Towards the 12th May: A play spoken by a chorus of voices for James Connolly (5 June 1868 – 12 May 1916)

Morris, Catherine (2020) Towards the 12th May: A play spoken by a chorus of voices for James Connolly (5 June 1868 – 12 May 1916). The New Pretender.

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Abstract

Antonio Gramsci, James Connolly, Alice Milligan. Towards the 12th May is about different forms of radical freedom and acts of solidarity that are imagined and performed in different forms of imprisonment. The piece, in part, revisits the rehearsal space in Liberty Hall in which Connolly’s play Under Which Flag was performed just three weeks before the Rising. Conflating memory and time, the stage is occupied simultaneously with rehearsals of theatre work by women such as Alice Milligan whose performances of Irish tableaux formed a major part of the anti-colonial cultural movement and attempts to build community through theatre as practice. Roger Casement, on return from his Human Rights work in the Congo worked with Milligan and other to stage these theatrical productions across Ireland and especially in the north. Like embodied acts of quotation in coded resistance, women prisoners who had trained with Milligan and Gonne in devised theatre performance staged tableaux depicting former historic revolutionary political prisoners during their own Hunger Strike in the Free State. Francis Sheehy Skeffington was the only person to publish a review of the play. Many of those who performed James Connolly’s script on the stage of Liberty Hall went onto die in action just weeks later during the Irish revolution. The stills in this piece are from Jesse Jones’ commissioned 16mm film The Spectre and the Sphere that evokes the spectres of ideology and amplifies residual voices that haunt the cultural vessels of history. It examines how the spaces of our popular imagining such as the theatre and the cinema are also containers of historical and political impulses. Resonating throughout halls of the Vooruit a whispering choir revisits Karl Marx’s iconic text, The Communist Manifesto extracting the spectral aspects of Marx’s prediction of how history would unfold.

This piece is dedicated to the former Irish Debenhams workers in Dublin and Cork who while campaigning to be paid redundancy payments following their own lay-off in April 2020 have raised funds to help their fellow Bangladeshi workers in Dhaka after they discovered that they too had been left stranded by the company’s cutbacks.

Item Type:	Article
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Creative Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities
Depositing User:	Catherine Morris
Date Deposited:	21 Apr 2023 09:14
Last Modified:	05 Dec 2024 16:17
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3886

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