Cork Opera House: A Home to Participation?
Cork Opera House is the only purpose build Opera House in Ireland, with a 1000 seat auditorium, orchestra pit built for 70 musicians and a sell-out pantomime delighting Cork audiences’ year after year. Rebuilt after a fire in 1955, this cultural landmark has been at the epicentre of Cork City for over 150 years. However, despite this rich history and its commitment to programming state-of-the art theatre, many people in Cork have never been inside the Opera House.
For Culture Night 2023, I have been asked as a theatre maker and academic researcher to delve into why this is the case; developing a novel piece of theatre which engages new audiences with parts of the Cork Opera House building they have never seen before. I work in participatory arts and community engagement; my goal is to platform marginalised, unheard voices in all aspects of my work.
My aim, then, is to combine my work in community with my practice as a theatre maker, working with groups across Cork who have little-to-no experience of the Opera House to co-create a performance piece which interrogates who gets to call the Opera House a home, and why some people feel as though they belong in cultural institutions more than others. This project thus necessitates an in-depth interrogation into the theory and practice surrounding the question of community and participatory theatre, reflecting on the ways in which community can be dialectically understood as both a positive force for change and a means of maintaining, rather than troubling, the status-quo. How can I ensure that this piece of theatre disrupts, and that Cork Opera House becomes a home to participation; a home to all?
Community Theatre and Participatory Theatre: A Brief Introduction
Before creating this piece of theatre, as I will be working with Cork-based marginalised communities I deem it necessary to interrogate the meaning of community and participatory theatre and its role in contemporary Ireland. In Devising, A Critical History, the Association of Community Theatre envisioned community as ‘part of the larger class struggle and as a means of changing dominant concepts of culture’¹. This commitment to troubling dominant concepts of culture is pertinent when considering Ireland, where:
‘a largely clerically repressed and culturally homogenous nationalistic state existed throughout the 20th century. Irishness was represented in singular ethnic and religious terms, deliberately ‘forgetting’ the genetic riches of previous waves of migration. That has now been supplanted by the reality of a state in which up to one in six of the current residents were born off the island’².
This ‘deliberate forgetting’ is a cornerstone of traditional understandings of community: ‘in the 1950s and 1960s community was most often viewed as a static, utopian ideal of neighbourliness and locality, and its absence was mourned’³. Community at this time could thus can be linked to a normative and reductive understanding of identity that was entirely linked to place, rather than a celebration and embrace of difference: a means of deliberately leaving out people who are underrepresented and as such considered “other”, or outside of the normative, homogenous, traditional understanding of community.
To extend this to the question of Ireland, community in these terms would consist of white people born on this island, which is the dominant discourse around categorising “Irishness” in many ways, as in Ireland:
‘immigration laws are notoriously tight; migrants with claims for refugee status are housed in ‘direct provision’ centres until they are (slowly) processed and which have been the subject of much controversy; racism is a facet of Irish life and the loathsome fearmongering of the far-right is emergent’⁴.
To counter this reading of community in a Brazilian context, theorist Paolo Freire developed his notion of conscientization — considering communities of interest, rather than locality, and banding people together across borders⁵.
Taking these theories into account, and embracing a contemporary understanding of community, I understand community theatre to be a style of performance making which aims to break down barriers to active engagement and participation with both creators and audiences; engaging communities of interest and amplifying otherwise unheard voices.
My Piece for Cork Opera House as Community Theatre
To truly trouble dominant discourses in the arts, engaging with and platforming stories and voices outside of our own is pivotal, which makes community theatre integral to our cultural landscape. Though there is a potential of perpetuating the traditional understanding community as a homogenous, damaging means of keeping marginalised people out, listening to unheard voices and engaging communities of interest can uplift these marginalised voices, demonstrating the multiplicity of human experience through participation while highlighting and celebrating our shared humanity. Therefore, (not) for the likes of us, my piece for Cork Opera House, aims to exemplify the importance of community theatre through working with Freirean, conscientized communities of interest. I will specifically engage with people who self-identify as having experienced social exclusion through having additional needs such as chronic pain, reduced mobility and social anxiety.
Engaging new audiences in Cork Opera House necessitates an understanding of the multiple diverse communities of interest cohabiting in Cork City, putting them at the heart of the performance. I will work with partner organisations across Cork to deliver workshops in Spring 2023, bookending this process with individual interviews with participants. The workshops will centre around using your voice to take up space, and the voices and stories of participants will become the building blocks of the final sound piece for Culture Night in September. But why sound?
(not) for the likes of us — is a Sound Piece the Right Medium?
As a writer and theatre-maker my work has been traditionally grounded in text, with actors on stage for the final performance. However, taking these theories around community and participation into account, I deem it important to explicate why the final performance of (not) for the likes of us will be a sound piece: when so much of this project centres around the representation of marginalised communities who have long been silenced and left out of Cork (and Irish) theatre, would it not make sense to have them live on stage? Based on this research into communities of interest and my above definition of community theatre (theatre which breaks down barriers to engagement participation from both creators and audiences), I have decided to create a sound piece as a means of encouraging audiences to engage with the piece. Audiences will be led through Cork Opera House, listening to the voices which have been historically left out of the institution as their bodies are the only ones to physically occupy the space. Considering workshop participants/co-creators, Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance⁶ is pivotal to understanding the power that comes from only hearing their voices. According to Phelan:
‘there are serious limitations to visual representation as a political goal… [as] visibility politics are additive rather than transformational (to say nothing of revolutionary). They lead to the stultifying “me-ism” to which realist representation is always vulnerable’.
To avoid making these marginalised people even more vulnerable through realist representation, a sound piece enables us to collectively lean into what Phelan outlines as the ‘real power in remaining unmarked’, and as such situating audience members in a more vulnerable position than creators during the performance. As audiences listen to these marginalised voices who have been left out of Cork Opera House, while seeing no bodies outside of their own along the performance path, they will thus confront this absence of bodies as implicitly political: a symbol of the continued repression of marginalised bodies in Irish performance spaces and Irish society as a whole. The process of co-creating this performative sound walk is largely inspired by Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (a follower of Freire’s school of thought), as spectators will be encouraged to instead be ‘spect-actors’⁷. They will be theorised as part of the performance and, as such, encouraged to call into question longstanding oppressions in Irish arts and culture as they take part in this sound walk; asking how barriers to participation with Cork Opera House might be eased through aesthetic engagement strategies and addressing the multiplicity of Ireland as a nation.
Conclusion: Cork Opera House — for the likes of us?
This article attempts to embrace the slipperiness of the term community — a malleable definition which has changed over time and which continues to change in contemporary Irish society. It doesn’t fully pin down a right way to engage people in theatre making. To look at ‘communities of interest’, specifically working with marginalised groups, undoubtedly raises ethical questions around who has the right to tell another person’s story, what risks are being incurred for people with different vulnerabilities, and who serves to gain from the finished product — when does co-creation turn into tokenisation? Imposed definitions can constrict, and so the aim of this project, instead, is to use broad brushstrokes. In attempting to find right ways (rather than a singular way) of merging community engagement with theatre making, I aim to encourage self-identification, to engage with participants over a long period of time and to celebrate the multiplicity of voices that have long been left on the margins of Irish society. Embracing the power of the unmarked, while politicising spect-actors, Cork Opera House could truly become a home to participation.
[1] Heddon, Deirdre and Jane Milling,Devising, A Critical History (New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006)
[2] Freebody, Kelly and Micheal Finneran, Critical Themes in Drama, A Social, Cultural and Political Analysis (Oxford, New York: Routledge, 2021)
[3] Heddon, Deirdre and Jane Milling, Devising, A Critical History (New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006)
[4] Freebody, Kelly and Micheal Finneran, Critical Themes in Drama,A Social, Cultural and Political Analysis (Oxford, New York, Routeledge, 2021)
[5] Freire, Paolo, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (London, New York: Penguin Books, 1996)
[6] Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London, New York: Routledge, 1993)
[7] Boal, Augusto, Theatre of the Oppressed (London: Pluto Press, 2019)
