Performing tradition

Ireland’s performative culture is rich in folk rituals that give the country an arts heritage based not only in text, but also in gesture and embodied, participatory traditions. This fact of our performance history has only recently earned the recognition it deserves among Irish theater scholars. In Performing the Body in Irish Theatre I consider how the use of traditions such as mumming, waking, Wrenboys, Strawboys, and Patterns affect notions of performance and mark a theatrical history often overlooked in established histories of Irish theater. Mark Phelan, in ‘Modernity, Geography and Historiography: (Re)-Mapping Irish Theatre History in the Nineteenth Century,’ notes that archival research reveals a wealth of material available, whether related to local commercial theatres, stock companies, national touring circuits, or the virtually unexplored world of music halls, ‘free and easies,’ singing saloons, variety theatres and vaudeville. Beyond this is the hybrid, heteroglossic plenitude of theatrical activity outside of the urban, institutional and professional sphere in the diversity of popular traditions, forms and practices.².