July 22: Lasting Impressions

Images of myself in our final moments in Ireland

On our last evening in Dublin, I went on a walk through St. Stephen's Green, down Leeson St. Lower, up along the canal, through Merrion Square Park, and back to Trinity. I took the first photo at the beginning of the walk in the middle of St. Stephen's Green, and the second photo at the end of the walk as I was caught in a classic Dublin downpour. I loved the painting of a fierce little artist with her fiery hair flying painted on the electrical box.

Lasting Impressions of Dublin & Ireland

I took the photos above while on my walk on our last evening in Dublin. As I walked through Merrion Square Park, I recorded a voice memo of some of my lasting impressions, especially focusing on the way that I noticed care in action in Ireland. You can listen to that by playing the audio file below.

Final reflections on Dublin - Merrion Square Park.m4a

Addressing my initial goals for the course

When I sat at my parents' kitchen table in California and tried to formulate goals, they were quite simple:

To be able to articulate some of the primary values and concerns of Dublin-based community engaged theatre practitioners.
To learn new facilitation strategies that I can incorporate into my own practice of facilitating artistic experiences.
To have a positive experience creating a devised piece I am proud of.

I felt confident that I would achieve goals 1 and 2, but I could not have predicted just how far my expectations would be surpassed. Community-engaged theatre artists in Dublin care about economic accessibility to the arts, LGBTQ+ inclusion, advancing Ireland's conversation about race, reckoning with the past, being custodians of the environment, and fostering curiosity. They shared so many projects with us that demonstrated how they have been able to address these concerns in hands on ways, from Freshly Ground's performance about fairies in the forests of Tallaght that teaches children to protect nature, to Declan's dusting off of a narrative of fierce woman who was unjustly treated.

As I wrote on my prior page, my expectations for devising were far surpassed. I am deeply proud not just of our piece, but also of how my group members all tried to be the best versions of ourselves.

One of my biggest takeaways about the Irish people is that they are caring custodians of their past. Coming from an American context where states are enacting laws that prevent teachers from teaching history accurately, the frank and unflinching conversations I have had with Irish people about their fraught past, along with the lingering legacy of that past, have been refreshing. It was not so long ago that Irish language and cultural traditions and language were banned, women were more obviously second class citizens, and there was widespread abuse in the Catholic church. But what has impacted me is the fact that at least the Irish people I have met have not shied away from those facts -- perhaps because all of them were affected in some way, or because it has not been possible to insulate themselves from those tensions like some groups of people in the U.S. can. Ireland seems to be a place that wants to reckon with and right the wrongs of its past rather than pretend the past did not happen.

I have seen care exhibited in Ireland in so many ways. Ireland is a place that has crosswalks that tell clueless tourists to "look left" or "look right" to keep them safe. Trinity has stylishly inserted smooth paths along the cobblestones to make its campus accessible to wheelchairs and troublesome knees. The Forty Foot has hand railings and offers multiple ways to enter the water. Irish people have made choices that facilitate ease as people navigate this place that was uneasy for centuries.

I saw the many Tallaght facilitators share control beautifully, highlight each other's strengths, and make space for less experienced facilitators to practice in a supportive environment. I saw Joe, Jo, and Jenny care for each other and for us throughout the process through check ins, deep listening, and providing context about why they made certain choices.

Our facilitators held space for our messy feelings. My classmates and I checked in with each other after workshops when those messy feelings spilled out, and commiserated after challenging devising days. My devising group cared for each other by respecting each other's communication styles that we had established on day one.

I witnessed our cohort caring for the space we have borrowed at Trinity on the morning after our performances: I walked into the dance studio from the lift and saw one of my classmates pulling up spike tape. By the time I had put down my backpack and gotten around to helping, five other students had joined in the de-spiking efforts and there was only one piece of tape for me to pull up.

I was supposed to meet up with Dunny during our second week to swim, but I ended up canceling on him because I had a headache. Dunny left me a sweet voicemail advising me to have some whiskey with some honey and lemon in it.

Where do I go from here? Next steps...

What are my next steps as an artist-facilitator?

A few days after I arrive back in the U.S., I will be presenting at the national conference for the American Alliance of Theatre & Education. This conference presentation will be my immediate next step as an artist-facilitator: I will be leading a participatory workshop about uncovering Asian American theatre history. Part of my workshop outline involved participants doing a quick dive into researching a figure or moment from Asian American history and pitching an idea for a show about their mini research topic. Now, rather than having people just verbally present, I plan to incorporate Phil Kingston's tableau exercise wherein we built the arcs of stories starting with a pivotal moment. I think Phil's exercise will be more effective at getting participants to see the dramatic potential of these stories than my original verbal pitch idea.

After that, I just want to start doing more of this work. I am nearing the end of my course work for my PhD, so I want to find ways to offer the kinds of embodied storytelling workshops that we experienced here. I want to get a lot more facilitation under my belt with communities that are diverse in age, cultural background, immigration status, ability, and more. I have felt so much pressure in the U.S.'s model of grant applications to have worked out an entire arc of a project beforehand myself, but one lesson I am taking from Imogen Doel's presentation in particular is to see where the communities lead me.

A community-engaged theatre project I would like to do as a result of this experience:

This year a lot of my energy will go towards my dissertation proposal. At present, I am planning to do an arts-based case study of the student-run theatre troupe focused on Asian American stories that I was part of as an undergraduate at Stanford University: the Stanford Asian American Theatre Project (AATP). Until this course, I was not sure what the arts-based element of my research would entail. I now feel empowered to facilitate devising workshops with current members and alumni of the group as a method of data generation. I am still on AATP's mailing list, and I have noticed that many of the shows they produce are either plays written by established Asian American playwrights, American plays and musicals that are being re-imaged in an Asian American context (e.g. Next to Normal or Into the Woods), or new works by student playwrights. From my now-outsider perspective, it seems to me that devising is not a tool this group of undergraduates is fluent in; that was certainly my experience when I was part of the group. I hope if I facilitated some devising workshops as a means to illuminate my research questions, those workshops could be a mutually beneficial experience wherein I could introduce the group to a playmaking vocabulary they could use to stage collaboratively generated, original work.

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