“You don’t really understand a place until you make something there… ‘Place’ could be a room in a building, or ‘place’ could be a city in a country. An understanding of place is facilitated by making something in and about that place.” – Joe Salvatore

Above: Stills from our sharing of our devised piece in the dance studio at the Samuel Beckett Theatre at Trinity College. Clockwise from top: My collaborator Keter performs a traditional Irish song called "The Lambs on the Green Hill" as a musican in a pub; reciting a prayer to Molly Malone during a queered communion; a foul ensues at a heated Gaelic football match.

How did we make this piece? 

Reflections on our devising process & sharing our original work

Day 1: How do we work together? What are we interested in?

On our very first morning, Elise opened her laptop and began consulting the "recipe" for devising that our instructors had given us. I interjected and asked if we could first have a conversation about our communication styles. My group agreed, and I asked everyone to journal for 5 minutes about:

• Our strengths as collaborators / what artistic and interpersonal skills we bring to a collaboration

• What sets us off or triggers our own negativity

• What artistic elements we most wanted to pursue (e.g. adapting historical documents into a script, choreographing movement, devising scenes from image theatre, etc.)

Everyone generously and vulnerably shared. We found that hunger was a big trigger for all of us, so we all ended up bringing snacks to share with the group everyday without having explicitly agreed to do so. This conversation taught us how to care for one another, and established a culture of listening to each other and treating each other how we would like to be treated from the beginning.

We then dove into exploring the archive, which we did until our lunch break. We all read aloud the interviews we had conducted with local Dubliners aloud to the group and noted common themes as well as outlying opinions expressed in the interviews. We all felt very connected to the interviews we each conducted, and eventually decided that we would each portray the person we had interviewed. We also talked about our site visits and showed each other our "Investigation of Place" webpages.

In the afternoon, our tutor Jenny MacDonald spent some time in our group, and we had a fascinating conversation with her about the semi-mythological figure Molly Malone. My dad had sung me the song about her, "Cockles and Mussels," when I was a little girl, and he thinks he learned it from his mother. The other day when I went to a pub with some classmates and heard a live musician sing it, the song struck me as so sad. My collaborator Keter brought up how gross he felt when he went by the statue of Molly Malone and saw men and women alike going up to the statue and groping her. Jenny said that it has always bothered her that Molly Malone is one of the only statues in Dublin depicting a woman, and every day hundreds of people come up to the statue and pose lewdly with it. 

We decided to spend the rest of the afternoon making things and trying out pieces rather than just talking about them. We:

• Did a movement circle to warm up, led by Becca.

• Staged an opening scene where we all boarded an airplane and spoke a bit about where we came from to arrive in Dublin. I led an exercise where I had everyone write the phrases "I came from _____" and "It is a place that _______" on index cards and fill in the blanks. We then would each say one of those lines, one after another. We ended up using this sequence in our final performance, with some slight zhushing. 

• Moved the chairs that we had used to signify an airplane in a stylized way to transform the airplane configuration into a pub configuration.

• Sang the Molly Malone song ("Cockles and Mussles") while Saya played it on the piano

• Nora had written a poem about Catholic exclusion of queer people and the ways that queer people find community nevertheless, so they read it aloud to us. We tried having Saya underscore the poem with the Molly Malone song, which also found its way into the performance.

• Discussed creating a soundscape of a pub (Becca's idea), where we might hear the real voices of the people we had interviewed (alas, Joe reminded us that we had not received permission from our interviewees to do this). 

• Learned the song "Lambs on the Green Hill," which Keter eventually performed after our opening scene in our sharing.

At the end of the afternoon, we discussed what we had discovered that we were interested in. That list was as follows:

• Queer Identity 

• Misogyny 

• Poverty

• Lives of people in Ireland today

• Religion

• Unexplainable Inbetween (a quotation from an essay Nora found at an art exhibit they attended)

• Importance of music to Irish culture

• Context - our context

• New Gaelic Revival

• The messy, coexisting incoherence

That night, I had a hard time falling asleep because the reflections that Keter and Jenny shared about Molly Malone kept swirling in my head. As I lay there half awake, I had this vision of Becca as Molly Malone, first pushing a wheelbarrow and being restricted and oppressed by her place, and then finally being lighter and freer in death. I pictured her as an angel standing somehow above the playing space. In my semi-conscious state I realized that Molly and Katriona O'Sullivan, who wrote the memoir Poor that I have been reading were up against many of the misogynist systems of oppression, a century apart. According to the song, Molly "died of a fever." As Jenny pointed out, no one should live in such a state of squalor that a fever is their cause of death. O'Sullivan similarly had to travel to the U.K. to get the healthcare she needed (in her case, an abortion).

The next morning, I quickly drafted a scene that put O'Sullivan's text and the Molly Malone folk song in conversation with one another. I wrote lines for a joking, misogynist tour guide based partially on Keter's observations when he visited the statue and partially on what my tour guide had said on my DoDublin bus tour. I did not have to dig deep to find the words; the scene just poured out of me, which has never happened to me before. I think that experienced speaks to how immersed I have been in this art making process.

Day 2: Generating & playing

At the end of Day 1, Elise proposed that we would be best served by getting on our feet and generating material on Day 2. We decided at the beginning of the day that we would "just make stuff" and not worry about how it all went together until Day 3. I came in with my Molly Malone script, and my collaborators generously let me walk them through my vision. Nora raised the question, "What does guarded body language look like?" We began exploring the Molly Malone/Katriona O'Sullivan scene with this question in mind. Keter played the song on guitar as the four of did a movement exploration of guarded body language.

I asked Elise to play the tour guide and the man who sexually assaults Katriona for several reasons. First, I knew Elise would handle the roles with care, and I was interested in what an audience's reaction would be to see a petite woman playing these roles. Second, Keter had shared that he often has to portray toxic masculinity when he is the only male-identifying person in an artistic collaboration, and that he would prefer to not have to do that. There was also the practical matter of my wanting Keter to underscore the montage on guitar. He ended up being a comforting troubadour who told Molly's story with respect and added emotional layers to Katriona's narrative. We spent the entire morning session staging this montage, which became the bulk of our performance. I played Katriona, and Nora played several side characters including a nurse at Katriona's abortion clinic.

That afternoon Elise came in with a delicious offer: she said she had been thinking about our improvisation facilitator Declan York's idea of turning theatre into a sport, and wanted our help figuring out what that might look like. Some of our group members had attended a Gaelic football match over the weekend and were feeling inspired by it. My collaborators played a volleyball-like game while I sat out (frankly, I was cranky from having stayed up all night thinking about Molly Malone). We then had the idea to play I Am A Tree, a game we played with Darren, but just within the context of what you might see at a Gaelic football match. We created tableaux that included:

• Gaelic football players scoring goals, committing fouls, and celebrating wins

• Fans in the stands taking selfies, catching the ball, being bored because they don't like sports but were dragged there by their families, and eating snacks

• Stadium employees selling popcorn and sausage rolls (our apologies to people of Ireland; we had no idea what people eat at Gaelic football games)

• The Gaelic gods laughing at the players from on high as they cause chaos down below.

We then used the Image Theatre techniques we had learned from Phil Kingston at The Abbey Theatre to create a series of images of pivotal moments in the football match. We turned those still tableaux into four slow-motion movement sequences that portrayed scoring a goal, fouling, fan reactions, and winning the match.

Finally, Nora edited the Molly Malone/Katriona O'Sullivan scene to remove repetition and improve the tempo of the scene. This was the most challenging moment for me to let go of control; there were some lines Nora cut that I really wanted to keep because they were meaningful to me, having read the whole book. But Nora was an excellent advocate for the audience and cut the script in such a way that kept the story moving along while communicating the requisite information.

At the end of the day, we made an agenda of everything we wanted to accomplish on Day 3.

A side note about process and credit: When I say "we had an idea," I truly mean the group generated an idea. In recounting this process, I am trying to give credit where credit is due to the people who catalyzed an exploration. But we had such a genuinely flowing sharing of power that there are many ideas that feel like they came from all five of us at once.

Day 3: Finding a flow and finalizing the structure

With one day until the performance, Day 3 was dedicated to figuring out how we would incorporate audience engagement (a requirement of the project) and what the overall shape of the piece would be. We came in steeling ourself to have to "kill some darlings." In our group debrief the morning after we shared our work, Nora reflected that "It felt like the piece revealed itself to us." I agree completely with Nora's assessment. We did not have to cut any major pieces, and even though we wondered how on earth we could put our goofy Gaelic football montage in the same show as the Molly Malone piece that explores abortion access and sexual assault, we found a way to knit it all together. We realized that we could use Elise's interview transcript as a transition between those two piece because her interviewee talked about how Ireland is now vs. how she wishes it would be. 

We began to discuss audience engagement in earnest. I shared an idea I had to create an altar onstage where audience members could write and leave a wish for someone/a group in Ireland that they feel has been overlooked. The could then take someone else's wish with them and think of a way to make that person's life better. (This idea was heavily influenced by a project by the theatre company Freshly Ground Theatre in Tallaght, Ireland.) But the group came up with an idea to dress Nora as a queer saint as they recited their poem, and then invite the audience up for a Catholic-style Communion using Tayto brand potato chips. We all thought this idea worked better with the overall flow of the piece. Nora adapted the "Hail Mary" prayer to be about "Holy Molly Magdalene Malone," and we collectively created prayer cards to hand out to the audience. I modified the sheet music I had for "Cockles and Mussels" to sonically resemble Christian hymns and underscored the poem and communion. After our performance, several audience members who grew up Catholic but are no longer involved with the church kept their prayer cards. Two audience members I talked to who identify as queer described the Communion as healing.

Day 4: Finalizing, a medical incident, and sharing our work

Our final morning before the performance was very relaxed because we had finalized the shape of the piece the previous evening. Our professor, Joe Salvatore, had given us a note that the opening scene on the airplane felt tentative, so we rehearsed the lines for that scene to give it energy. Most of the morning was spent perfecting small details; we all felt quite relaxed thanks to our positive and efficient collaboration. We practiced our content note, which we incorporated into the performance as we welcomed audience to the pub. We wanted to do what our professor Joe Salvatore calls teaching the audience the "rules of engagement" within the aesthetics of the performance.

During our lunch break, I accidentally ingested something containing almonds, which I'm allergic to. I have to keep my heart rate down after I have an allergic reaction, so I had to take a Benadryl and sleep through our planned afternoon rehearsal. Luckily we had our performance all finalized and were just planning to mark through our show. My collaborators were incredibly caring and understanding. I made it to our rehearsal in the performance space, and although we had planned to practice our piece full out, my group was totally understanding of the fact that I had to mark through the piece slowly. It was a continuation of the care we had established on our first morning.

The performance itself was incredibly fun and empowering. One of the other devising groups had also used the transcript of my interview a man I had met while swimming in the sea at the Forty Foot. When I delivered those lines, I made eye contact with my classmate Patrick, who had also embodied that man's words, and we shared a lovely moment of connection. 

Several audience members I talked to told me they felt it was brave of me to portray Katriona as she sought an abortion and dealt with sexual assault. It was so interesting to receive that comment multiple times because I did not feel that that role required bravery on my part. I thought O'Sullivan herself was incredibly brave a) to have endured all that, and b) to have published a book that shares her stories. I just felt like advocating for a story that I felt needs to be told. During rehearsals, I had felt shy making eye contact with our professors while rehearsing the Katriona piece, but in the show, I held eye contact with the audience throughout most of my lines. I felt a responsibility to have the story to land with them as the person caretaking this story that is not my own.

My one wish is that we had been able to invite the people we had interviewed to the performance. I know that my interviewee would have been thrilled to see himself portrayed onstage by two groups because participating in theatre has been a transformative experience for him recently. 

I am incredibly grateful for this experience. I had been so anxious about devising before coming to Ireland; I would even say I was dreading it. I now feel empowered to facilitate devising processes because it felt amazing to share something that come from me and people I have come to deeply care about. I am usually an actor or director who becomes a steward of someone else's ideas, but it felt great to have had a hand in each step of the process, and to feel that those responsibilities were equally shared among the five of us.