"W.B. Yeats and the Arts" symposium at NUI Galway

Symposium: W. B. Yeats and the Arts

26th-27th August, 2011

Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway

Funded by the NUI Galway Millennium Fund, and the '1916 and After' project.

‘The arts have failed', wrote W.B.Yeats, ‘fewer people are interested in them in every generation.' Fortunately, however, this gloom over the fate of ‘ingenious lovely things' only spurred him on to ever greater artistic engagement. His poetry, prose, and drama repeatedly address and incorporate music, dance and visual art, while his publications self-consciously deploy design and iconography. Yet Yeats was not only a author; he was also a cultural entrepreneur. He changed Irish public life by helping to found institutions such as Dublin's Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, the Abbey Theatre, and the Abbey School of Ballet. In collaboration with his sisters, Lilly and Lolly, he set up a printing press as a forum for Irish design and illustration. Together with his wife, George, he renovated the tower at Ballylee using local craftsmen. He took to the concert platform and later the airwaves to promote poetry spoken with music. Moreover, as a theatre director, journalist, public speaker and politician, he inspired numerous other cultural productions in Ireland and beyond.


This two-day international symposium, presented by ECHO, NUI Galway's Humanities Research Forum, and funded by the NUI Galway Millennium Fund and as part of the international research project ‘1916 and After', seeks to promote research on all aspects of Yeats's interactions with the arts, from storytelling to stained-glass windows. It offers a forum for discussing different historical, methodological and theoretical approaches, crossing disciplines to bring together critics of literature and drama, musicologists, and historians of dance and the visual arts. It thus includes panels on Yeats and Music, Yeats and Dance, Yeats and the Visual Arts, Yeats and Drama, Yeats and the Book, and Yeats and the Wider Arts, presented by the some of the finest scholars in the field. There will also be a conference dinner and an evening's entertainment of Joycean and Yeatsian songs.

As well as addressing key issues within Yeats's work, the symposium looks to wider debates in Irish studies, and cultural history and theory. It considers questions about the value and relationship of the arts, Ireland's role in European modernism, and the links between late-Victorian and modernist culture. Examining the interaction between aesthetics and politics, it also reflects on the political operation of centres of cultural production and the role played by art in political radicalism in Ireland in the period, leading up to the 1916 uprising and the revolutionary conflicts that followed. Through a focus on Yeats's work and career, it seeks to encourage further a growing body of cultural history and criticism based on genuinely interdisciplinary research.

We are delighted to welcome as our keynote lecturer Daniel Albright of Harvard University. Our panels of Yeatsians and other scholars from many disciplines include such distinguished speakers as Nicholas Allen, Brian Arkins, Richard Rupert Arrowsmith, Nicola Gordon Bowe, Terence Brown, Adrian Frazier, Warwick Gould, Margaret Mills Harper, Sue Jones, Stoddard Martin, Emilie Morin, Aidan Thomson and Deirdre Toomey.

The two-day symposium is free to all from NUI Galway, and €50 (€40) otherwise. All are very welcome.
For further information please look at our website: http://echoforum.wordpress.com/
or address the conference organisers:
Adrian Paterson (National University of Ireland, Galway) adrianpaterson@yahoo.com
Thomas Walker (University of Oxford/Trinity College Dublin) thomas.walker@ell.ox.ac.uk

Interview with Thomas Kilroy at NUI Galway

Earlier this year the Archives and Special Collections service of the James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway were delighted to receive the personal archive of the celebrated playwright and novelist Thomas Kilroy. To mark this very great occasion, Professor Adrian Frazier of the Moore Institute, NUI Galway conducted a public interview with Thomas Kilroy, discussing at length Kilroy’s own personal life and experiences from his homeland of Kilkenny to his career as a playwright which brought him to world-wide notoriety.

The Kilroy archive contains research notes, drafts and scripts of all these and of his other plays, and his academic criticism. The creative work is complemented by correspondence from agents, theatre practitioners, publishers, and members of the public, as well as production material from the stage plays. There is a noteworthy collection of correspondence from literary friends and associates, such as Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, Mary Lavin, John McGahern, and also papers from his board membership of The Field Day Theatre Company, and from his collaboration with The Abbey Theatre. The papers join other purely literary archives at the Library, such as those of John McGahern and Eoghan Ó Tuarisc, as well as archival collections pertaining to the Druid Theatre, the Lyric Players Theatre, and Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe. The collection is being processed and will be available to researchers from August 2011.

Watch and enjoy what is a really fascinating interview with one of Ireland’s most engaging writers. 

An Interview with Thomas Kilroy from CELT NUI Galway on Vimeo.

Starring Role for First Galway Film Fleadh in 1989

With the Galway Film Fleadh barely over and the Galway Arts Festival now is full swing around the city, we hardly have a spare moment to look back through our collections here in NUIG. While working on the Galway Arts Festival Archive I have come across and catalogued a small but really interesting amount of material from the Galway Film Fleadh. Of particular interest are these items: a press release and invitation to the very first screening in the very first Galway Film Fleah. The film was Venus Peter and starred Ray McNally. This was incidentally McNally’s last film before he died. Venus Peter, set in the Orkney Islands was directed by Ian Seller and produced by Christopher Young. Other cast members include Sinead Cusack and Peter Caffrey.

The invitation pictured was to attend the opening night screening of Venus Peter at the Claddagh Place cinema, Galway on July 19, 1989. 

Press release from First Galway Film Fleadh

Invitation to the opening screening of Venus Peter

For more information on these items or on the archive of the Galway Arts Festival and its material relating to the Galway Film Fleadh please contact archivist barry.houlihan[at]nuigalway.ie

The Cripple of Inismaan

The rich and dark comedy of Martin McDonagh’s the Cripple of Inismaan has been touring coast to coast across America as part of the ‘Imagine Ireland’ programme throughout the first half of 2011. An award winning co-production between Druid Theatre Company and Atlantic Theatre Company, the show has performed to nearly 100,000 people throughout this trans-Atlantic tour. Launching in Roscommon and tracing its way across the United States with stops in Boston, Michigan, Chicago, California and South Carolina, to name a few, before a trip to its spiritual home in Inis Maan for an emotional homecoming.

McDonagh has enjoyed a long association with Druid. The rise of McDonagh is well documented in then Druid Theatre Company Archive, also held here in NUI Galway. McDonagh’s writing has created some of the best loved plays and performances by Druid of recent years. The visceral, beautiful and poetic language that McDonagh creates and is spoken between his islanders has throwbacks to the best of Synge but also is uniquely his own. The archive of Druid Theatre Company holds records such as invitations to teh opening night of the 1998 production of The Cripple at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, and also many photographs taken during rehearsal and full performance of this production.

Dearbhla Molloy as Eileen (1997)

Now that the tour of the co-production by Druid and Atlantic Theatre Company has just finished its massively successful run, it is interesting to look at other productions of The Cripple. The archive of the Galway Arts Festival contains wonderful photographs (above and below) from the Royal National Theatre’s (U.K.) production of The Cripple of Inismaan which was a highlight event during the 1997 Galway Arts Festival. Directed by Nicholas Hytner and designed by Bob Crowley, the production files contain black and white photographs of the production, while the press files contain numerous local and national press reviews and features on The Cripple. The play was staged at the Town Hall Theatre Galway from 22 Jul to 2 August 1997.

Ray McBride as Johnnypateen (1997)

For more on the production history of The Cripple of Inismaan please see the archives of Druid Theatre Company and the Galway Arts Festival held at NUI Galway James Hardiman Library: http://www.library.nuigalway.ie/collections/archives/ or contact archivist barry.houlihan[at]nuigalway.ie

Cillian Murphy returns to the Galway Arts Festival

The mouth-watering line-up for this year’s Galway Arts Festival has just been announced. Among the numerous highlights is the production of Enda Walsh’s 1999 play Misterman which stars Cillian Murphy in the starring role of this one-man play. Misterman was premiered by Corcadora Theatre Company in 1999 at the Granary Theatre in Cork. This production saw Enda Walsh himself take the starring role and was directed by Pat Kiernan.

Cillian Murphy makes his return to collaboration with Enda Walsh for the first time since 1996 when he starred in Walsh’s Discopigs which was also made into a movie. The very successful stage version of Discopigs was a highlight of the 1997 Galway Arts Festival and starred Cillian Murphy and acclaimed actress Eileen Walsh in the leading roles. Murphy has seen his stock constantly rise since his early appearances at the Galway Arts Festival. Major Hollywood roles in the likes of Batman Begins and Inception as well as in the Palm d’Or winning film The Wins That Shakes the Barley directed by Ken Loach and depicting struggle and conflict in Ireland during the War of Independence and Civil War Ireland. Eileen Walsh has achieved huge notoriety and critical acclaim in her own right which strong turns in film such as the Magdalene Sisters and as Lady Macbeth on the Abbey Stage and in Medea in the 2010 Dublin Theatre Festival.

The archive of Galway Arts Festival holds a single photograph from the production of Discopigs at the 1997 Festival and shows Murphy alongside Walsh. It is a great photograph and a timely reminder of past collaboration between Cillian Murphy and Enda Walsh at the Galway Arts Festival.
The full archive of the Galway Arts Festival is currently being catalogued at the archives of the James Hardiman Library of NUI Galway. For any enquiries about material in the Galway Arts Festival archive please contact archivist Barry Houlihan: barry.houlihan[at]nuigalway.ie

Funding the First Galway Arts Festival - 1978

A real find this week is the Galway Arts Festival archive is the earliest press cutting in the archive. Taken from the Connacht Sentinel, 21 March 1978, the article is titled “Arts Group appeals to city councillors”. The article outlines the case for assistance and funding to the Galway Arts Group which is organising the first-ever Galway Arts Festival. Founding member of the Galway Arts Group, Ollie Jennings, who later went on to hold the post of Festival Director until 1991, made the appeal to Galway City Councillors to support this venture as the Arts Council had allocated a grant of £1,000 to establish an Arts Festival in Galway.

The requirements such as a venue to act as Festival headquarters, to establish a dedicated Arts Centre for Galway City and establish an annual Arts Festival are stated as being the key goals of Jennings and his group. The deliberations regarding funding from the various Galway city councillors is detailed and makes for an intriguing insight into the planning by a few of an event for Galway that would turn into one of the biggest annual Arts Festivals in Europe!

New exhibition of photographs from Garda Siochana Historical Society

A new exhibition presenting a photographic history of An Garda Síochána is now on in the James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway. The exhibition features a series of 48 incredible images from An Garda Síochána Historical Association which date as far back as 1909 and reach as far forward as the 1940s. The photographs chart the fascinating history of An Garda Síochána and include its precursors The Royal Irish Constabulary and The Dublin Metropolitan Police.


The exhibition is complemented by images of Gardaí from our own archives here in NUI Galway, taken from the Ritchie-Pickow collection. More material from the Ritchie-Pickow archive can be seen here: http://call.library.nuigalway.ie:8180/Pickow/index.jsp

The exhibition runs until 6 May 2011 and admission is free.

 For further information please see: http://url.ie/appn, http://url.ie/appq and http://url.ie/apps

Galway Arts Festival Archive - Cataloguing Underway!

Having spent a fantastic last few months working on cataloguing the Druid Theatre Company Archive (stay tuned for updates on electronic version of the finding aid) the next project to be undertaken here at NUI Galway Archives will be the cataloguing of the Galway Arts Festival archive.

Established in 1978, the Galway Arts Festival has firmly placed itself as a major arts and cultural festival on the international as well as national calendar. Attracting over 100,000 visitors to the West of Ireland annually, the Galway Arts Festival is a spectacle of performance, music, literature, theatre, art and comedy. The archive of the Galway Arts Festival reflects over thirty years of the legacy and achievement of those who supported the festival, participated in it and who travelled from far and wide to attend the festival.

The archive boasts hundreds of high quality colour and black and white photographs, a huge array of posters, administrative material such as Board of Directors’ minutes, an expansive press archive documenting public and critical response to the festival every year. The archive even contains a number of T-shirts (size L/XL!) from the Galway Arts Festival in recent years. Cataloguing those items will be a new experience!

Over the coming months you can follow the project of cataloguing the Galway Arts Festival, be updated of interesting articles, items and stories that have perhaps being forgotten over the years. It promises to be a great project bringing to life over thirty years of amazing festival records and memories. You can also follow NUI Galway Archives on Twitter @nuigalwayarchives.

Galway Arts Festival

The Many Lives of Albert Nobbs

The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs is a story worth hearing and a life worth knowing. So much so in fact, it is being filmed in Ireland for a new film starring Glenn Close in the title role. The original story, written by George Moore, has long been adored on the international stage and also on the Irish stage.

Premiering on Broadway in June 1982, the stage version of the story, devised by Simone Benmussa, tells the story of a young woman in the male-dominated Dublin society of the 1860’s and who disguises herself as a man in order to get ahead in the city. Described in review from the New York Times, the production “[was] an oddly haunting piece of theatrical chamber music, at times so low-key as to be dim wattage, but one that holds our attention like a tale told at the fireside”. The 1982 review can be read in full here. The standout performance of this production was by none other than actress Glenn Close, described as follows: “Miss Close, so lovely in ''Barnum'' and as Elena in ''Uncle Vanya'' at the Yale Repertory Theatre, is almost unrecognizable as Albert. It is not simply a matter of her boyish hairdo -darkened and cut short - but of her manner, movement and sensibility. She is a timid youth who is efficient at work but without grace, eager to please but afraid to be expressive. The play is a curio, but the performance is transforming”

This story was given the Druid theatre treatment is a production in 1996 and also designed and directed by the renowned Simone Benmussa who brought Albert Nobbs to the Broadway stage in 1982. Jane Brennan starred in the title role alongside an ensemble cast of Clara Simpson, Jayne Snow, Dawn Bradfield, Aoife Kavannagh, Melanie McHugh, Natalie Stringer, Allen McLelland, Dermot Crowley and Kevin Moore. The Druid Theatre archive in NUI Galway holds the production files for this production. The files include the scripts used by Druid Theatre, press releases, playbill, flyers, invitations as well as a file of photographs taken during rehearsal and production of Albert Nobbs.

Glenn Close as 'Albert Nobbs'

Adding even more to this story of the recurring presence of life of Albert Nobbs, Glen Close will reprise her role of some 30 years ago as filming is currently underway, with Close back in the title role. It will be directed by Rodrigo Garcia, the son of the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and co-written by Man Booker Prize winner John Banville. Read more about this coup for Irish film here.

The Druid files for The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs will be available soon in 2011.