Copyright by Kathryn Rebecca Van Winkle 2019 The Dissertation Committee for Kathryn Rebecca Van Winkle Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: “They shall be speaking forever”: Performing Revolution, Riot, and the Nation in the Centenary Commemorations of Ireland’s 1916 Rising Committee: Charlotte Canning, Supervisor Paul Bonin-Rodriguez Elizabeth Cullingford Rebecca Rossen “They shall be speaking forever”: Performing Revolution, Riot, and the Nation in the Centenary Commemorations of Ireland’s 1916 Rising by Kathryn Rebecca Van Winkle Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2019 Dedication In memory of Mark Hunter. And of Lyra McKee. Acknowledgements Making theatre is usually a collaborative act. To a collaborative artist, writing a dissertation about theatre can feel lonely, unmoored, adrift. But I have had incredible good fortune in researching and writing this work buoyed by my teachers, friends, and family. I am deeply grateful for their support, curiosity, and love. All the scholars who form my committee have provided crucial guidance throughout my coursework and my research. My advisor Charlotte Canning has met my assumptions with challenges, my failings with patience and compassion, and my writing with the insight and rigor of a magnificent scholar, and with the great good humor of a magnificent person. The rest of my committee helped round out the methodological concerns I brought to this project. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez’s perspective on performance practice and the relationships artists have with their governments and communities has been indispensible in my research. Rebecca Rossen’s attention to the body as a site of meaning and history has continually enriched my work. Elizabeth Cullingford, in her course on Irish Women Writers, fashioned a stimulating intellectual community in miniature, and our discussions and her own scholarship continue to inspire me. I have learned so much from UT’s faculty: thanks to Megan Alrutz, Charles O. Anderson, Andrea Beckham, Craig Campbell, Andrew Carlson, Tina Curran, Liz Engelman, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Lisa B. Thompson, Beau Thorne, and Jorie Woods for modeling dedication, excellence, and joy in academia. Katie Stewart’s workshop kick-started my writing after I returned from Ireland. Assisting Yacov Sharir in the creation of the Sharir and Sharir/Bustamante Dance Collection for the Fine Arts Library over the past six years has been a daily source of nourishment for the mind and heart. Thank you so much, Yacov. The University of Texas at Austin offers many valuable resources. I am particularly grateful for the opportunity to share support with my colleagues through the Dissertation Support Group at the Counseling and Mental Health Center. Thanks, friends—we are all more than our research! v The dissertation would not have been possible without the Donald D. Harrington Doctoral Fellowship, which supported my studies and fieldwork between 2013 and 2018, and the College of Fine Arts/Graduate School Dissertation Writing Fellowship, which funded the final months of writing in the spring of 2019. Thank you to Marv Hackert, Elizabeth Korves, and Del Watson. For all this support, I owe great thanks to the College of Fine Arts and the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin, and to the memories of Don and Sybil Harrington, and of Wales Madden, Jr. The research now bearing fruit took root during my graduate studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway. I am grateful for the time and wisdom of my teachers there, especially Patrick Lonergan, Thomas Conway, Adrian Frazier, and Ira Ruppo. I am grateful to Trina Vargo and Anne Glusker of the US-Ireland Alliance, which provided me with the life-changing opportunity to live study in Ireland through a George J. Mitchell Scholarship. When I returned to Ireland in 2016 to conduct my dissertation fieldwork, I returned to a land of bright memories and good friends. My thanks go to everyone who spoke with me about theatre and the past, present, and future of Ireland. I am grateful to the artists and historians who generously gave me their time and insights in our interviews. I especially want to thank those friends in Ireland who smoothed my road and cheered my days: Mary Conroy, Grainne Lynch, and Mary-Lou McCarthy. I have presented portions of this research at conferences, and I am grateful for the warm reception and constructive commentary offered by my colleagues participating in 1916 : HOME : 2016; the Gender Symposium at UT-Austin; the Southern Regional American Conference for Irish Studies; the Southeastern Theatre Conference Symposium; War, Literature and the Arts at the United State Air Force Academy; and the “Violent Incitements” Working Group of the American Society for Theatre Research. My students at UT-Austin and at Texas State University have also challenged and enriched my thinking around the issues of theatre, identity, and spectatorship. Thanks, y’all! My colleagues in the Performance as Public Practice program, the Department of Theatre & Dance, and the Austin theatre community have given me many true gifts. Fellow PPP students Scott Blackshire, Russ Dembin, Brianna Figueroa, Amy Guenther, vi Christine Gwillim, Bart Pitchford, and Gabby Randle provided immeasurable support, characterized by customary brilliance and grace. And I am so very grateful for the many opportunities I had to create theatre while engaged in this research: thank you to Taylor Flanagan and Becca Musser, Joanna Garner and Lydia Blaisdell, Mallory Schlossberg and Margaret Hunsicker, Adam Sussman and Hannah Kenah, Susan Gayle Todd and Jessica Arjet, Kirk Lynn and Courtney Sale, Gia Marotta and Tamara Carroll, Jess Hutchinson and Diana Lynn Small, Jenny Larson and Adrienne Dawes. Thanks, as well, to the teachers and artists who introduced me to the art, politics, and inquiry of performance: Gavin Witt, James Magruder, Irene Lewis, and all the artists at Baltimore Center Stage; Allen Kuharski and the theatre department of Swarthmore College; James Loehlin of Shakespeare at Winedale; Madge Darlington, Lana Lesley, Shawn Sides, and the rest of the Rude Mechs; Jill K. Swanson and Jon Watson of Austin’s Shakespeare scene; and Mark Hunter, who is deeply missed. I met Mark Hunter when he was a doctoral candidate in the Performance as Public Practice program at UT- Austin, and I was a fifteen-year-old theatre kid. He directed me in Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare and Abhijat Joshi’s Bricks & Lyrics, and taught me more than I can say in a brief acknowledgements section. My character, Morse, concludes One Flea Spare with a warning or tribute: “Our lives are but a splash of water on a stone, nothing more. Then I am the stone on which they fell, and they have marked me. So beware, because I loved them, and they have marked me.” Thank you to the dear friends who have shared delight, encouragement, and sometimes gentle mockery with me in times of triumph and of doubt: Taylor Flanagan and Robert McFerren; Rebecca Estee, Shannon Iverson, and Gilbert & Will Slade; and Anna Belc, Steph Duncan Karp, Nick Malakhow, Emily Robbins, Rachel Sugar, and Rae Votta. And Tango. Above all, I owe thanks to my family. Mom, Dad, Tina: thank you for your unstinting love and devotion. Thank you for supporting my pursuits, calming my fears, and guiding my steps. And Nathan, thank you. Always. vii Abstract “They shall be speaking forever”: Performing Revolution, Riot, and the Nation in the Centenary Commemorations of Ireland’s 1916 Rising Kathryn Rebecca Van Winkle, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2019 Supervisor: Charlotte Canning Throughout 2016, Irish theatre-makers created scores of commemorative performances for the centenary of Ireland’s 1916 Rising. These performances, whether commissioned by or created in opposition to the government-funded national commemorative initiative Ireland 2016, transmitted and unsettled collective and incommensurable memories of a nationalist revolution. “They shall be speaking forever” concerns the cultural production of national identity and collective memory through the theatre, dance, and television productions commemorating the centenary of Ireland’s 1916 Rising. Focusing on representations of state and revolutionary violence, I offer close readings of over twenty performances, ranging from reenactments of historical events and productions of original scripts, to immersive site-specific dance theatre and televised historical dramas, to school pageants, military parades, and bus tours. I investigate what remains compelling about the scenario of uprising in 2016, what national visions it supports through state deployment, and how artists and policy-makers make use of contemporary repetition. In chapter one, I provide an overview of theatre in Ireland as a crucial site for the negotiation of national identity and memory, and of the entanglement of the Rising -- viii which was mistaken for a performance by several witnesses early on -- with theatre and theatricality. In chapter two, I explore the production history of Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), by W.B. Yeats and Augusta, Lady Gregory, in order to illuminate how nationalists in Ireland represented and performed nation, gender, and violence in the years leading up to the Rising. Examining the play as an example of the “blood sacrifice” scenario, I consider how it influenced theatre practitioners and spectators by structuring their understanding of history, colonization, military conflict, and sacrifice, and of their own potential roles and agency. In chapter three, I analyze performances of blood sacrifice in the centenary commemorations, identifying Cathleen ni Houlihan’s major influence on imaginative engagements with the Rising in 2016. Chapter four features site-specific reenactments of the Rising in the GPO, Kilmainham Jail, and on the streets of Dublin. These events mark a productive collision between long-standing commemorative traditions and contemporary, participatory performance practices.