This book investigates Ireland’s translation of interculturalism as social policy into aesthetic practice and situates the wider implications of this ‘new interculturalism’ for theatre and performance studies at large. Offering the first full-length, post-1990s study of the effect of large-scale immigration and interculturalism as social policy on Irish theatre and performance, McIvor argues that inward-migration changes most of what can be assumed about Irish theatre and performance and its relationship to national identity. By using case studies that include theatre, dance, photography, and activist actions, this book works through major debates over aesthetic interculturalism in theatre and performance studies post-1970s and analyses Irish social interculturalism in a contemporary European social and cultural policy context. Drawing together the work of professional and community practitioners who frequently identify as both artists and activists, Migration and Performance in Contemporary Ireland proposes a new paradigm for the study of Irish theatre and performance while contributing to the wider investigation of migration and performance.

This book examines the surge of queer performance produced across Ireland since the first stirrings of the Celtic Tiger in the mid-1990s, up to the passing of the Marriage Equality referendum in the Republic in 2015.

This Handbook offers a multiform sweep of theoretical, historical, practical and personal glimpses into a landscape roughly characterised as contemporary Irish theatre and performance. Bringing together a spectrum of voices and sensibilities in each of its four sections — Histories, Close-ups, Interfaces, and Reflections — it casts its gaze back across the past sixty years or so to recall, analyse, and assess the recent legacy of theatre and performance on this island. While offering information, overviews and reflections of current thought across its chapters, this book will serve most handily as food for thought and a springboard for curiosity. Offering something different in its mix of themes and perspectives, so that previously unexamined surfaces might come to light individually and in conjunction with other essays, it is a wide-ranging and indispensable resource in Irish theatre studies.

This book uses the social transformation that has taken place in Ireland from the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993 to the repeal of the 8th amendment in 2018 as backdrop to examine relationships between activism and contemporary Irish theatre and performance. It studies art explicitly intended to create social and political change for marginalised constituencies. It asks what happens to theatre aesthetics when artists’ aims are political and argues that activist commitments can create new modes of beauty, meaning, and affect. Categories of race, class, sexuality, and gender frame chapters, provide social context, and identify activist artists’ social targets. This book provides in depth analysis of: Arambe – Ireland’s first African theatre company; THEATREclub – an experimental collective with issues of class at its heart; The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival; and feminist artists working to Repeal the 8th amendment. It highlights the aesthetic strategies that emerge when artists set their sights on justice. Aesthetic debates, both historical and contemporary, are laid out from first principles, inviting readers to situate themselves – whether as artists, activists, or scholars – in the delicious tension between art and life. This book will be a vital guide to students and scholars interested in theatre and performance studies, gender studies, Irish history, and activism.

Childhood and Migration in Europe explores the under-researched and often misunderstood worlds of migrant children and young people, drawing on extensive empirical research with children and young people from diverse migrant backgrounds living in a rapidly changing European society. Through in-depth exploration and analysis of the experiences of children who moved to Ireland in the first decade of the 21st century, it addresses the tendency of migration research and policy to overlook the presence of children in migratory flows. Challenging dominant adult-centric perspectives on contemporary global migration flows and presenting understandings of the lives of migrant children and young people from their own experiences, this book presents a detailed exploration of children's lives in four different migrant populations in Ireland. With a unique comparative perspective, Childhood and Migration in Europe advances upon current conceptualisations of migration and integration by interrogating accepted views of migrant children and focusing on children's own voices and experiences. It challenges the prevailing assimilationist discourses underlying much existing research and policy, which often construct migrant children as deficient in different ways and in need of 'being integrated'.

This book follows the travels of Nanay, a testimonial theatre play developed from research with migrant domestic workers in Canada, as it was recreated and restaged in different places around the globe. This work examines how Canadian migration policy is embedded across and within histories of colonialism in the Philippines and settler colonialism in Canada. Translations between scholarship and performance – and between Canada and the Philippines – became more uneasy as the play travelled internationally, raising pressing questions of how decolonial collaborations might take shape in practice. This book examines the strengths and limits of existing framings of Filipina migration and offers rich ideas of how care – the care of children and elderly and each other – might be rethought in radically new ways within less violently unequal relations that span different colonial histories and complex triangulations of racialised migrants, settlers and Indigenous peoples. This book is a journey towards a new way of doing and performing research and theory. It is part of a growing interdisciplinary exchange between the performing arts and social sciences and will appeal to researchers and students within human geography and performance studies, and those working on migration, colonialisms, documentary theatre and social reproduction.