situated not only in my own subjectivity, but in relation to national cultural policy.

Dancing the rising: “Be Irish and you’ll be alright”

Though often neglected from public discourse, there was dancing at the start of the twentieth century in Ireland, dancing that was already part of political movement to form independent Irish bodies. Three weeks before the Easter Rising, Yeats’ experimental dance play At the Hawk’s Well was rehearsed in London, attempting to give artistic and acutely corporeal form to his vision of a decolonised Ireland.¹⁵ According to Meyer, “one might well view dance as the gunpowder of the Irish Revolution.”¹⁶ Conradh na Gaeilge was set up in 1893 primarily to promote the Irish language, as part of a larger movement of cultural nationalism that developed for some into revolutionary politics. Proclamation signatories Pearse, Ceannt and MacDiarmada served on Conradh na Gaeilge’s Management Committee, while Plunkett, MacDonagh and Clarke were also active in the movement. In 1897, in an effort to add to the social dimension of their Irish classes, the London chapter of Conradh na Gaeilge held the first céilí and began a process of inventing a “traditional” Irish dance form that came to be taught at Conradh na Gaeilge meetings all over Ireland. The form was not uncontroversial. A performance of reels by the London Gaels at the 1901 Oireachtas was criticised as foreign in influence, and vigilance around supposed national authenticity was evident in the development of Irish dancing at the start of the twentieth century, even when the sanctioned national dance form was actually the product of a homogenising of regional variations and an ignoring of the “foreign” social dances that were commonly practised in Ireland at the time.¹⁷ The céilí repertoire favoured the physical restraint of Munster dance styles over what was regarded as the more full-bodied exuberance of their Connaught counterparts. Since céilís were more likely to be held in the formality of public halls rather than in the unregulated settings of crossroads, private houses and outhouses, they met the approval of Catholic priests, despite the non-sectarian nature of Conradh na Gaeilge’s activities.¹⁸ J. J. Sheehan’s 1902 A Guide to Irish Dancing linked foreignness and immorality in its caution that men should not hold their female partners “round the waist English fashion”, and also advised against “any straining after ‘deportment’. Leave that to the Seoinini [socially ambitious imitators of the English]. In short be natural, unaffected, easy – be Irish and you’ll be alright.”¹⁹ The bodies performing the sanctioned choreographies of Conradh na Gaeilge had to exhibit restraint without displaying strain, a sophisticated and demanding physical embodiment designed to produce the appearance of “natural” Irishness. However, this regulation of bodies in the invention of a national body did not suppress subversion. Kathleen Clarke, one of the founders of Cumann na mBan, described the use of a céilí on the Sunday preceding the Rising as a cover for a meeting of Irish Volunteers from around the country. A concern for probity was expressed in a question if it was appropriate to have a dance during Lent, but Clarke observed that given that some of them might soon be dancing “at the end of a rope”, that they might as well dance on Palm Sunday.²⁰ While political and religious affiliations were not entirely aligned in the Lenten céilí, a rebellious indulgence in corporeal pleasure was a factor. Roy Foster has also provided evidence that for all the choreography of restraint, the céilís nonetheless were experienced as opportunities for pleasurable physical contact between men and women, reminding us how bodies perform, exploit and deform their ascribed choreographies.²¹

There is much to be gained by paying attention to the creation of national identity at the inception of the Irish Republic through the formation of “natural” Irish bodies and the invention of “traditional” Irish dancing. However, it has not been common, or possible, to think of the Proclamation signatories nor their revolutionary comrades as dance artists, nor to pay attention to the choreography of Irish identity in which they participated. Indeed, the initial aim of the invention of Irish dancing, as articulated by Sheehan, seemed to have been the creation of a physical artlessness, however artfully achieved, that has withheld corporeality from consideration. To look to the material and discursive legacy of Roger Casement is to find a different lineage that leads to other possibilities for contemporary embodiment in Ireland that can be still framed, surprisingly and subversively, within foundational national narratives.

Philip Connaughton in Butterflies and Bones: The Casement Project. Photographer Stephen Wright for The Casement Project.

Roger Casement

Roger Casement came to international prominence in 1904 on the publication of The Casement Report, which exposed exploitation and abuse of indigenous people in the rubber trade of the Congo Free State.²² He wrote a similar report for the British government on rubber slavery in the Putamayo region of the Amazon.²³ In 1911, he was knighted for his reports and for the humanitarian campaigning he undertook in their aftermath.²⁴ By this time, Casement was already involved in the Irish nationalist cause. In 1891 Casement had written a poem in honour of Charles Stuart Parnell that envisaged “Erin’s pass to freedom”,²⁵ graduating from the cultural nationalism of attending a Feis of “Gaelic” culture in Antrim in 1904, to the more separatist ideology evidenced in his insistence that correspondence to him be addressed to the Consulate of Great Britain and Ireland in Brazil rather than to the British Consulate.²⁶ Ultimately, at the outbreak of the First World War, he sought Germany’s help for an Irish rebellion against British rule. He was captured on Banna Strand, Co.Kerry on Good Friday, 1916, on his way to intercept a rebellion that he believed to be futile, given that he had been unsuccessful in persuading the Germans to give sufficient weapons and support to guarantee military success. He was found guilty of treason in the Old Bailey in London and despite a high-profile campaign for reprieve, he was hanged at Pentonville Prison in August 1916, the last of the rebels executed in the aftermath of the Rising. Given Casement’s international prominence and the recognition that the executions of the leaders of the Easter Rising had generated more sympathy for the nationalist cause than had been prevalent at the time of the rebellion, a reprieve for Casement might have seemed possible. However, the British Secret Service circulated extracts of Casement’s prolific diaries in which he detailed his enthusiastic sex with men. Shown to the press and to influential supporters in America, high profile political pressure for clemency evaporated. The so-called Black Diaries are a continuing source of controversy as a minority of historians maintain that they were forgeries concocted to smear Casement’s reputation.²⁷

Casement is acknowledged as a powerful and inveterate writer. During his Amazon investigations he appears to have maintained two diaries and gathered testimonies, from which he wrote an official account of his findings there, as well as letters. He also wrote poetry and newspaper articles.²⁸ However, it is as a politicised body with a notable sensitivity to the corporeal that Casement provided me with such a useful resource for a dance-led re-evaluation of the body in the formation of Irish national identity. Casement’s body was often remarked upon for his exceptional height and his notable good looks. John Clarke described him as “a man of splendid physique, well-built, towering conspicuously over many of average height.”²⁹ Jesse Conrad, wife of Joseph Conrad, wrote of him being “a very handsome man with a thick, dark beard and piercing, restless eyes.”³⁰ This attractive body was always in motion. Described at his trial as being of no-fixed abode, his life was one of constant international mobility. His family moved frequently in his early childhood and after the death of both his parents, Casement continued that travel, initially in Africa and subsequently in South America, North America and Europe. His mobility was facilitated by and followed the already global flows of colonial capitalism and its politics. Indeed, it is important to recognise that Casement’s increasing articulation of colonialism as a system of oppression is predicated on his own direct experience of and implication in that system, though he turned his privilege against the regime that employed and ennobled him. His travel also suited Casement to the advocacy role he assumed on behalf of Irish nationalism in the United States and Germany. Furthermore, mobility facilitated the illicit sexual liaisons described in Casement’s diaries, a movement that never settled into the conventional choreographies of a geographically settled nuclear family (even if circumstances of his own birth-family illustrated that not all families functioned with spatial stability). Letters exchanged with his foreign sexual partners, as well as Casement’s anticipation of reconnecting with them, as detailed in his diaries, suggests that travel beyond the patterns of the heterosexual family unit were not rudderless, not entirely without points of recurring reference and physical anchoring. In this, Casement anticipated the experience of the independent contemporary dance artist in 2016, even managing to lunch in Holborn in London on 16 July 1910 and dine at the Zoo in Dublin the following evening, long before market deregulation and consequent cheap international flights made such business travel relatively commonplace.³¹ Such travel, in Dudgeon’s assessment was for Casement “insubstantial”.³²

In addition to being relentlessly mobile, Casement was sensitive to bodies. His search for sexual encounters in public and semi-public space required an awareness of what other bodies communicated. As Uriarte observes in his account of Casement’s time in the Amazon: “Cruising is largely about looking and reading the body, the gaze, the gestures, and the movements of others.”³³ Casement detailed the physical attributes, most notably the penis-size (“Huge & curved”)³⁴ of the men to whom he was attracted. He also described the uninhibited physicality of his sexual encounters:

X Deep to Hilt,Breathed and quick enormous push. Loved mightily. To Hilt Deep. X., First time after so many years and so deep mutual longing. Rode gloriously – splendid steed.³⁵

Homosexuality was criminal in both public and private Edwardian Britain under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act and would in itself have attracted official opprobrium. As Havelock Ellis observed in his study on sexual inversion published in 1900:

Thus it happens that whenever a man is openly detected in a homosexual act, however exemplary his life may previously have been, however admirable it may still be in all other relations, every ordinary normal citizen, however licentious and pleasure-loving his own life may be, feels it a moral duty to regard the offender as hopelessly damned and to help in hounding him out of society.³⁶

That expected response to homosexuality notwithstanding, the frequency, zest and unabashed minutiae of description of Casement’s sexual encounters were noted, in the advice to Cabinet of Sir Ernley Blackwell, legal advisor to the Home Office, as particularly aggravating evidence of Casement’s degeneracy. In a passage that begins by asserting that “[i]t is difficult to imagine a worse case of high treason than Casement’s”, Blackwell’s advice observed that “Of late, he seems to have completed the full cycle of sexual degeneracy, and a pervert has become an invert – a woman or pathic who derives satisfaction from attracting men and inducing them to use him.”³⁷ The conflation of treason and homosexuality conveys a patriarchal aversion to bodily penetration and its misogyny is evident in the characterisation of women as typically “inducing men to use” them.³⁸ It is not difficult to imagine that Casement’s physical receptiveness to non-white colonised males was particularly offensive to the sexual politics of imperial domination. The discussion of Casement’s body and its desires at the highest levels of British government continued after his death with a report to the Home Office on a post-mortem rectal examination to determine if Casement had the sexual activity described in diaries:

I made the examination which was the subject of our conversation at the Home Office on Tuesday, after the conclusion of the inquest today, and found unmistakable evidence of the practices to which it was alleged the prisoner in question had been addicted. The anus was at a glance seen to be dilated and on making a digital examination (rubber gloves) I found that the lower part of the bowel was dilated as far as the fingers could reach.³⁹

Whether or not the medical examination had any validity in determining pre-mortem sexual activity, the reporting of this intimate examination highlights the political import of ostensibly private bodies.⁴⁰ As Colm Tóibín mordantly expressed it:

In all the images we have of Anglo-Irish relations over the centuries, perhaps this one is the saddest and the most stark: a prison doctor examining Casement’s arsehole a short time after he had been hanged, on the orders of the British Government.⁴¹

Casement’s body remained a source of controversy for fifty years after his death, as the British and Irish governments discussed whether his remains could be repatriated to Ireland from their burial place in Pentonville Prison.⁴² In advance of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising and mindful of Irish votes, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson agreed to the return of Casement’s remains. Casement had expressed a wish to his cousin Gertrude Bannister to be buried at Murlough Bay in Northern Ireland, but such a burial would not have constituted repatriation since the altered political realities meant that Northern Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom.⁴³ Moreover, the British government was unwilling to risk inflaming tensions in Northern Ireland and as a result, Casement was reinterred in Glasnevin on 1 March 1965, with the honours of a State funeral and in a cemetery that holds the remains of many of the State’s founding heroes such as Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stuart Parnell, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Michael Collins, Maud Gonne, Constance Markievicz and Kevin Barry. Making a connection between Casement’s body and the political reunification of Ireland, the British Government received assurances that “any question of the further removal of the remains should not be considered until the unity of Ireland was restored”.⁴⁴ In life and in death, where Casement’s body went and what it did proved politically sensitive and instructive of the prevailing national and body politics.

In addition to this sexual corporeality, Casement read on bodies the abuse suffered by the indigenous people enslaved to the rubber trade in the Congo and in the Putamayo. He described their starved bodies, as well as the scars of violence inflicted in them. He documented “highly instructive backsides”, eloquent and informative bodies, that he imagined rubbing in the faces of those responsible for the whippings that marked the buttocks.⁴⁵ His response to what he saw suggested an ability to respond in a variety of physical registers:

The sick woman groaned all night, and some of the other women came for medicine and help. I gave them what I had in the shape of relief, and then the big men, seeing this, came round me with their bruised buttocks and scarified limbs. One big splendid-looking Boras young man – with a broad good humoured face like an Irishman – had a fearful cut on his left buttock. […] The flesh for the size of a saucer was black and scarred, and this crown of sore flesh was the size of a florin. I put lanoline and a pad of cotton wool over it. Many more came for the same treatment.⁴⁶

Casement linked here a corporeally-aware desire (“splendid-looking Boras young man”) with an active physical care for the young man, for the sick woman whom he protected all night and for the “many more [who] came for the same treatment”. Also at play was a conception of Irish identity that could include the oppressed non-Irish he encountered: “It was only because I was an Irishman that I could understand fully, the whole scheme of wrongdoing at work on the Congo [… .] I realised I was looking at this tragedy”, he wrote of the slavery he witnessed in the Congo, “with the eyes of another race of people once hunted themselves”.⁴⁷ And the identification operated in the other direction also, allowing him to call the Irish “White Indians” and to recognise in the impoverished bodies of children in the West of Ireland the consequences of the same colonial capitalism he had witnessed in South America, leading him to dub Galway an “Irish Putamayo”.⁴⁸ Casement’s version of Irish national identity created lines of solidarity and empathic identification that extended beyond geographical borders and family heritage. Some, such as novelist W.G Sebald have suggested that “it was precisely Casement’s homosexuality that sensitised him to the continuing oppression, exploitation, enslavement and destruction, across the borders of social class and race, of those who were furthest from the centers of power.”⁴⁹ And Colm Tóibín concurs, acknowledging the potential for empathy in corporeal desire: “Perhaps it was his very homosexuality, and his deep interest in ‘a certain portion of their anatomy’, to quote Eamon Duggan, which made him into the humanitarian he was, made him so appalled.”⁵⁰

Casement’s ability to read the complexities of embodiment is particularly evident in his response to the dances he attended during his investigations in the Putamayo in 1910. He described in his diaries large tribal gatherings with dancing as their organising focus. He was aware that the gathering was in part a performance, a display ordered by the overseers to give the impression to the investigating commission that relations with the indigenous people were benevolent. Casement learned that “this is not an ordinary dance”, since what he calls “balls” were often occasions for further physical and sexual violence by the company overseers.⁵¹ He also learned that the dances were controlled by the company overseers who limited their number to four a year and curtailed their duration “because they [the indigenous people] would not be able to work caucho (rubber) tomorrow if they danced”.⁵² Despite the intentions of the company overseers, the ball also provided Casement with an opportunity to see and photograph the lash-wounds inflicted on the people: “We photographed many – Gielgud and I. We visited the Indians’ house (the Muchachos’ house) where the Indians were dancing both in afternoon and evening. I saw many men, and boys too, covered with scars, and often drew the attention of the others to this.”⁵³ Dance, as Casement described it, could be both a choreography of oppression and a threat to the efficiency of colonial capitalism, a performance demanded, as well as a resistant pleasure experienced.

Dance also provided an opportunity for solidarity, as Casement noted how one of the investigating team was “highly popular [with the indigenous people], dancing with them, keeping step and playing with the children.”⁵⁴ Such keeping step implied an empathic corporeal attentiveness facilitated by the dancing. And it was an involvement that Casement had experienced himself as part of the nascent nationalist movement in Ulster in the early twentieth-century: “We tried to revive Irish dancing, and Roger took his place in the fourhanded reels. He strode about the roads, hatless, encouraging and working up interest in the movement.”⁵⁵ Whether it was in the physical or in the political “movement” that Casement was rousing interest is ambiguous, perhaps appropriately so, since Casement’s analysis of the politics of dancing in the oppressive conditions of the Putamayo did not focus on the aesthetics of the dance form, but recognised the complexity of social, economic and political forces activated and resisted through the form that also expressed pleasure, empathy, community-reinforcement and self-expression. Added to an understanding of Casement as a political and erotic body in motion, this Putamayo material proved Casement to be a rich resource for a contemporary dance artist wishing to acknowledge dance’s expertise in the formation of individual and collective bodies and, consequently, in reassessing the origins and sanctioned identities of the nation-state in Ireland.

Liv O’Donoghue in Butterflies and Bones: The Casement Project. Photographer Stephen Wright for The Casement Project.

Entering the archive: legacies of The Casement Project

Alison Garden concludes her recent work on the promiscuous influence of Casement on modernist and contemporary literature with an analysis of the variety of artistic responses to the Casement legacy that appeared in 2016 and identifies The Casement Project as “[m]ost provocative of all”.⁵⁶ Without explaining the reasoning for that assessment, she offers that “Ó Conchuir’s engagement with Casement was shaped by three central preoccupations: the archive, the body and the performative nature of identity.”⁵⁷ I don’t disagree, though, as with all artistic work, I contend that there are other animating currents and preoccupations unfolding in the work that escape this helpful classification. In my application to the Arts Council’s Open Call, I proposed that The Casement Project would comprise five elements: a performance for stage, a day of dance on Banna Strand, a dance film for broadcast on RTÉ, cross-disciplinary academic symposia, and a programme of dance activities for LGBT refugees and asylum seekers.⁵⁸ The variety of dance-based activity was designed to offer different ways into a project that aimed to model how an engagement with the myth and materiality of historical legacies could be manifest in productive and progressive ways in dancing bodies. For almost two years, The Casement Project prepared, performed, communicated about and reflected on these activities, adding to them when opportunities presented themselves, such as curating a club night for Kilkenny Arts Festival 2016 or giving lecture demonstrations for academic events in New York and at the University of Limerick. Casement’s history provided an opportunity to foreground dance not only in the centenary commemorations of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, but also – in a conscious complication of any closed conceptions of nationhood – in the 1418NOW programme that was part of the United Kingdom’s official commemoration of the First World War. I mobilised networks built through my own career across both jurisdictions to secure this trans-national identity for the project. As a result, Butterflies and Bones, the work for stage, was premiered in London before being performed in Dublin, on Banna Strand and in Belfast. The academic symposia, Bodies Politic and Hospitable Bodies took place at Maynooth University and at the British Library respectively, and the dance film, I’m Roger Casement, was broadcast on RTÉ and streamed on ARTE, the European cultural channel. The work with LGBT refugees and asylum seekers, which continues, happened in London and in Dublin. The project was conceived and enacted not just to represent a set of ideas enabled by a particular articulation of Casement’s legacy, but also as a practice of those ideas in action. The choreography was of movement on stage and of the connections, flow, and interplay between places, funding structures, partnerships, political contexts, participants and archives. This is the material from which a dance artist can make choreography an ethical and political act.

By engaging with that wider context, The Casement Project was able to seed a legacy in institutions where dance is rarely acknowledged. The National Library of Ireland selected the project website for inclusion in its nascent web archive. The same website won an award for best microsite in the 2016 Irish Web Awards, illustrating how the work managed to be visible beyond a dance context. The project was also included in Centenary, the State’s official account of the 1916 commemorations.⁵⁹ In 2017, at the launch in London of Creative Ireland – a legacy programme of the 2016 commemorations under the auspices of the Taoiseach’s Office– images from The Casement Project were used as part of then Minister for the Arts, Heather Humphreys’ introductory presentation.⁶⁰ Footage from the project’s dance film, I’m Roger Casement, along with a brief interview with me appeared in a video that Creative Ireland used to relaunch the ireland.ie portal as a platform for Irish creativity. The video, entitled “This is Ireland”, allowed dance and The Casement Project in particular to appear alongside a selection of chefs, designers, scientists, filmmakers, composers, poets, theatre-makers and musicians in the promotion to national and global audiences of the creative constituents of a State-sponsored Irish identity. The harnessing of The Casement Project to what was ultimately a nation-branding exercise is not without its complications: the particular movement that appeared in the still and video excerpts from The Casement Project showed the dancers on Banna Strand with interlinked elbows in a choreography inspired by a photo taken by Casement during his investigations in the Amazon, investigations that exposed the corporeal costs, inscribed on human bodies, of exploitative capitalism.⁶¹ The gesture of interlinked arms suggested solidarity, support and connection while also supporting movement and surprise. It linked Casement and his humanitarian work understood and mediated through dancing bodies to the functioning of the contemporary Irish state and to the State’s economic imperatives.

Finally, The Casement Project has also secured in academic archives a growing legacy for the dance-based knowledge it practised and produced, and has maintained boundary-crossing trans-disciplinary motion as its distinctive characteristic. It has been the subject of my own analysis in an Irish Review special edition on Geography. It has been referenced in Garden’s coda to a work on Literature, discussed in the The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance, and in this edition, included in a context focused on History.⁶² There can be little doubt that it is what O’Toole has called the “multifaceted nature of Casement’s personality and legacy, from his homosexuality to his pioneering human rights investigations, from the body politic to the politicised body” that has provided The Casement Project with this passport into a variety of archives for dance and for dance’s foregrounding of the corporeal.⁶³ The dancing bodies that the project has brought into focus no longer perform the studied artlessness sanctioned by earlier nationalist ideologies (though as noted, lived reality has always exceeded the discursive boundaries established for it). These are bodies in motion, crossing borders, offering care, bearing corporeal witness to their experiences. The transformation by dancers’ bodies of Casement’s story, diaries, photographs and the objects he collected, modelled both the formation of bodies by oppressive historical legacies and the ability of bodies, individually and collectively, to find positive resources for creativity in such an inheritance. The deliberate placement of those dancing bodies in relation to the complex and changing performances of national identity, as conditioned by the politics and economics of commemoration, represented a strategic claim for and a materialisation of the value of dance. As we deal with a health crisis in 2020 that has exposed once again the unequal distribution of corporeal risk in our society, that value is undiminished.

Acknowledgments

The material in this article was submitted as part of my PhD dissertation “Artist/Citizen: Choreographing the Nation Brand.” National University of Ireland Maynooth, 2017. My PhD research was funded by the Irish Research Council’s inaugural Employment-based PhD Scholarship in 2012, that brought together Project Arts Centre and Maynooth University in support of work-based academic research. Particular thanks are due to my supervisor Prof. Gerry Kearns, to the wider supervisory team of Prof. Karen Till and Cian O’Brien and to the performers, collaborators, partners, funders and participants who made possible the creative work described here. A full list of all involved is available at www.thecasementproject.ie. This article and the contribution it offers to research on embodied commemoration and the formation of identity would not have been able to appear in this context without the feedback and guidance of the editor and peer reviewer. Buíochas mór leo.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Kobayashi, “Situated Knowledge, Reflexivity,” 139.

2. O’Toole, “In 2016, Official Ireland”.

3. McGrath, “Emerging Dance Scholarship in Ireland,” 289.

4. Bryan, “Ritual, Identity and Nation,” 22.

5. McBride, “Art: 2016–The Year That Was”.

6. Kenny, “Speech by An Taoiseach”.

7. For the significance of theatre for many involved in the Easter Rising see “Playing” in Foster, Vivid Faces, 75–114.

8. See Carol Rumens analysis of the poem in “Poem of the Week”, where the title is seen as a reference to William Dubar’s “Lament for the Makers”. “Lament for the Poets: 1916” appears as “The Blackbirds” in some anthologies such as The Complete Poems.

9. Irish Writers’ Centre, “A Poet’s Rising”.

10. Lucy McDiarmid’s focus on the afterlife of Casement has opened a rich seam of enquiry on Casement’s posthumous power. McDiarmid, “The Afterlife of Roger Casement,” 167–216. See also Lewis, “The Queer Life and Afterlife”.

11. Johnson, Ireland, the Great War and the Geography of Remembrance.

12. Arts Council. “ART:2016”.

13. O’Toole, “Fintan O’Toole’s Cultural Highlights”.

14. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 820; and Braidotti, The Posthuman, 102.

15. McGrath, Dance Theatre in Ireland, 37.

16. Meyer, “Mapping the Body Politic,” 69.

17. Brennan, “Reinventing Tradition”.

18. Ibid., 23.

19. Quoted in Foster, Vivid Faces, 122.

20. McDiarmid, At Home in the Revolution, 85–6. See ibid, footnote 45, 213.

21. Foster, Vivid Faces, 122–3.

22. For the account of Casement’s life and afterlife that follows see Dudgeon, Roger Casement; Mitchell, Roger Casement; Mitchell, The Amazon Journal; Lewis, “The Queer Life and Afterlife”; Tóibín, “A Whale of a Time”; Tóibín, “The Tragedy of Roger Casement”; O’Toole, “The Multiple Hero”; Sawyer, Roger Casement’s Diaries; Mullen, The Poor Bugger’s Tool; and Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism.

23. The report was titled Correspondence respecting the treatment of British Colonial Subjects and Native Indians employed in the collection of rubber in the Putamayo District, referred to in Mitchell, The Amazon Journal, 92.

24. In 1915, Casement sought to divest himself of his titles in a letter to Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary. The letter was not acknowledged and Casement was officially stripped of his knighthood after his conviction. Mitchell, One Bold Deed, Appendix 2.

25. Casement, The Crime Against Europe, 171. Quoted in Kearns and Nally, “An Accumulated Wrong,” 8.

26. Mitchell, Roger Casement in Brazil, 60. (Casement to Green, R.M.S. Nile, 21 September 1906). Also Mitchell, Roger Casement: 16 Lives, 128.

27. See for example, Mitchell “Phases of a Dishonourable Phantasy”; and Mitchell, Roger Casement.

28. Casement, “Some poems of Roger Casement”; and Casement, “Essays by Roger Casement”.

29. Clarke cited in Dudgeon, Roger Casement, 170.

30. Conrad cited in Tóibín, “A Whale of a Time,” 24.

31. Dudgeon, Roger Casement, 225.

32. Ibid.

33. Martinez-Pinzón and Uriarte, “Documenting Atrocities,” 93.

34. Dudgeon, Roger Casement, 213. Emphasis in original.

35. Ibid., 207, 208, 215. (emphasis in original).

36. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 203.

37. Blackwell, “Cabinet Papers”.

38. Mitchell, Casement, 148.

39. Mander, “Post-Mortem Description”.

40. The 1870 case of Fanny and Stella had seem a similar mobilisation of dubious medical intrusion. Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, friends, professional cross-dressers and men who had sex with men, were arrested for sodomy. They were subjected to repeated medical examinations designed to detect whether they had had anal sex. They were examined first by a police surgeon and eventually by a panel of six court-appointed medical experts, including Dr. Alfred Swaine Taylor, a pioneer of forensic medicine. Ambroise Tardieu’s 1857 work on the physiology and psychology of sodomites, Étude Médico-Légale sur les Attentats aux Mœurs, provided a reference guide for at least some of the doctors involved. According to Tardieu’s analysis, sodomites were betrayed by a distinctive depression on the groove between the buttocks, by a smoothing of the puckering around the anus, and by the dilation of the anus, or failing evident dilation, the susceptibility of the anus to dilation when penetrated by an examiner’s finger. Elongated, pointed or corkscrew–shaped penises were also considered by Tardieu to be evidence of sodomy. Taylor, from his own experience of performing a post–mortem examination on a woman who turned out to be a man dressed as a woman, also considered a dilated anus and lack of puckering to characterise someone who had engaged in sodomy. The failure of these medical experts to agree on the evidence produced by these intrusive examinations led to Fanny and Stella being spared charges of sodomy and illustrated the inadequacy of the approach as a diagnostic. See McKenna, Fanny and Stella. See also Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality.

41. Tóibín, Love in A Dark Time, 109.

42. For an account of the surprising agency and political significance of corpses, see Young and Light “Corpses, Dead Body Politics”; and Verdery, The Political Lives.

43. Reid, The Lives of Roger, 434, quoted in McDiarmid, The Irish Art of Controversy, 186. Minutes of a British Cabinet meeting on 14 January 1965 acknowledge Casement’s burial wishes and the political impossibility of granting them. PRO, CAB128/39, pt. 1 quoted in Grant, “Bones of Contention”, 351–2.

44. Mac Dubhghaill, “Casement Burial Plan”.

45. Mitchell, The Amazon Journal, 198.

46. Ibid., 271. The Bora tribe is indigenous to the Amazon region between the Putamayo and Napo rivers.

47. Casement to Alice Stopford Green, 20 April 1907. Quoted in Mitchell, The Amazon Journal, 280.

48. Ibid., 270.

49. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 134.

50. Tóibín, Love in a Dark Time, 105. See also Kearns, “The Casement Project and the Empathic Body”.

51. Mitchell, The Amazon Journal, 143.

52. Ibid., 144.

53. Ibid., 142. Henry Gielgud, an accountant, was one of the Peruvian Amazon Company’s commission members sent to investigate conditions in the Putamayo, as well as researching further commercial exploitation opportunities. Casement joined the commission as a British Foreign Office appointment.

54. Ibid., 143.

55. O’Neill cited in Dudgeon, Roger Casement, 170.

56. Garden, The Literary Afterlives, 198.

57. Ibid., 198.

58. Ó Conchúir, “Artist/Citizen,” 155–71.

59. McCreevy, Centenary, 241.

60. Ó Conchúir, “Artist/Citizen,” 296.

61. Casement, Roger Casement Photographic Collection, CAS16D. For a discussion of the image see Ó Conchúir, “Artist/Citizen,” 181–87. See Kearns “Colonial Resistance” [online lecture] for an account of Casement’s developing anti-colonial and anti-capitalist thinking.

62. Ó Conchúir, “Féile Fáilte”; Jordan and Weltz, eds, The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance, 194; and Garden, The Literary Afterlives, 198.

63. See note 2 above.