Theatre and Home: Thoughts from a Kitchen Sink Jan 2021
The tap runs, the suds form, and I immerse my hands into warm water. The view from the window is the same but different, the trampoline, the patchy grass, the four hens who nourish it, the colour of the sky ever changing. For the warmth, the water and a place to call home, I am grateful. I embody this gratitude somewhere. I often forget it, as I flit between several states of emotion and thought often in minutes, sometimes in days. I doubt I am alone in this.
As global, national and local communities and as individuals we have been coping with the COVID-19 pandemic, and the various restrictions and challenges this brings mentally, socially, physically, politically and economically. Ideas of home have changed due to governmental and geographical measures of confinement, which range from being advised to stay at home, to stay within 2km, to 5km, to county boundaries, and include restrictions on activity, work and social interactions. The world for me has seemed bigger and yet smaller, as I move in and out of my family bubble becoming more adept and aware of online platforms and digital means of communication and theatre making. I miss my parents, my siblings, my friends. I miss working in the theatre, I miss the craic, the battle of making and making do, the relief of something coming together. I am immersed into full-time motherhood, I think of my own mother, and mothers, and homemakers, and those for whom ‘home’ is an unsafe place. I think of little shoes tied to fences, walls and gates in Tuam, Meath and Cork. Shoes marked by stories of little feet, a visible reminder of pain, loss and displacement but also of resilience and a resolve for dignified resting places. I breathe. I look out the window and take in the sky. Robins, wagtails, thrushes and crows visit the patchy grass. I salute the magpies, and think of nests, nesting, and learning to fly.
I move between nostalgia for the past, gratitude, wonder at the local environment and particularly the sea. I feel frustrated, disempowered, frightened and overwhelmed. I have spent most of the year in my house, talking to and looking at screens, and yet I know I am not alone, and that there are possibilities for great change in this time. I investigate access to water, food, housing and health care in Galway, Mexico and Gaza; three distinct places brought together for me by researching how theatre artists make meanings of home in places confronting adversity, whether political, ecological, historical or indeed, all and more. The data and lack of data angers me and I resolve to highlight what I have learned. I am inspired and comforted by the work and will of fellow artists in Ireland and abroad. I live for connection and I seek connection. This search is quintessential to my profession and brings up many questions about what I as a theatre artist am trying to achieve but also about liveness and theatre as a digital medium. I wish to highlight that this is the first time I have publically described myself as a theatre artist, which speaks to my own story and to larger socio cultural contexts that have led to a reluctance to claim my identity as a theatre artist and to my feelings of inadequacy even when I do so.
2020 marked a year where due to the COVID-19 pandemic the majority of live performance artists turned to digital mediums to disseminate their work and for many theatre artists in particular this was a relatively new or unexplored medium. Figures for at least for the first half of 2020 demonstrate huge audience numbers for online performances released on national or large media platforms. US analytics company Samba TV reported that 2.7 million households in the US tuned into the streaming version of the massive hit Broadway musical Hamilton from when it debuted on Disney Plus July 3 through July 13.[1] However, Disney has not released viewership data for Hamilton, for which they are reported to have paid $75 million for streaming rights.
In the UK tens of millions of people viewed productions online during lockdown in April and May 2020, according to figures reported by organisations including the National Theatre, which says its own streaming figures equate to all three of its spaces being completely filled for 11 years.[2] The National Theatre in the UK released one free production a week over 16 weeks between April and July 2020 and had over 10 million viewers, with viewers coming to the channel from more than 160 countries in total.[3] It is important to note that the National Theatre have been live streaming theatrical performance through cinema since 2009, but these have all been ticketed events.
In Ireland, the national theatre, the Abbey, launched Dear Ireland in April, described by the Abbey Directors as ‘A national conversation led by Ireland’s artists 50 writers, 50 actors.’[4] Fifty performances were presented free on YouTube over four nights in and were available to watch online for six months. Over 4000 people viewed the ‘opening night’ of Dear Ireland.[5] The Abbey subsequently released two more instalments of Dear Ireland, the second ‘an open house performance of letters, poems, and songs’ and filmed on the Abbey stage which currently has over 41,000 views on YouTube[6]. The third a series of ‘three minute postcards from underrepresented voices in Irish society’ has 3,989 views on YouTube[7].
In terms of smaller independent theatre companies in Ireland, I can report viewing figures from Fregoli Theatre Company, of which I am the artistic director. Fregoli was awarded funding for a residency for 2020 in the newly refurbished Roscommon Arts Centre, which has several studio spaces, and a large bright white rehearsal room enhanced by the natural light from several large windows. From March of this year our ‘home’ as a company became not what we had hoped and planned for, but 8 onscreen boxes of a zoom call where we met weekly to talk, read scenes and try and make work. The digital projects were released over Facebook and YouTube and currently have over 15,000 viewings in total. Fregoli’s average annual audience figures for theatre attendance prior to 2020 are approx. 5000. The digital pieces were available to watch free of cost (two requested charity donations). This work would not have been possible without the support of the arts centre and funding. 2020 was the first year Fregoli received arts council funding since the company’s establishment in 2007. This raises questions of sustainability of working in a hugely competitive and sporadically funded landscape particularly for smaller organizations. It also highlights the pressing need to prepare for the dissemination of digital arts content sustainably. Although there are many potential drawbacks and complexities for theatre artists in presenting work digitally, the accessibility of digital theatre to wider and more international audiences is a huge advantage, both in terms of the performance reach and perhaps a deeper consideration of content. I for one have considered much more what the work is saying about us a community on a national and international level.
Community, the length of this word, its sounds, and meaning has always intrigued me. I remember being in second class in primary school drawing ‘our community’, the small village where the school was located. I felt uneasy about this, as I lived a half hour drive away and was never there at weekends! Later the teacher talked about community and sharing, how we all affect each other using the image of ripples in water as an example and this made more sense to me. Ripples, waves, connections, theatre has such potential as a vital energy in this movement of life.
I make more tea, the gurgle of the kettle, the steam, the clinking spoon, the pouring of boiling water, the spinning tea bag turning it brown. The repetition and ritual of this brings me comfort, makes me feel at ‘home’, and sometimes gives me space to dream. I look out at the birds, I think about migration, mobility, and about how we all share a portion of one vast sky. I buy a large set of costume wings online for a performance I know I will do. I stand at the kitchen sink, and from this place things begin.
[1] https://www.nexttv.com/news/disney-plus-hamilton-viewership-exceeds-those-whove-seen-it-live-research-company-says accessed 06/11/2020
[2] https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/tens-of-millions-watching-streamed-theatre-shows-worldwide accessed 07/07/2020
[3] ibid
[4] https://www.abbeytheatre.ie/dear-ireland/ accessed 20/05/2020
[5] Sunday Times, Culture Magazine, Culture Vulture Katy Hayes June 14 2020
[6] https://www.abbeytheatre.ie/whats-on/dear-ireland-continues accessed on 16/01/2021
[7] https://www.abbeytheatre.ie/whats-on/dear-ireland-3/ accessed on 16/01/2021
