Chair’s Corner: Notes from the CCÉ Ottawa Chair, August-September 2015

A very heartfelt thank you also to all of our branch members who volunteered in many ways in the preparing of the site of the Oireachtas Gaeilge Cheanada, which we did not use because of rain, setting up the hotel venue, printing certificates, directing  people and answering their questions. CCÉ members from the Ottawa, Kingston, Toronto, Hamilton and Sudbury branches attended and competed in the event this year.

Also a huge thank you again to the Ottawa CCÉ dancers who came out for twice weekly practiced for the set dancing competition. It paid off again in another gold medal performance!  Dancers were C. McFee, P. Avendano, D. Clement, A. Mayrand, S. Proctor, L. Hay, C. Bowers and S. Scott. Kudos also to CCÉ members A. Mayrand, M.  Comerton for participating in the signing competitions.

Several Ottawa CCÉ members attended the Irish language immersion weekend at the Gaeltacht, August 10th to 16th. These were Deirdre Dooley, Jim Downey, Helen Finn, Bridget Guglich, Margaret Moriarty, Joan O’Donoghue, Oscar Mou, Sheila Scott, Patrick Scott, Seimh Willoughby. Bridget and Sheila also taught during the week. Many thanks for your active participation in the classes, workshops and evening activities!

The Chair has been in touch with the ICUF scholar who will be with us this year. Her name is Kate Jordan.  She is from Cork also.  She is happy to teach for us this year.

The chair also have been in touch with the English Intensive Program directors and teachers, some of whom were at the May ceili. Hopefully we will have more students in attendance next fall.

Preparations are underway for the Irish language Immersion weekend in Arnprior run by Caint ‘is Comhrá. I attended a planning meeting in late July where we discussed the schedule, publicity, and fees. The weekend will be held at Galilee House in Arnprior on the last weekend of September, Friday 25th to Sunday 27th. 

Kate Jordan, the ICUF from Cork has arrived. Feedback from the students is that she is very good. Thank you also to Bridget Guglich, Joan O Donoghue and Barry Cronin for teaching the Beginner, High Advanced and Advanced classes respectively.

The Chair have met Austin Comerton and other representatives of other Irish cultural groups here in Ottawa re his Fund raising project based on the card game 25, as a way to help save the Irish card game. Present were the Gaels, the Rose of Tralee, the IWN the Irish Society and CCÉ.  We will be meeting on the 25th of each of the following months Nov, Jan, Feb, March, April and possibly May. Austin is looking for a spot like the Residence for us to run this. 

https://youtu.be/8P-aK5yMfw4 

S. Scott has been working with Joan O Donoghue, Toni Forsythe and Bridget Guglich on the organising of the Irish language Immersion weekend in Arnprior run by Caint ‘is Comhrá. The weekend will be held at Galilee House in Arnprior on the last weekend of September, Friday 25th to Sunday 27th.  Kate Jordan (ICUF Ottawa) and the ICUF scholar from Montreal, Siobhan O Maoilaigh will be teaching.

Also the Ottawa CCÉ Branch will hold its AGM on Wednesday, October 7 at 18:30 - 20:30 at the Sunnyside branch of the Ottawa Public Library (that's 1049 Bank St in Old Ottawa South, and there's free parking available, or it's also accessible via bus routes #1 or #7). We hope you can join us to elect a new executive, and get an update on what we're up to. If you are interested in running for any of the Executive positions, please contact M. Maher. Remember you must have your membership up to date (expires on 30 September) to be able to vote and to run for office.

Respectfully submitted, Cathaoirleach

Staging Intercultural Ireland New Plays and Practitioner Perspectives -- Book Review

http://www.corkuniversitypress.com/Staging-Intercultural-Ireland-p/9781782051046.htm

Staging Intercultural Ireland New Plays and Practitioner Perspectives

by 

Charlotte McIvor and Matthew Spangler

This collection features eight plays and six interviews with migrant and Irish-born theatre artists who are producing work at the intersection of interculturalism and inward-migration in Ireland during the first decades of the 21st Century.


Plays covered:

Cave Dwellers (2002) by Nicola McCartney

Hurl (2003) by Charlie O’Neill

Orpheus Road (2003) by Ursula Rani Sarma

The Cambria (2005) by Donal O’Kelly

Once Upon a Time & Not So Long Ago (2006) by Bisi Adigun

Mushroom (2007) by Paul Meade

Rings (2012) by Rosaleen McDonagh

Broken Promise Land (2013) by Mirjana Rendulic


The Celtic Tiger era witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of transnational migrants entering Ireland. By the 2011 Census, 17% of the population was born outside of Ireland and much of what had been assumed about Irish identity (and theatre) could no longer hold. This groundbreaking anthology brings together six interviews and eight plays by migrant and Irish-born theatre artists who probe the impact of inward-migration and interculturalism in post-1990s Ireland. The interviews and plays collected here, all available in print for the first time, model a range of devising strategies, dramaturgical frameworks, and literary forms. To date, the work documented here has been produced at a wide range of venues from the Abbey Theatre and New York’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre to mid-sized theatre companies, community centres, street theatres, and even refugee accommodation centres throughout Ireland. This book represents established as well as emerging theatre artists and includes work by Donal O’Kelly, Bisi Adigun, Charlie O’Neill, Rosaleen McDonagh, Paul Meade, Nicola McCartney, Ursula Rani Sarma, and Mirjana Rendulic. Additionally, there are interviews with Bairbre Ní Chaoimh, Anna Wolf, Kasia Lech, John Currivan, Alicja Ayres, José Miguel Jimenéz, Declan Gorman, Declan Mallon, and John Scott. Staging Intercultural Ireland offers a snapshot of Ireland’s long-term intercultural process in its early stages and contributes to transnational migration studies and intercultural theatre research in a global context.


Charlotte McIvor is Lecturer in Drama, National University of Ireland, Galway and Matthew Spangler is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at San José State University in California, USA.

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This book review appeared in Stylus: Trade, Academic, and Professional Books - Fall 2014, book catalogue. For more information about, and to place an order of "Staging Intercultural Ireland New Plays and Practitioner Perspectives," please check Stylus/Cork University Press website.

Hellenism and Reconciliation in Ireland from Yeats to Field Day -- Book Review

http://www.corkuniversitypress.com/Hellenism-p/9781782050681.htm

Hellenism and Reconciliation in Ireland from Yeats to Field Day

by 

Nathan Wallace

This book is a genealogy of reconciliation in modern Ireland. As Seamus Deane has written, reconciliation stands at a nexus between politics and aesthetics in Irish writing, and has therefore often been a vehicle of colonial ideology. This book shows that the term often fits into a pattern that the author calls the ‘iconography of reconciliation’.


This iconography began in the 1810s when Samuel Taylor Coleridge synthesized Edmund Burke’s thoughts about Ciceronian conciliatio and Aristotelian ethos with Schlegelian literary organicism. That is, Coleridge identified what Aristotle called ‘ethical music’ with the ‘balanced’ personality of Romantic literary genius itself. Wallace then shows that Matthew Arnold and Edward Dowden adopted this Coleridgean synthesis and used it to make their writings about Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Sophocles (now icons of reconciliation) chime with their writings in favour of the Anglo-Irish Union.


Moving on to the twentieth century, Wallace shows first that Yeats and Joyce contested the Unionist icons and, later, that Conor Cruise O’Brien revived them in his writings about Northern Ireland. Wallace finishes by arguing that Field Day countered O’Brien’s ‘Sophoclean’ reading of the Troubles with their own, more ethically responsive icons of Sophoclean reconciliation between 1980 and 1990.


Nathan Wallace is an Assistant Professor of English, Ohio State University, Marion, Ohio.

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This book review appeared in Stylus: Trade, Academic, and Professional Books - Fall 2014, book catalogue. For more information about, and to place an order of "Hellenism and Reconciliation in Ireland from Yeats to Field Day," please check Stylus/Cork University Press website.