Beyond These Rooms
IRISH PREMIERE | BEYOND THESE ROOMS
COLLINS BARRACKS, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF IRELAND –
DECORATIVE ARTS & HISTORY
07 – 24 NOVEMBER 2019
THESE ROOMS is a living history performance project: an intense, immersive blend of theatre, contemporary dance and visual art whose starting point was the testimonies of 38 female witnesses to Dublin’s North King Street massacre in April 1916 – when 15 civilian men were killed in house-to-house raids by British soldiers. It was first performed at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2016 winning an Irish Times Irish Theatre Award. In 2018, it was wholly reimagined for the London International Festival of Theatre and investigates one story from two perspectives: those of the civilians who were victims of and witnesses to the killings, and those of the men of the South Staffordshire Regiment who committed the act – their identities largely unknown and their actions controversially exonerated at a military enquiry.
The BEYOND THESE ROOMS art installation continues to interrogate the original archive and research material bringing together artefacts, documents, imagery and video to conjoin fact, documentary and fiction, blurring the edges of the real and the imagined to bring this complex, conflicted history back to life. An interactive living archive project, it encourages people to touch, see, hear, and feel the tragedy through a highly focussed lens of the present day and aims contextualise how the past is propelled into the present and explore truth and the impact of time on conflicted histories.
A collaboration between ANU and CoisCéim Dance Theatre, BEYOND THESE ROOMS was co-commissioned by 14-18NOW, the UK’s arts programme for the First World War centenary. It results from the 2018 production of THESE ROOMS co-commissioned by LIFT and Shoreditch Town Hall, and supported by Culture Ireland as part of the GB18 programme. THESE ROOMS began as an Open Call National Project in The Arts Council of Ireland’s ART: 2016 programme as part of Ireland 2016.
Find out more at www.theserooms.ie
Performed at
Irish Tour
COLLINS BARRACKS, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF IRELAND – DECORATIVE ARTS & HISTORY
DUBLIN
7 - 24 November 2019
UK Tour
TATE LIVERPOOL (TATE EXCHANGE)
Liverpool, United Kingdom
17 January - 9 February 2019
