The Cracked Art World: Conflict, Austerity, and Community Arts in Northern Ireland 9781800735347

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The Cracked Art World

Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement Edited by Birgit Meyer, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University, and Maruška Svašek, School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen’s University, Belfast During the last few years, a lively, interdisciplinary debate has taken place between anthropologists, art historians, and scholars of material culture, religion, visual culture, and media studies about the dynamics of material production and cultural mediation in an era of intensifying globalization and transnational connectivity. Understanding ‘mediation’ as a fundamentally material process, this series provides a stimulating platform for ethnographically grounded theoretical debates about the many aspects that constitute relationships between people and things, including political, economic, technological, aesthetic, sensorial, and emotional processes. Recent volumes: Volume 12 The Cracked Art World Conflict, Austerity, and Community Arts in Northern Ireland Kayla Rush

Volume 7 Death, Materiality and Mediation An Ethnography of Remembrance in Ireland Barbara Graham

Volume 11 Crafting Chinese Memories The Art and Materiality of Storytelling Edited by Katherine Swancutt

Volume 6 Creativity in Transition Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production across the Globe Edited by Maruška Svašek and Birgit Meyer

Volume 10 From Storeroom to Stage Romanian Attire and the Politics of Folklore Alexandra Urdea Volume 9 Sense and Essence Heritage and the Cultural Production of the Real Edited by Birgit Meyer and Mattijs van de Port Volume 8 Ethnographies of Movement, Sociality and Space Place-Making in the New Northern Ireland Edited by Milena Komarova and Maruška Svašek

Volume 5 Having and Belonging Homes and Museums in Israel Judy Jaffe-Schagen Volume 4 The Great Reimagining Public Art, Urban Space, and the Symbolic Landscapes of a ‘New’ Northern Ireland Bree T. Hocking Volume 3 Objects and Imagination Perspectives on Materialization and Meaning Edited by Øivind Fuglerud and Leon Wainwright

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.ber​ ghahnbooks.com/series/material-mediations

The Cracked Art World Conflict, Austerity, and Community Arts in Northern Ireland

Kayla Rush

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2022 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2022 Kayla Rush All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2022004643

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-533-0 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-534-7 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800735330

For Maruška, who foretold this book, and for Stephen, who made it possible.

• Contents

List of Illustrations viii Acknowledgements x List of Abbreviations xii Introduction. The Cracked Art World 1. Community Arts in Context: Between Post-Conflict and PostPost-Conflict Imaginaries

1 18

2. Becoming Actors in Later Life: Older People’s Community Theatre 39 3. Restoration and Resurrection: Religion and Dialogue in Community History Theatre

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4. Layers of the Post-Post-Conflict: Street Art and Urban Narratives in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter

84

5. Up the Hill: Politicians, Protests, and Community Arts under Austerity 112 Conclusion. Whither Community Arts in Northern Ireland?

135

References 145 Index 166

•

Illustrations

Figures 3.1 View of Girdwood Hub as seen from outside the Duncairn Centre. The removal of the road barrier allows for visual and physical access between the two sites. Belfast, 14 September 2021. © Kayla Rush. 81 4.1 Map of the Cathedral Quarter, using the boundaries set by Belfast City Council for the Cathedral Conservation Area. Map © Google Maps, image edited by Kayla Rush. 86 4.2 MTO, ‘Son of Protagoras’. Image permission received from Extramural Activity. 94 4.3 Graffiti on North Street Arcade, Donegall Street, Belfast, July 2004. Photo by icanseeformilesandmiles, Wikimedia Commons, public domain. 99 4.4 Historical buildings sit empty and derelict on North Street in the Cathedral Quarter. Belfast, 28 February 2016. © Kayla Rush.102 4.5 Unnamed street artwork by Visual Waste depicting character Jax Teller from Sons of Anarchy, overlaid with a bullet wound from an anonymous tagger. Belfast, 28 February 2016. © Kayla Rush. 107 5.1 Funding awarded annually by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from fiscal year 2010/11 to 2019/20. Chart created by Kayla Rush. 113 5.2 Protest signs on display in Signs of Collective Protest, PS2 gallery, Belfast, 10 November 2015. © Kayla Rush. 127 5.3 Protest signs on display in Signs of Collective Protest, PS2 gallery, Belfast, 10 November 2015. © Kayla Rush. 128

Illustrations ix

5.4 Protest signs on display in Signs of Collective Protest, PS2 gallery, Belfast, 10 November 2015. © Kayla Rush. 5.5 Protest signs on display in Signs of Collective Protest, PS2 gallery, Belfast, 10 November 2015. © Kayla Rush. 5.6 Cathedral Quarter architecture reflected in the window of PS2, where Signs of Collective Protest is on display. Belfast, 10 November 2015. © Kayla Rush. 5.7 Cathedral Quarter architecture visible from the interior of PS2, where Signs of Collective Protest is on display. Belfast, 10 November 2015. © Kayla Rush.

129 131

132

133

Tables 1.1 Arts Council of Northern Ireland artform categories during the period of research. Table created by Kayla Rush. 3.1 List of performances of Halfway House during its initial, weeklong run. Table created by Kayla Rush.

31 60

•

Acknowledgements

This book could not have come into being without the support and encouragement of so many remarkable individuals and institutions in Northern Ireland and beyond. The research for this project was made possible by an International PhD Studentship from what was then called the School of History and Anthropology (now History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics) at Queen’s University Belfast. I am grateful for the many opportunities provided by that department and the individuals therein. I am also grateful for the continued support that I have received from the anthropology faculty, even as I have moved to a new role at a different institution. Thank you for taking a chance on a weird student from rural Indiana. I have been incredibly fortunate to receive input on this book, and many of its previous forms, from so many wonderful and insightful academics. Maruška Svašek and Joseph Webster read far too many early drafts of this work and constantly challenged me to think more deeply and clearly about my subject matter and analysis. Maruška and Joe lead by example in both scholarship and citizenship, and I am proud and honoured to call them mentors and friends. I am also eternally grateful to Maruška for encouraging me to explore more creative approaches to writing and for providing spaces in which I could develop both my thinking and practice in creative ethnography. Without this encouragement from a very early stage in my career, this book would look very, very different. Jeremy MacClancy provided excellent feedback on this project at an early stage, asking hard questions and encouraging me to continue developing the work. His insights prompted significant and valuable revisions. A very large number of my colleagues and friends listened to early versions of this work at different points in its development. I am grateful to them for putting up with my years of chattering about cracked mirrors and arts budget cuts.

Acknowledgements xi

John O’Flynn provided valuable interdisciplinary feedback on the cracked art world framework and gave me both the time and encouragement needed to finish the manuscript. When COVID-19 derailed my postdoctoral fieldwork plans, John encouraged me to use the time I couldn’t spend researching to work on the book. I am incredibly fortunate to have such a supportive mentor, colleague, and friend in John. Thanks are due as well to the rest of my colleagues in the School of Theology, Philosophy, and Music at Dublin City University for warmly welcoming an anthropologist into their mix. Thank you as well to Tom Bonnington and the whole team at Berghahn for believing in this book and guiding this first-time author through the publication process. I am grateful for Tom’s support and, when the manuscript took longer than expected due to an international move (and then once more due to illness), patience. I am proud and grateful to see this book published with Berghahn and the wonderful Material Mediations series, whose previous books on Northern Ireland in particular have been especially useful in guiding and informing my scholarship. Thank you to the members of the Belfast ‘Writing Tank’, who saw the initial project, the book proposal, and a number of other writing projects through to their completion over days of free tea refills. Thank you in particular to my dear friends Sonja Kleij and Róisín Seifert, who have continued to navigate the winding, precarious path of early-career scholarship and post-PhD life alongside me. RIP to the Thinking Cup Café on the Lisburn Road, in whose dedicated study room large swathes of the text in this book were written. Thanks to my family, who have supported my academic career at every step: to my parents, Jim and Sue Smith, and my brother and sister-in-law, Kyle and Erin Smith; to Stephanie Johnston, chosen family and the best fictive kin anyone could ask for; and most importantly, to my husband and partner Stephen Rush, for over a decade of love and support. And finally, thank you to the many artists, arts workers, arts learners, and others who participated in this research – to those who appear in these pages, and the many more who do not. I am so incredibly fortunate and grateful that you welcomed me into your midst. I hope that I have done justice to your experience, your work, your passion, and your struggle. #ArtsMatterNI.

•

Abbreviations

ACNI AFP CAF CAP CQB CRC DCAL DfC DUP ECONI MLA NIO NVTV RHI SDLP SEUPB U3A UAH UUP

Arts Council of Northern Ireland Annual Funding Programme Community Arts Forum Community Arts Partnership Cathedral Quarter Belfast Community Relations Council Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure Department for Communities Democratic Unionist Party Evangelical Contribution on Northern Ireland Member of the Legislative Assembly Northern Ireland Office Northern Visions/NVTV Renewable Heat Incentive Social Democratic and Labour Party Special European Union Programmes Body University of the Third Age Ulster Architectural Heritage Ulster Unionist Party

Introduction

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The Cracked Art World

Imagine: you are an anthropologist. Picture yourself set down, not on a tropical island, nor in a mud hut, nor even in a faraway slum to whose sounds you slowly acclimate yourself, the white interloper. Instead, you are cold and it is dark and you are waiting in a long line outside a public park two nights before Halloween. You are two short bus rides away from the university where you study; in a different city it would only be one bus, it is that close, but Belfast is funny like that, its bus routes fanning out from City Hall like spokes in a crooked wheel. It is 2015, after all, and you have been assured that it’s okay to do anthropology close by, where people speak the same language as you and look like you – where you can blend in, as you are doing tonight. Sort of. Also you are broke, and you couldn’t afford to travel somewhere more distant for fieldwork even if you wanted to. You begrudgingly exchange a pound coin for the metallic wristband that will let you into the park – broke, remember? – and then you wait. And wait. While you wait, you realize that you’re not doing as good a job at blending in as you’d like. You’re there by yourself: strike one. Everyone else is in groups. Strike two: you’re an adult alone. Every adult you see is there with a child or two or three. Thank goodness you’re a woman, you think; if you were a man alone they might think you’re some sort of pervert. You worry they might be thinking that anyway. You keep your eyes on the ground, or off in the distance, just in case. Through the ornate metal bars that fence the Waterworks Park – a relic of its nineteenth-century origins, nothing like the angry metal fencing that separates neighbourhoods one from another in this city – you can see black-clad workers scurrying along the paths as they finish stringing white Christmas lights, hanging decorations, and doing other mysterious things you can’t quite see. You hear the soft swish-swish of the river, low and constant, beneath the sounds of children’s laughter and adult chatter.

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The Cracked Art World

At long last, the park gates swing open. Hundreds of children barrel through, screaming happily; it feels more like something out of a film than real life. They race through the path that circles the park, passing along a narrow bridge whose railings have been interwoven with strands of Christmas bulbs, through a stand of trees lit by brightly coloured spotlights and populated by stilt-walkers in top hats, and along the edge of the reservoir that lends the park its name. You, in turn, circumnavigate the park at a much more sedate, adult pace. One stilt-walker stoops down to give you an enthusiastic high five; the others ignore you. You have to stoop awkwardly low to walk beneath the clear umbrellas strung from the trees, dangling pink-plastic jellyfish tentacles the right height for a child’s head, but too low for your five-and-a-half-foot frame. As you circle along the reservoir’s edge, enjoying the peaceful sounds of the water and the faint starlight you can see beyond the city’s brackish orange glow, you spot the park’s playground, in whose towering metal structures the children seem far more interested than the enchanted forest landscape, the under-the-sea decorations, the food trucks, or the music emanating from the white marquee at the water’s edge. As you approach the marquee, the band, all young, mid-twenties it looks like – your age – draw their song to a close. The young woman singer, billowy pink skirt, flower in her hair, smiles as she addresses the small gathered crowd of mostly children: ‘Some of you may know this next song. If you know it, sing along. This is “Tainted Love”’. A record-scratch sound in your brain. What the hell? Surely you must have misheard, but no, there are the clearly recognizable opening bars. You gape at the stage, unsure what to think. You like the song on its own, but it wouldn’t be your first choice for a children’s festival. Or your tenth, or your hundredth, really, given its fairly obvious sexual themes. The audience are less than enthusiastic about the performance. A woman tries to dance to the song with her daughter, who looks to be about 8, but their attempt doesn’t last long; the two are going for an upbeat, swinging type of dancing that simply doesn’t match the song’s heavier, slower beat. The number of children and parents in front of the stage dwindles to under ten. The song draws to a close – mercifully, in your opinion – but the band is not done. The singer surveys what is left of the crowd and addresses them – you – again, this time asking, ‘Does anybody know what ingredients go into a martini?’ Wait, what? The band launches into their final song, an original, which includes such lines as, ‘Gin – you make me happy’. (‘What a terrible lesson to teach children; vodka martinis are clearly the superior drink’, the former bartender in you snarks. You write this observation down in your fieldnotes later. You think yourself rather clever.) The audience don’t respond to this song either; they are bored, listless. No one tries to dance this time. The band is skilful, you must admit; if you close your eyes and pretend you’re elsewhere,

Introduction 3

somewhere more appropriate, you think you would enjoy their performance. But you’re not there; you’re here. The applause at the song’s close is lacklustre, sparse. It’s pretty much what you’d expect of a band playing a song about martinis at a children’s festival. However, as the song draws to a close, something else happens. As the band members wind cables and stow instruments, a group of young teenagers begin to array themselves at the rear of the stage, lying down as though dead. Their heads are wrapped in toilet paper, their faces painted haphazardly with dark eye makeup. Some have Frankenstein scars on their cheeks or foreheads. Most are wearing black. The white stage spotlights are shaded with reds and greens. An adult voice announces that the next performance will be that of the New Lodge Arts dance troupe. You know New Lodge Arts, at least by reputation; they are a well-established community arts organization here in North Belfast, and the co-sponsors of tonight’s Halloween festival, so it makes sense that they would be represented on the performance stage. The music starts – ‘Thriller’, naturally. The teenagers slowly rise from the floor of the stage. Some extend their arms in the classic zombie-movie walk as they move into their formation. Bits of ‘Thriller’ are poorly spliced together with other popular Halloween-themed songs – ‘Monster Mash’, that sort of thing. The teenagers are not the most coordinated or practiced dancers: a girl with dark lipstick and black-lined eyes walks the wrong way and bumps into another dancer; a boy with toilet paper wrapped around most of his head periodically looks to the others to remind him of the moves, rendering him a step or two behind everyone else. The rapid jumps between songs seem to confuse them; they often pause when a new song starts, taking a beat (or three) to remember what to do next. There is some quiet giggling among the audience at the more visible gaffes. However, a crowd begins to gather, watching far more intently than they did the preceding act. You start to feel bodies – adults mostly – pressing closer around you, and you see spectators fill up much of the cement area in front of you. When the group finishes their routine, they are met with the sound of thunderous applause. You turn around and see, to your surprise, that many more still have gathered behind you, jamming the audience area. More than a hundred spectators have gathered in the five minutes or so of the performance, and all are enthusiastically cheering the dancers. Imagine: you are an anthropologist. What do you make of what you have just witnessed?

Researching Community Arts in Northern Ireland The research interest that took me to the Waterworks Park that night was the genre most commonly glossed as ‘community arts’ in Anglophone countries. From October 2014 through May 2016, I conducted ethnographic research on community arts in Northern Ireland, with a particular focus on

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The Cracked Art World

the city of Belfast, where much of the region’s arts activity is concentrated. The social-historical-political backdrop to this research was, firstly, the implementation of austerity measures by the UK government in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. As Colin Coulter notes, Northern Ireland was, and continues to be, ‘especially vulnerable to the new age of austerity’, given the region’s high level of dependence on public funding from the UK treasury, as well as the relatively large percentage of the population who claim state benefits (2014: 770). The second key context for this research – much longer-lived, having spanned many centuries of the region’s history – is the ongoing ethnopolitical tension between the ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ communities, which deeply entrenched social divide has led scholars to class Northern Ireland as a ‘deeply divided society’. The division between Catholic and Protestant populations – which maps onto the named religious groups, but primarily signifies ethnicity and politics – arises from the region’s long history of colonization and conflict (Tonge 2002). This division has resulted in multiple periods of sustained violent conflict throughout the region’s history, most notably (and best known to an international audience) that from 1969 to 1998, known colloquially as ‘the Troubles’ (ibid.). Though the region is not, of course, entirely free of violence, nor of political turmoil, the first decades of the twenty-first century have been significantly more peaceful than their predecessors. Today, the ethnopolitical divide both manifests as and is exacerbated by high levels of segregation in housing and education (Jarman and Bell 2012; Borooah and Knox 2015; Hansson and Roulston 2020). The divided, ‘two-community’ understanding of Northern Ireland society, while still dominant, has been increasingly problematized in recent years as post-1998 migration has led to greater numbers of Northern Ireland residents hailing from neither ethnopolitical background (McVeigh and Rolston 2007) and as increasing numbers of residents choose to self-identify as belonging to neither community (Bull 2006). Two major political events that occurred shortly after the period of research are also worthy of note, as the trajectories that led thereto were already in motion during this period and thus affected the context within which I was researching. The first of these was the June 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum vote, in which a majority of UK voters opted to leave the European Union. The campaigns for ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ served as the backdrop to my final months in the field, and many of my research participants expressed anxiety about the upcoming vote. Northern Ireland is set to be uniquely affected by the ‘British exit’, given not only its particular history of conflict and the belief of much of the population that the North should rightly be part of the Republic of Ireland rather than the United Kingdom, but also the fact that that it shares a land border with the Republic, which remains within the European Union. The second event worthy of note, which occurred seven months after the Brexit referendum, is the collapse of Northern Ireland’s devolved power-sharing government in January

Introduction 5

2017. The region lacked a sitting government and Assembly for three years; devolved government of Northern Ireland was finally restored in January 2020. The collapse of power-sharing and the difficulties in restoring it revealed ongoing social, cultural, and political tensions within the region. This, then, is the particular – and some might add peculiar – political landscape within which I carried out ethnographic research on community arts for a year and a half between 2014 and 2016, and which I continued to watch unfold first-hand as I began analysing the research data. As an outsider (originally from the United States), my interest in community arts arose, first and foremost, in relation to the region’s relatively recent history of violent conflict. Before arriving in Northern Ireland, and admittedly knowing quite little of the region’s history, I had read that community arts and community artists had played an important role in Northern Ireland’s peace process. And I certainly found this to be the case; as I will discuss in Chapter 1, the history of community arts in Northern Ireland is inextricably bound up with that of the Troubles. However, this is by no means the whole story, for the reality of community arts in Northern Ireland is far more complex, comprised of numerous actors with many different aims, sometimes working together and often at odds with one another. In this volume, I seek to examine the complexities of community arts participation and practices within the particular context of contemporary Northern Ireland: a Northern Ireland twenty years distant from the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, but still living and dealing with the long shadow of the Troubles; a Northern Ireland vulnerable both to economic crisis and to its chosen solution; a Northern Ireland whose face is rapidly changing as the first post-Troubles generation comes of age, and as new migrants from Europe and beyond change its demographics; a Northern Ireland with a close-knit artistic community that extends and expends itself to speak into these complex realities – a community that is simultaneously vibrant and struggling. This introduction and this volume seek to present and interrogate community arts in contemporary Northern Ireland as an art world: as a collection of individual and organizational stakeholders of different means and aims, all working within what the majority identify as a single artform which can be labelled (and is known locally) as community arts. In this introduction, I present the analytical model through which community arts is examined in this volume, using the story that opens this chapter to demonstrate how the model might be useful, and what new insights it might proffer for the anthropology of art. Throughout this text, I argue that art worlds are not static things, but are rather ongoing processes: art worlds are continually being made, unmade, and remade.

Art Worlds Are Made Relationality and interconnection within and among the social groupings in which art is made have for many years constituted a key interest in

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the study of art. Authors in multiple disciplines have offered a number of models for describing and discussing these connections: Bourdieu’s (1983) ‘cultural fields’, Becker’s (1974, 1982) ‘art worlds’, Brinner’s (2009) ethnomusicological adaptation of network theory, Ingold’s (2011, 2015) ‘lines’ and ‘meshwork’, various adaptations of rhizomes (e.g. Ferreira and Devine 2012) and actor-network theory (e.g. Jurkowlaniec, Matyjaszkiewicz, and Sarnecka 2018), and so forth (cf. van Maanen 2009). Each approach is valuable, and any one of them would provide a strong basis for an analysis of community arts in Northern Ireland. From among them, I have chosen ‘art worlds’ as the foundation on which to build my approach, primarily given the relative accessibility and reader-friendliness of Becker’s approach. While this is of course an academic book, it has been my goal from the beginning of the research to write a text that is accessible to my research participants and other community arts practitioners, both within and beyond Northern Ireland. When presenting my initial, tentative analyses to research participants, I found that many were already familiar with Becker’s approach, and that explaining my work in those terms provided opportunities for their critical, informed feedback on my research. In selecting a sociological text as an anthropologist, moreover, I hope to demonstrate the interdisciplinary possibilities for the approach I have chosen, inviting arts researchers from other disciplines to join me in this conversation. Finally, I have found Becker’s more open-ended, unbounded understanding of art worlds, which accounts for the presence of relatively peripheral persons and institutions, to be particularly well suited to the Northern Ireland context with its dense web of interconnections at individual, institutional, and political levels. Recognizing the significance of relatively peripheral art world players and how their experiences and motivations may or may not affect community arts practices has prompted me to consider how community arts affects and is affected by politics and policy, religion, urban spatial organization, and other seemingly non-arts factors. In what follows I will introduce the art worlds concept and use it to explore the meanings of the audience reactions to the two performances during the Halloween festival at the Waterworks Park. In the subsequent sections of this introduction, then, I will demonstrate the ways in which that model presents only an incomplete picture of community arts in Northern Ireland, and I will set forth an alternative model for analysis that might further and expand our anthropological understandings of the work of art. Becker’s chief aim in Art Worlds (1982) is to dismantle the ‘romantic myth of the artist’ as the solo, unfettered genius; he seeks instead to situate those who make art within the social and relational contexts that make their works possible (ibid.: 14–24). The art world is fluid in shape, perhaps best illustrated as the ripples that emanate from a disturbance in a pond. Artists or makers – ‘originators’, as Becker calls them – are located at the core of the art world, which then expands outward into ever more peripheral circles, comprised of the various and numerous individuals, groups, and

Introduction 7

institutions who contribute, to differing extents and in diverse ways, to the artworks’ conception, creation, circulation, and criticism (ibid.: 2–4). The art world is unbounded – we could extrapolate the ripples ever outward, to those who hear of a work of art in passing or read about it online, for example – and its substance is comprised not of the works produced and circulated, but of the ever-shifting intersubjective formations that make these works possible (ibid.: 35). To place an artistic product (object, performance, or otherwise) within its art world is to understand it to be more than the sum of its parts. In the story with which this chapter begins, the teenagers’ Halloween-themed dance could very easily be understood as something other than art, whether due to the apparent lack of skill among the dancers, or to the work’s unoriginality (i.e. its utilization, and even copying, of the creativity of others), or even to a continued prejudice in other art worlds against amateur or community-based performance (Jacob 1995: 55–56). Anthropological understandings of art that focus on the nature of art, taking as their primary question the boundary between art and not-art, or those that focus on aesthetics and the physical and performative qualities that make art ‘good’, are all largely indifferent to mundane performances like this one, despite the fact that this is the primary way in which most humans interact with art during their lives: the simple, the amateur, the perhaps-slightly-silly. An art world perspective, however, allows us to place this dance performance within its own particular web of interrelationships and interconnections – between New Lodge Arts and its local community, between the well-known pop songs and their listeners, between the dancers and their friends and family members in the audience. Extrapolating the art world further, following its ripples outward, the dance performance also exists within local and international flows of ideas about community and youth arts, and especially about the ways in which music and movement can be deployed for social purposes among the youth populations of economically disadvantaged areas like the New Lodge. And suddenly, the audience’s disproportionate response to the dance performance begins to make sense. The onlookers are vociferously cheering neither the physical skill nor the aesthetic value of the dance, but rather the social and relational context within which the dance was made, and which it represents for them on stage. Thus, for community arts, we cannot understand or make sense of the ‘thing’ of art – the object, the performance – without understanding the art world within which it is situated. This understanding fits well with anthropological views of art that have come to the fore since the publication of Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency (1998).1 In that seminal volume, Gell works to move the anthropology of art away from a view of art as symbolic or representational – as ‘having semantic and/or aesthetic properties that are used for presentational or representational purposes’ – and away from the dictates of ‘the institutionally recognized art world’ (ibid.: 5). Instead, Gell proffers an ‘“action”centred approach to art’, in which the focus is on what humans do with

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The Cracked Art World

art and how it makes and mediates their social relations (ibid.: 6–7). His analytical focus is on movement, change, and causation: becoming rather than being. In Gell’s understanding, anything can be art, provided it acts as art – that is, that it fulfils art’s purposes in social processes. Such an understanding is especially useful for genres like community arts, where appeals to aesthetic properties or institutional ideas of art will most likely fall short in explaining what art does and how it is enacted and received as meaningful by members of the art world. Taking a processual approach to art, following Gell, allows us to better see and understand the total shape of art worlds. A focus on the artist as solo genius neglects the work’s postproduction lives and mediations, and the creativity involved therein (Ingold and Hallam 2007; Svašek 2016) – such as the appropriation and use of a classic pop song by a teenage dance troupe. It also valorizes the labour of the work’s ‘originator’ – in this case Michael Jackson and the team behind the original ‘Thriller’ song and video – and marginalizes the labour of others further along in the performance’s post-production life cycle (Jackson 2014: 224–30). Thus, to fully understand the work of the community artist, the various groups and organizations with whom the artist engages, and the art world(s) within which the artist labours, a processual approach is not only useful but also, in fact, vital. At the same time that art worlds provide the social and relational spaces within which art can be reused, remixed, and reappropriated, they also set boundaries around the art that is made and remade. More specifically, art worlds provide the structures and strictures within which artists both conform and innovate (Forge 2017: 82–85). Successful innovations, which is to say those that are accepted or generally approved by a majority of other art world members, can move an art world’s tastes and aesthetics in new directions (Bolton 2017), while less successful ones may be deemed ‘not art’ or assigned to alternative (art) worlds, such as ‘craft’ or ‘pornography’ (Svašek 2007: 154–90). Jason Toynbee (2000), an ethnomusicologist of popular music, examines the ways in which art worlds serve to bound and constrain these possibilities. Drawing on the work and language of Bourdieu (1983), Toynbee argues that an artist chooses from among a series of limited ‘possibles’, each of a varying degree of ‘likelihood’ or ‘likeliness’ determined by habitus, historical precedent, and hierarchical relations among members of the art world. While all possibles are technically possible at any given moment within an art world, ‘some possibles are more likely to be selected than others’ (Toynbee 2000: 39–40; cf. Becker 1974: 770–74). In Toynbee’s example, a rock guitarist will most probably select chords based on stylistic convention and artistic self-presentation; while a certain amount of innovation is possible, choosing chords or chord progressions too far outside the art world norm renders a work ‘hard to hear’ (Toynbee 2000: 39–40). Other researchers have observed and commented on similar processes in jazz improvisation (e.g. Faulkner and Becker 2009; Svašek 2016: 3–6). Artworks or performances that tread outside the usual

Introduction 9

art world boundaries can be experienced as awkward or uncomfortable, such as that in this chapter’s opening scene, in which the band stepped not outside the boundaries of what is considered art, but rather those of what is considered appropriate or tasteful for the specific context. Choice-making and navigating possibles is not, however, a democratic or equal process. For example, innovations from established artists or proven innovators are more likely to receive art world acceptance than those proffered by newcomers, outsiders, or marginal art world members. Certain art world players wield significantly more power than others. The facilitator of a community arts project, for example, typically gets more say in the tools and methods used and the goal of the collaboration than the project participants, thus influencing significantly the shape of the final work (cf. Kothari 2001: 149). Funding bodies and their bureaucracies are particularly powerful within art worlds, dictating goals, constraints, target audiences, and even new innovations. (Arts funding in Northern Ireland will be discussed briefly below, and at length in Chapter 5.) And this is where we begin to see the limitations of the art worlds perspective, for while it enables us to better understand the interconnections among stakeholders, it does not, on its own, provide sufficient language or breadth for discussing these inequalities, these lopside shapes that the art world so often takes. Those theories and models of interconnection which have been having their heyday for a while now, both within the anthropology of art and beyond (Der and Fernandini 2016), are simply insufficient to describe the unequal social and relational milieux within which humans live, move, labour, and create meaning. They are, as Elizabeth Roberts puts it in her incisive critique of the entanglement paradigm, ‘an extremely imperfect means for understanding unequal lifeworlds’ (2017: 596). This prolonged focus on connected relationality, while useful, has managed to eclipse its opposite: that is, the disconnected relationality, the ruptured sociality that characterizes many art worlds. Anna Tsing argues similarly, noting, ‘Ten years ago social analysts were impressed by the size and power of newly emergent global connections, so they focused on global coherence, for better or worse. Now it is time to turn attention, instead, to discontinuity and awkward connection, as this proves key to emergent sources of fear and hope’ (2005: 11). In her book Friction (2005), Tsing focuses on what she calls ‘zones of awkward engagement’ – spots of ‘friction’ that arise in human relational contexts (ibid.: xi). For Tsing, these zones of friction present a way forward for studying ‘global connection’, highlighting as they do ‘the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference’ (ibid.: 4; cf. Appadurai 1990). To focus on the art world only as a space of connection, to map out the interconnections among arts stakeholders, while a useful and instructive exercise, would be to miss the point entirely. My research participants’ primary affective experience of their art world at this moment in time is not one of networks and interconnections and entanglements, but rather one of

10

The Cracked Art World

conflict, disconnection, and disjuncture. What we need, then, in the anthropology of art is a model for discussing the ‘friction’ that Tsing identifies in the midst of interconnection, as well as the conflicts, both major and minor, macro and micro, that are visible in the everyday workings of art worlds. In the second half of this chapter, I propose a new model of analysis for the anthropology of art, one that might account for these missing pieces, for these aspects of art world – and indeed life world – experience that do not fit so neatly into existing models.

Art Worlds Are Unmade To this end, I propose a new model for discussing and analysing these points of rupture, an approach that I, taking my cue from Becker (with just a touch of James Joyce),2 have termed the ‘cracked art world’ (see also Rush 2020b). The art world, I argue, is a fundamentally misaligned thing. It is like a mirror with a crack in it: while still legible, still reflecting back an image to the viewer, the versions of the image on either side of the crack will never quite line up. They are disjointed, off-kilter; they have the potential to create a jarring effect in the viewer, not unlike the jarring effect I felt at the Waterworks that night, or that which my research participants felt when they protested at Parliament Buildings, or received the fateful notice in the post telling them that their Arts Council funding had been denied this year (see Chapter 5). The cracks in an art world – and I say ‘cracks’, plural, for they are always multiple – occur when one art world stakeholder’s goals, directives, desires, or means differ from those of others. The mirror as metaphor is particularly apposite, as the mirror has long been used in both art and anthropology to symbolize the ways in which each of those disciplines interacts with culture and seeks to tell us something about ourselves (e.g. Danto 1964; Ruby 1982; Turner 1982: 103–5; Madison 2010: 12; Schneider 2017: 15). Furthermore, playing with the popular notion that art ‘holds a mirror up’ to culture, the image of the cracked mirror has been widely used in artistic works to signify that something is wrong, that something has been broken – in short, to argue that the image reflected is imperfect and troubled. To apply the metaphor of the cracked mirror to the art world, then, is to focus on its disjunctures, on the places in which perspectives or practices, discourses or values, goals or priorities, do not exactly align. Since there will almost always be some level of disjuncture when any two individuals or groups meet, a point that Erving Goffman argues in his Frame Analysis (1974), this state of crackedness is the usual state of any art world, or any social world at all for that matter. There exist no uncracked or ‘pure’ art worlds. Rarely is the art world irrevocably, incontrovertibly broken, but neither is it ever whole. To focus on these conflicts, on these ruptures within art worlds, is in many ways emblematic of our contemporary time: readers will certainly be aware of cracks in current social and

Introduction 11

political worlds, educational and research institutions, and everyday social lives. Despite their prevalence and relevance, however, disconnections are understudied and undertheorized within the anthropology of art and within anthropology more generally. Entanglement has eclipsed its other, and in the process we have lost something that is vitally important to the everyday lived experiences of those with whom we research. The cracked art world model seeks to recapture this aspect of social life, both as it relates to art and as it relates to human sociality and relationality more generally. So what might this look like in practice? What everyday art world experiences might the cracked art world illuminate for both researchers and art world participants? In the vignette with which this chapter opens, the cracks in the art world are relatively benign. They are, nonetheless, instructive for examining how the model might be applied to the everyday. I argue, more­ over, that this event might be usefully viewed as a microcosm of cracked art worlds, a small slice of the art world fractal that reproduces itself, cracks included, in self-similar ways at various levels of analytical focus (cf. Strathern 1991; Green 2005: 128–58; Mosko 2005). Paying attention to cracks, to friction, to conflict or discomfort or awkwardness, calls attention to the differences of interest, means, and desires among art world stakeholders. In the Waterworks Halloween festival example, the wildly different audience responses indicated an obvious divide between the type of music and performance the band wanted to present and the type that the majority of the audience wished to see and hear. There is also a divide between the two performance groups, in terms not only of skill and musical choice, but also of connection with the audience, a crack that certainly influenced the differing audience responses. There is, moreover, still another crack based on the level of institutional backing (or lack thereof), which affects such factors as funding and pre-festival advertisement or promotion. The cracks apparent in this event, already many in the initial recounting, are not so neatly split as this description, this first attempt at analysis, might suggest. Cracked art worlds are further complicated by intra-group splinters, by differences among individuals within a group. When we take these into account, the model begins to resemble more a splintered web than a straightforward fracture. For example, my own less-than-positive response to the band’s song about martinis was based in my internalized perceptions of what is and is not appropriate performance material for a children’s festival and my anticipation of how those attending with children might feel. Those attending the event with children – those whose concerns are for the well-being and experiences of actual, specific children, rather than a set of hypothetical others – will certainly have had a different response. This is not to advocate a model based entirely in individuality. Those within a given group often have significant commonalities in their perceptions and opinions; this is why we can speak of groups at all within anthropology. In this case, the other festival attendees’ responses clearly mirrored my own, at least to an extent, as evidenced by their lacklustre applause and

12

The Cracked Art World

general disinterest. But we can certainly both perceive and imagine smaller splinters within that group, based on parenthood or lack thereof, age of the child(ren) present, musical tastes, attitudes towards alcohol consumption, and so forth. Identifying and probing the cracks within an art world is both an intellectual and an affective pursuit, inasmuch as affects can point us towards cracks that are perhaps not immediately apparent. The affective is the indicator, the emotional and sensorial seismograph pointing to the less visible subterranean cracks. This is particularly useful for those of us who begin our research as relative outsiders to the art world under study: affect provides vital clues for us to follow in identifying and querying the cracks in the art world. A feeling of awkwardness, of social ‘friction’, whether felt inwardly, observed outwardly, or a combination of both, is an affective signal that something is not quite right – that some social thing is cracked. Anger can likewise point us towards significant cracks in art worlds, as can anxiety. Recognizing such affects among our research participants, particularly where they are especially strong or widely shared, can illuminate vital aspects of the art world’s shape, as well as conflicts, inequalities, and ruptures that bear further attention. Thus, a cracked art world analysis, while certainly possible as a purely intellectual pursuit, calls for a sensorial dimension, attending to the feelings and emotions experienced and expressed by art world stakeholders. One of the most noticeable and strongly felt set of cracks in Northern Ireland’s art world, one towards which I was pointed by the strongly vocalized collective anger of my research participants, has to do with the effects of austerity policies on arts funding. As Becker points out, ‘[T]he state always plays some role in the making of art works’ by providing the legal and governmental ‘framework’ in which the members of an art world live, work, and exchange the items necessary for the creation and circulation of their art (1982: 165). He adds, ‘Like other participants in the making of art works, the state and its agents act in pursuit of their own interests, which may or may not coincide with those of the artists making the works’ (ibid.). Public funding for the arts, and the bureaucratic bodies responsible for awarding it, are especially powerful within cracked art worlds, wielding an ability to guide or entirely change their shape – a power to which relatively few individuals, or even individual artistic organizations, have access. For example, the vicissitudes of government funding are counted responsible for both the rise (van Erven 2001: 209–10) and fall (Hunter 2001: 326–27) of community theatre in Australia, while funding priorities at the National Endowment for the Arts have long shaped the historical trajectories of community arts in the United States (Cohen-Cruz 2005: 55–58). The situation is exacerbated still further in Northern Ireland, given the heavy reliance of the local arts sector on public funding, alongside ‘the overarching dominance of public funding’ in the region’s economy more generally (Coakley and O’Dowd 2007: 18), and thus the art world’s increased vulnerability

Introduction 13

to austerity measures. As Becker notes, ‘Government support takes on importance as it becomes a larger proportion of the available support for the arts’ (1982: 184), and in a place where government has long provided the majority of arts funding, austerity measures threaten the art world status quo in a way that has consistently roused strong emotional responses from affected art world stakeholders. Cracks within art worlds, moreover, may map onto, mirror, and potentially even exacerbate cracks within the wider social world, such as largerscale sociopolitical divides and socio-economic inequalities. In the Northern Ireland case, this includes the existing, long-standing divide between the region’s two main ethnopolitical identities. While many of the artists, particularly community artists, with whom I researched work to ‘rise above’ what they perceive to be sectarian division, they cannot entirely escape this crack in the art world, as no one in Northern Ireland can escape it entirely. This is especially true for organizations and individuals whose art forms are traditionally associated with Protestant or Catholic culture, such as Irish traditional music, marching bands, Irish or Ulster-Scots language and heritage initiatives, and so forth. It is also seen in the perception – less prevalent now than during the Troubles, but still reported by community artists – that theatre is a Catholic pursuit, which notoriously makes it more difficult for community artists to engage the Protestant community, especially workingclass Protestant men (Grant 1993: 41; Hamayon-Alfaro 2011: 124; 2012: 43–46; but see Parr 2017 on the rich and varied history of Ulster Protestant working-class playwriting, and on the complicity of academics in perpetuating this myth). Cracks in the art world often mirror social inequalities as well, falling all too often along lines of social class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, citizenship, education, and more. The cracked art world model, in fact, provides a language for incorporating an understanding of these inequalities into the discussion, and more broadly into the anthropology of art, in a way that existing models do not, or only allow for to a very limited extent. That I am proposing this model at a time when art world commentators in the UK are noting both increased barriers of entry to art world jobs for those from working-class backgrounds and the decreasing diversity of the artistic workforce (see e.g. Friedman, O’Brien, and Laurison 2017) is telling. While I suggest that the cracked art world has always been the case – that is, that crackedness has always been the nature of art worlds – the cracked art world is also a model for our time, and for a shifting state of affairs for which the anthropology of art has not, to date, been entirely able to account. As with the making of art worlds, their breaking, their cracking, their unmaking, is also processual. Art worlds are entropic, generally trending towards disintegration. The cracks in an art world, in other words, if left untended, will not only remain cracked, but will also tend to splinter further, to widen the existing rifts. An emphasis on making, on production – against

14

The Cracked Art World

which processually inclined anthropologists of art have tended to argue – elides the entropic nature of the artwork’s post-production afterlife. Objects tend to break down, either rapidly or over the course of millennia, depending on their materials, their uses, and the preservative activities afforded to them (Jackson 2014). Art-as-experience – that is, live performance – though it only exists momentarily, also undergoes a type of breakdown as its memory fades, or as the temporary relationships it created disintegrate and those who engaged in the artwork go their separate ways. So too art worlds: while their making is more gradual, and perhaps less fixable to a particular moment, the connections within the art world also break down over time. Entropy does not, however, march forward unimpeded; cracks are not a death knell for the art world, and broken things do not always stay broken. For example, retouching and repair have become a vital part of the post-production lives of famous paintings, and in the experiential realm, entropic memories of fleeting performances are archived through recordings, performance notes, and exhibition booklets, and even, increasingly, through ethnographic accounts. So too art worlds: cracked relationships can be left untended, or they can be mended. This, then, is the final step in the tripartite conception of art worlds that I have presented here. Art worlds, being constantly, perennially, eternally made and unmade, are also simultaneously being remade, repaired, and restored by their actors.

Art Worlds Are Remade The cracks in the art world, then, are not the whole story, even as interconnections are not the whole story. If we end our analysis with cracks, we have a better understanding of the disagreements and conflicts that pervade art worlds – divergences that prior theorizing has tended to elide. However, if we cease our analysis here, with a view of cracks within cracks within cracks, we are left wondering how anyone in the art world ever manages to get anything done. For in spite of the splintered, fragmentary nature of their interconnections, art worlds ultimately continue to produce art, a feat that Becker tells us is impossible without at least tacit cooperation among the art world’s various players. They manage to organize, sometimes on grand scales, for art to continue to be made, taught, exhibited, collected, and critiqued. Organization of this sort, of any sort, requires a level of active collaboration, of working within and against cracks in the art world. In theorizing this phenomenon, I take my cue from science and technology scholar Steven Jackson’s (2014) essay on what he calls ‘broken world thinking’. In this piece, Jackson emphasizes the processual nature of the world. While his focus is on technology and technological objects, his analysis might be easily applied to sociality within art worlds. Jackson argues that the general state of the world – technology, material objects, relationships, and so forth – is entropic: ‘[T]he world is always breaking; it’s in its nature to break’ (ibid.: 223). At the same time, these constant breaks

Introduction 15

are also constantly being attended to – treated, mended, realigned. While the world is forever breaking, ‘it is also being recuperated and reconstituted through repair’ (ibid.). We know this, I think; we recognize this already in our studies of art. A painting’s nature is to decay; its vibrancy is regularly maintained by carefully trained restorers. Likewise, links between artists and, say, gallery owners, buyers, and suppliers of artistic materials must be regularly maintained through communication; otherwise these connections wither and die. Jackson describes this dual state of the always-in-process world: ‘Here, then, are two radically different forces and realities. On one hand, a fractal world, a centrifugal world, an always-almost-falling-apart world. On the other, a world in constant process of fixing and reinvention, reconfiguring and reassembling into new combinations and new possibilities … The fulcrum of these two worlds is repair’ (ibid.: 222; emphasis in original). So while the world is always breaking, it is also always under construction, being attended and maintained and repaired. There is intentionality in such actions, and there is also love. Repair is, fundamentally, an act of care (Jackson 2014: 222); repair grows out of emotional attachment to the breaking-down art world, out of a conviction that there is something important and worthy of preservation. It is repair that keeps art worlds intact, keeps them moving forward and producing art in spite of their cracks, in spite of their tendency to break down. Let us return one last time to the vignette with which this chapter commenced. We have examined and explored the art world made and unmade, but if we look closely, we can see that it was also subtly remade. Here the action is passive, but still intentional. While viewers could have taken action to more noticeably exacerbate the cracks – protesting vocally, taking their complaints to social media, or even the old, clichéd standby of hurling vegetables at offending performers – the audience remained silent, allowing the band’s faux pas to go largely unremarked. Of course, the spectators’ passivity, including my own, speaks more to social norms and niceties than anything else; to cause a scene would have been the greater social blunder. But it also speaks to their priorities: those spectating were clearly far more interested and invested in the success of the festival and of the New Lodge Arts group’s dance performance than in responding to the awkward song choices of the young band. In other words, they cared about their art world – the specific art world, and indeed social world, which had allowed that night’s festival to occur – and within that moment they acted subtly, and most likely even unconsciously, to preserve the art world’s function­ ality, to allow it to do its work in continuing to produce its art. Care can also be undertaken more actively, more noticeably. In the case of arts funding cuts and austerity, Northern Ireland art world stakeholders recognize that a more active response is needed if the art world is to be maintained in something resembling its current form. Acts of repair to the cracks caused by austerity-led funding cuts come in numerous forms. Many

16

The Cracked Art World

arts organizations facing cuts choose to streamline their budgets to allow themselves to continue delivering the same programmes and services as before. Many seek alternative funding, both public and private, to make up the lost revenue; in the cases of several high-profile institutions, for example, Belfast City Council has stepped in to replace lost Arts Council funding, thus allowing the organizations, which had been faced with imminent closure, to keep their doors open (Taggart 2015; D. Young 2018). Interest in funding from private foundations has been on the rise, with more arts organizations looking to diversify their revenue sources to protect against anticipated further cuts to public funding. Northern Ireland’s artists have also formed an active social movement advocating against austerity-led cuts and calling for increased state funding for the arts (Rush 2022); one of this movement’s protest actions is examined in detail in Chapter 5. Protest, too, is an act of care for an art world perceived to be under threat; accounts of such protests reveal individuals deeply invested in the care and maintenance of their art worlds (Serafini 2014; Serafini, Cossu, and Holtaway 2018). It is important to add, as Jackson notes, that ‘repair is not always heroic or directed toward noble ends’ (2014: 233). Acts of repair can just as easily be harnessed for nefarious ends, or against the continuing functionality of an art world, as when art world members band together to denounce or exclude new innovations that they deem upsetting or aesthetically displeasing (e.g. McLoughlin 1995). Austerity, for example, can be read as an attempt at the repair of a cracked and breaking-down economic system. Or to take a related example, the repeated insistence of Carál Ní Chuilín (Northern Ireland Culture Minister from 2011 to 2016) that austerity was neither her nor her party’s choice but rather the dictate of Westminster (Rush 2022), can be read as an attempt to repair and maintain relationships with her constituents, her party, and (some of) her fellows in the Northern Ireland Assembly. It must also be noted that repair is not the same as full restoration. While historical or past cracks can certainly be reconciled, they are not removed as though they never existed; their legacy remains within the art world, not unlike the ways in which the legacy of the Troubles remains in Northern Ireland in the present day. And art world repairs can create cracks of their own, either offshoots of the originals or new, unexpected ones entirely. Repair, then, is complex and unstraightforward. It is also an act of creativity (Jackson 2014), as artists, arts workers, and other stakeholders invest themselves into the continued functioning of their art world. The acts of care by which cracks in the art world are repaired are bursting with creative potential: the thornier the problem, the more jagged the crack, the more creative the solution must be. Tsing calls this ‘the productive friction of global connections’ (2005: 3), while Jackson remarks that ‘[b]reakdown disturbs and sets in motion worlds of possibility that disappear under’ more ‘stable or accomplished’ conditions (2014: 230).

Introduction 17

And here at last is, I believe, where we can begin to speak of community arts and similar socially motivated endeavours: not only as aspects of a complex, breaking-down art world, but also as attempts at relational repair. It is a response to relational entropy on a larger scale: an entropy that has always existed, though perhaps it has been exacerbated by, or at least manifested more visibly under, regimes of industrialism, capitalism, and globalization. Art which takes as its primary substance the relationships among individuals can be read as a response to the perpetual breaking down of the world – an artistic mode of repair, a response to a world in whose nature it is to break.

Notes 1. Cf. Pinney and Thomas (2001); Chua and Elliott (2013). Gell’s approach, while deeply influential in the anthropology of art, has of course not gone uncontested; see e.g. Morphy and Perkins (2006: 12–16); Morphy (2009); Derlon and Jeudy-Ballini (2010). 2. ‘It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant’ (Joyce 1993: 7).

1 Community Arts in Context

•

Between Post-Conflict and Post-Post-Conflict Imaginaries

What might this phrase ‘community arts’ actually mean? Understandings of this term, as well as of closely related notions such as ‘communitybased art’ (Cohen-Cruz 2005: 1), ‘community performance’ (Kuppers and Robertson 2007), and ‘community cultural development’ (Goldbard 2006), are themselves cracked, splintering along lines of ideology, geography, history, language, artistic medium, and so on. Some of the available terms are specific to particular linguistic or geographic contexts, such as the French animation socio-culturel (Jeffers 2017a: 9) or the Latin American creación colectiva (van Erven 2001: 132–67). ‘Community art’ or ‘community arts’ (the plural indicating multiple possible artforms or artistic media) has traditionally been the term of choice in the United Kingdom, and it continues to be the dominant terminology there today, even when the specific meaning of this phrase is contested or not necessarily agreed upon (Jeffers 2017b: 135). Robin Pacific (2001) identifies and describes seven different ‘perspectives’ or ‘models’ of community arts, which ‘overlap’ and diverge in various, complex ways. She writes, The term community art is … vague and ill-defined. It reminds me of the story of six blind men and an elephant, only in reverse. Six blind men all examine the same animal, one feeling the trunk, one the legs, one the belly, and so on. The result is six different descriptions of the same animal. When it comes to community art, six people can use the same language, identical words and phrases, but they are in fact talking about six different animals. (Ibid.: 172)

Elsewhere, I have described another common term within contemporary art worlds – ‘value’ – as similarly divergent and contested, and that description holds true for understandings of community arts as well: ‘[D]iscourses simultaneously intersect and splinter along the fault lines of the cracked art world; this is how differently positioned speakers or evaluators, while

Community Arts in Context 19

ostensibly addressing the same subject, can easily end up talking past one another’ (Rush 2020b: 89). For my purposes in this book, I consider ‘community arts’ to be any localized, collective, aestheticized endeavour that specifically and intentionally involves non-specialists in the process of making and performing. Community arts organizations or groups typically exist outside of an institutional, for-profit ‘art market’ and employ some type of discourse of sociality, relationality, and/or communality to explain their rationale for, and the perceived value of, their work. This definition is intentionally broad, as it is not an attempt to specifically capture what I found while researching in Northern Ireland, but rather to articulate a definition that can encompass that vast majority of community arts and community-arts-adjacent projects and practices to which research participants, scholars, and others engaging with community arts refer. This is an overarching definition proffered in an attempt to advance the possibility of comparative studies among differently named community arts practices throughout the world. While such is not the intention of this book, which is locally very specific, I believe that such an effort is important for the anthropology of art, and thus a broad definition is necessary. As I will demonstrate in what follows, this is not an emic definition, and it is not one that I believe my research participants would share, at least insofar as it relates to their own work. One prominent community arts worker whom I respect very much told me outright, ‘That’s not community arts’. And for many of Northern Ireland’s community artists, this is not community arts, as I will demonstrate.1 I have taken the choice to use an etic definition for two reasons. First, a broad definition presents a useful step towards separating community arts from its stereotypes, particularly around the types of politics with which it aligns itself. Traditionally, community arts has been associated with ‘left-of-center’ political views and progressive political aims (Cohen-Cruz 2005: 4). This is no different in Northern Ireland, where many of the community artists with whom I interacted align themselves vocally with progressive politics and political parties. Most of the practitioners with whom I discussed the topic expressed an affinity for the Labour, Green, or Alliance Parties, and many were active in local political marches, rallies, and protests against Northern Ireland’s bans on abortion and same-sex marriage. (In the half-decade since I completed the research, same-sex marriage and abortion have both been legalized in the region.) Crucially for the time period in which this research was carried out, the vast majority of my research participants were vocal supporters of the ‘Remain’ vote in the 2016 Brexit referendum, a position that was and is common among arts workers throughout the UK (McAndrew, O’Brien, and Taylor 2020). With regard to the American presidential election occurring that same year, many expressed regret that Bernie Sanders had not won the Democratic Party’s nomination, and shock and outrage at the election of Donald Trump.

20

The Cracked Art World

As Jan Cohen-Cruz points out, though, while most practitioners and organizations operating within the visible community arts mainstream do espouse these types of political views, community arts practices, and the views of participants and practitioners, can cross the entire political spectrum (2005: 4). For example, in Northern Ireland there are a number of community arts initiatives run by Christian church groups. Youth Initiatives, a Christian organization, has run a drama programme for more than twenty-five years (see Grant 1993: 33). The Youth Initiatives programme is still active today, and I observed one of their rehearsals during the course of my fieldwork. I share another example of religiously sponsored community arts in Chapter 3. While Christian groups can, of course, cross the entire political spectrum, in Northern Ireland at least they tend to be more socially and politically conservative than the stereotype of community arts described above. A broader understanding of what constitutes community arts can allow for the inclusion of projects and initiatives that utilize community arts methods and goals, but which take place either on the margins or outside of the accepted community arts mainstream. Secondly, my definition might be productively viewed as a crude approximation of what the uncracked mirror could look like for community arts on a global scale, with the recognition that localized definitions will stake out specific ground within the wider bundle of global understandings. I begin from this somewhat artificial umbrella definition because examining the processes whereby members of Northern Ireland’s community-arts art world carve out their own local understanding can provide insight into the forces that splinter such definitions and shape such specificities. A cracked art world perspective can aid in understanding the local working out of definitions – that is, how broad terms like community arts are sliced up, reconfigured, and remixed within specific localized contexts. In this chapter, I attempt to elucidate broadly (though not universally) shared understandings of community arts that exist within the Northern Ireland community-arts art world, by placing these understandings within their specific historical, social, political, and policy contexts. I begin by examining the historical development of community arts in Northern Ireland from the 1970s through the 1990s, a history that is intimately bound up with that of the Troubles. I present this history using a combination of academic research, texts from within the art world – that is, texts authored, published, and circulated by and among members of the art world – and oral narratives communicated through personal conversations and face-to-face interviews. The historical account as encountered through these various sources is surprisingly unified, likely as a result of repeated retellings among art world members. Thus, what I present here is not a critical account crafted through extensive historical research, but rather an ethnographically informed representation of ‘the story they tell themselves about themselves’ (Geertz 1973: 448). Rooted as it is in contemporary tellings and retellings, this

Community Arts in Context 21

story highlights core concerns of the art world today, as well as key ideologies that have shaped community arts practices and policies in Northern Ireland over the past five decades. Kate Crehan’s (2011) Community Art: An Anthropological Perspective, the only other book-length work on the anthropology of community arts that I have found to date, similarly combines oral history, artist-created documents, and ethnographic participantobservation in an effort to elucidate what community arts is and does. Thus, the history that I present in this chapter also contributes in a small way to the comparative anthropological study of community arts, as readers may seek out both similarities and differences between Crehan’s analyses and my own. The historical discussion culminates in the development of Northern Ireland’s own definition of community arts – ‘access, participation, authorship, ownership’ – during the ceasefire period, and the subsequent codification thereof in Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) policy. Following this, I discuss the ways in which understandings of community arts have (and have not) shifted in the period following the ceasefires and the Good Friday Agreement which mark the end of the Troubles, and how research participants see community arts as positioned to address both the postconflict challenges of life in Northern Ireland and the non-conflict-related issues of everyday life in contemporary globalized society. In tracing this trajectory, I divide events and developments into three types, which map loosely but incompletely onto periods of the region’s history: conflict, post-conflict, and post-post-conflict. These are not meant as statements of historical fact, but rather as a cluster of general orientations to the Troubles and its legacies in Northern Ireland. In particular, I introduce the new idea of the ‘post-post-conflict’ as an emergent, imaginative approach to life in twenty-first-century Northern Ireland, as a way of describing the tensions with which my research participants held the simultaneity of the conflict and the what-comes-after-the-conflict. The post-postconflict is, I will argue, fundamental to understanding the particularities of the Northern Ireland community-arts art world; however, the circumstances and aspirations that drive the post-post-conflict are not unique. Thus, while this chapter is rooted very specifically and intentionally in the Northern Ireland context, it is my hope that readers situated in and researching other locales with recent histories of conflict will be able to find in these pages potential resonances with their own contexts.

Origin Stories While we can identify numerous and various community-arts-type practices throughout history (Cohen-Cruz 2005), community arts as it appears today is commonly accepted to have emerged in ‘Western’ states (especially North America and Western Europe) in the 1960s and 1970s, and to have been closely linked with the progressive political movements of those decades (Jeffers and Moriarty 2017). It has since spread globally, and ­contributions

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from the Global South have been and continue to be influential and ‘invaluable’ to the ongoing development of community arts (Nellhaus and Haedicke 2001: 4). While as I have already mentioned, community arts practices can and do cross the entire political spectrum, this historical link to progressive political activism is an important part of how contemporary community arts workers narrate their history, and many continue to align themselves with progressive politics. The rise of community arts in the mid-twentieth century was aided by the appearance of new funding for localized, participatory arts projects. In the United States, newly available public funds for community arts and artists arrived via the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of the 1970s and publicly funded institutions such as the National Endowment for the Arts (Cohen-Cruz 2005: 55–58; Goldbard 2006: 123–25). In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, the introduction of community arts funding streams within the devolved Arts Councils played a vital role in developing and lending momentum to the growth of community arts in its early days, as did the increasing availability of funds from private charitable organizations (Jeffers 2017a; though cf. Clements 2017, who discusses the changes that accompany the increasing availability of community-artsspecific public funding). This dual reliance on state funding and on activist movements – which often, though not always, advocate for changes to state ­policies – presents an interesting and recurring tension within communityarts art worlds, one that is particularly evident in Northern Ireland, given the heavy reliance of the region’s arts sector on public funding. The history of community arts in Northern Ireland is related to, but diverges in significant ways from, parallel developments in England, Scotland, and Wales (Fitzgerald 2004: 249–67; Jeffers and Moriarty 2017). This history is much more closely connected to that of community arts in the Republic of Ireland due to the shared land border, and there were and continue to be important institutional links between community artists and arts organizations working in the two political states occupying the island of Ireland, links that are underscored by art world publications that track this history (Fitzgerald 2004; Floyd et al. 2013). A key aspect of this shared history is that Ireland, North and South, witnessed a relatively late development of community arts practices compared to its neighbours, particularly England. A publication from Community Arts Partnership (CAP), a prominent community arts organization in Northern Ireland, describes this delay: The 1960s could be regarded as the beginning of the community arts movement in the UK. The original momentum for community arts grew out of a radical movement in the 1960s when pioneering artists sought participation for everyone. Changes to legislation resulted in improved access to education and subsequently the arts landscape was growing considerably … In Ireland the formation of a community arts movement took slightly longer. Community theatre groups slowly began to emerge north and south of the border in the 1970s. (Floyd et al. 2013: 13)

Community Arts in Context 23

Martin Lynch, a Northern Ireland playwright who has been active in community arts since the 1970s, uses very similar language in recounting these origins, writing, ‘In Ireland developments took a little longer. When community theatre began to develop in England, we were still sleeping in 1960s Ireland, north and south. Similarly, when community theatre was in full swing in England in the 1970s, we were just beginning to stir’ (2004: 57).

In the Midst of the Troubles: Community Arts and Conflict It is by no means a stretch of the imagination to surmise that this more protracted development of community arts was due in large part to the Troubles.2 The Troubles began in 1969, during the time when community arts was taking off in the English-speaking world, and thus the origins of community arts in Northern Ireland are inextricably bound up with the early days of the conflict. The first community arts groups began to appear in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the conflict’s most violent decade. One veteran community artist with whom I spoke referred to working in Belfast during the 1970s as being amid ‘bodies on the ground’, referring to high incidence levels of bombings, shootings, and other violent acts during the period. The first public funding specifically for community arts emerged in the late 1970s, when Lord Melchett, then Labour Party Minister for Education in Northern Ireland, approved a £100,000 grant to the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for community arts funding (Grant 1993: 7; Lynch 2004: 58–59; Hamayon-Alfaro 2011: 123–24; Moriarty 2017: 123). The goal of this new funding was ‘to promote community arts in deprived areas in Belfast and Derry/Londonderry’, and ‘[t]he overall aim of this pilot program was not to promote art for art’s sake but to fight exclusion’ (Hamayon-Alfaro 2011: 123–24). The focus on Belfast and Derry/Londonderry remained at least into the early 1990s, as in 1993 David Grant wrote that the region’s two major cities comprised ‘the extent of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s community arts brief’ (1993: 6). He added that, ‘In theory, Local Authorities outside Belfast have been free to support community arts activity in their own areas. In practice, the necessary motivation and expertise have been lacking’ (ibid.). During this early period, as today, community arts organizations also received funding from other public bodies, such as the Department of Education, Belfast City Council, and, following its creation in the late 1980s, the Cultural Traditions Group – a forerunner of the present-day Community Relations Council (Floyd and Ball 2004: 137; Hamayon-Alfaro 2012: 15; Moriarty 2017: 122).3 This original funding grant is telling, as it points to key themes that can be seen throughout this history, up to and including in the present day. The language of ‘exclusion’ and ‘deprivation’ certainly stems from policy language and priorities within that time period; some of that discourse survives today (see especially Belfiore 2002; Bishop 2012a: 13–14), while some has

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been discarded in favour of new rhetorics. What remains, however, is the idea that community arts is meant to do something, a pressure to utilize arts to deliver on non-arts policy aims. This was a tension that my research participants continued to express, one that is not easily resolved. Some practitioners embrace perspectives that align with Kuppers and Robertson’s broader definition of what they call ‘community performance’, which ‘is not bound by the arts as it crosses into other, less conventionally artistic practices, such as economic development, human rights politics, disability culture, community redevelopment, capacity building’ (2007: 1; emphasis in original). Others, meanwhile, viewed the instrumentalization of the arts in the service of policy aims in a more negative light, seeing it as a neoliberal strategy of austerity forcing the arts to prove their worth, where to their minds the worth was to be found in the art and its processes. The tension between art instrumentalized and what many participants called ‘art for art’s sake’ often arose in discussions, and while most of the people with whom I spoke felt that the correct balance fell somewhere between those two poles, exactly where that might be was difficult to pin down. This situation is not unique to Northern Ireland; Claire Bishop identifies it as a common discourse conflict among contemporary participatory and community artists, terming the two poles ‘the social discourse’ and ‘the artistic discourse’ (2012b: 38–40). The instrumentalization discourse, or the expectation that community arts should effect social outcomes, is further borne out by the public funding sources on which Northern Ireland artists draw. The ACNI plays a central role in funding community arts today, but it is far from the only funder. Community arts workers seek funding from a wide variety of sources – public and private, but primarily public – and frequently draw upon targeted government schemes with specific social goals, from health and well-being to education to peacebuilding. Public funding (or lack thereof) was a core concern of my research participants during this period, and as such this theme weaves itself both through the history I am presenting here and through the series of case studies in this book. (See especially Chapter 5, which examines funding more explicitly and in great detail.) Hélène Hamayon-Alfaro summarizes these early community arts initiatives in language that echoes stories related to me by research participants who had been working in the sector for a long time: Given the degree of residential segregation in Belfast and the level of violence in the 1970s and 1980s, most community arts initiatives developed on a territorial basis drawing inhabitants from the same geographic area and the same religious background … The first community arts projects or events that sprang up in Belfast in the mid-1970s originated in working-class areas that were, in fact, the worst-affected by the Troubles. Starting from a leftist perspective, the practitioners who got involved in these projects had in common a strong belief in the transformative power of the arts. (2012: 41–42)

Community Arts in Context 25

Hamayon-Alfaro’s description highlights several key points about the origin stories that Northern Ireland’s community artists tell. There is, first, the link to progressive political activism, which I have discussed above. Secondly, there is the inclusion, even prioritization, of working-class neighbourhoods in community arts work. Community arts projects partnered with and working within working-class urban neighbourhoods – which also tended to experience much higher levels of violence and conflict-related difficulties during the Troubles – have long been a prominent feature of Northern Ireland community arts, and projects of this sort continue to be a priority within the art world today (see e.g. Grant 2017). Finally, the geographic specificities of the Troubles (and beyond) continue to form a core component of this community arts history. The many ‘peace walls’ erected throughout Northern Ireland divide majority Protestant from majority Catholic neighbourhoods, with the stated goal of reducing intercommunity violence at these interfaces (Belfast Interface Project 2017; Donnan and Jarman 2017). The walls circumscribe everyday movement, and they both symbolize and contribute to ongoing residential segregation in Northern Ireland. While the walls are viewed by many local residents as continuing to provide safety (Byrne and Gormley-Heenan 2014: 450–52; Byrne et al. 2015; Halliday and Ferguson 2016: 530) – a key reason for their persistence, and in some cases even new construction, in the twentyfirst century – their meaning as related to me by community-arts art world members has shifted since the early days of the Troubles. During the conflict, intercommunity segregation was reinforced not only by the walls, but also (and arguably more so) by policies, policing, local attitudes, and the potential for violence if a person ventured into the ‘wrong’ neighbourhood. Thus, ‘cross-community’ projects (the term for initiatives involving members of both Catholic and Protestant communities) were simply not viewed as a possibility for early community arts practitioners in Northern Ireland – or if they did occur, they have not been incorporated into the contemporary retelling of this period. As Hamayon-Alfaro puts it, ‘The level of polarization was then such that it was virtually impossible for community organisations to transcend the sectarian divide’ (2012: 46).

Out of the Troubles: Post-Conflict Community Arts The paramilitary ceasefires of the mid-1990s signalled a turning point in Northern Ireland’s history and in the course of the conflict (Tonge 2002). Similarly, the 1990s ceasefire period represents a crucial turning point in the story of community arts in the region. The ceasefires and, eventually, the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 provided new opportunities for community arts due to increased freedom of movement. The lessening of the threat of violence, along with the societal trajectory towards peace, allowed for not only individual practitioners to cross Northern Ireland’s entrenched geographical and ethnopolitical boundaries (something that

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many had been doing throughout the conflict), but also for groups of community members to cross those boundaries together, to meet and make art (Moriarty 2017: 121–22). It is worth noting that while relative peace did – and does – allow for increased movement across boundaries, this is also a very idealized view of a region that remains heavily segregated, and in which many individuals still experience significant physical and psychological barriers to movement (see e.g. Roulston et al. 2017; Dixon et al. 2020). For example, a report on a recent community arts project in Tiger’s Bay, a working-class majority Protestant neighbourhood in North Belfast, notes that cross-community collaboration remains less possible in this area due to ‘[c]ontinuing tensions between the Protestant and Catholic communities in North Belfast’ (Grant 2017: 164). In addition to freer movement, during the 1990s the community-arts art world began to take more concrete form, moving from a loosely connected group of individuals and organizations into a more closely networked collective with an infrastructure and an ability to organize politically. Community Arts Forum (CAF) was formed in 1993, organizing and bringing together ‘over two hundred’ existing community arts groups, with the ‘remit to lobby and advocate’ for community arts as a distinct form of artistic practice and labour (Lynch 2004: 61). CAF published the first regional community arts newsletter in 1994 and the first community arts directory in 1999, providing practical ways for individuals and institutions within the art world to connect with one another (Floyd et al. 2013: 19, 28). In 1999, it also hosted the region’s first-ever conference on community arts, drawing ‘over 100 delegates, mostly from the UK and Ireland, but also from Europe, the Horn of Africa and the US’ (Matzke 2000: 135). CAF served as a unifying force and rallying point for political organizing, playing a key role in major arts funding protests that occurred in 2000 and 2007, which were successful in calling for significantly increasing the amount of public money available for community arts activity (Floyd et al. 2013: 34; see also NVTV 2011). CAF merged with the New Belfast Community Arts Initiative (see Devlin 2000; Floyd et al. 2013: 30) in 2011 to form Community Arts Partnership (CAP) in response to funding cuts during the post-2008 recession (Floyd et al. 2013: 72). CAP remains a major player in the art world today, delivering training, lobbying for policy changes, and connecting art world members through weekly and monthly online publications, among other activities. CAP played a significant role in the funding protests recounted in Chapter 5. The new freedom of movement and increasingly interconnected infrastructure were harnessed for the creation of a major community theatre project that features in every history of the community-arts art world that I have encountered: the Wedding Community Play, described as ‘the largest and most ambitious community drama project ever attempted in Northern Ireland’ (Floyd et al. 2013: 28; see also NVTV 2011). This large-scale, site-specific theatre piece depicted a ‘mixed-marriage’ wedding between a Protestant woman and a Catholic man. Performed in Belfast in November

Community Arts in Context 27

1999, set ‘against the backdrop [of] the Good Friday Agreement’ (ibid.), the play involved actors from both Catholic and Protestant community theatre groups and was staged on both sides of an interface in East Belfast: ‘There the audience entered the “real homes” of Geordie and Jean Marshall, in the [Protestant] Templemore Avenue area, and Margaret and Sammy Todd, in the Catholic enclave of Short Strand’ (BBC News 1999). The Wedding Community Play is significant not only for its new, ‘post-conflict’ use of space – facilitated in part, a BBC News article reports, through quiet engagement with local paramilitary organizations (ibid.) – but also for its bringing together of community theatre groups from Catholic and Protestant communities: ‘Although supportive of each other’s development, the community theatre groups had never worked together. It is fair to say that, until the ceasefire, it would not have been safe for them to do so’ (Moriarty 2004: 15). I suggest that the Wedding Community Play occupies an outsize role in shared narratives of Northern Ireland community arts history because it symbolizes a ‘post-conflict’ approach to and understanding of community arts. Here I should note that I do not use ‘post-conflict’ as a specific historical marker, nor as a statement that ethnopolitical violence has disappeared from the region (it has not), nor even as a particular, codified approach to creating and facilitating community arts. Rather, I use the term to refer to a specific set of ideas about Northern Ireland and how it is or ought to be, which in turn influence how community artists orient themselves towards their work and narrate its goals and outcomes to others both within and outside of the community-arts art world. This notion of post-conflict-ness, as deployed by the art world’s narratives about itself, is thus a ‘social imaginary’, a ‘common understanding which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy’ (Taylor 2007: 172).4 The post-conflict imaginary is a core component in the story that members of Northern Ireland’s community-arts art world tell themselves about themselves. The post-conflict imaginary of community arts is markedly different from the hegemonic view of the state and its corporate partners. While the latter have consistently presented and supported commercialization as a symbol of post-conflict status, a point that I will discuss in detail in Chapter 4, community arts workers emphasize a more interpersonal, relational view of post-conflict life. This is consistent with community arts globally, which have tended to support localized, interpersonal relationship- and community-building in the face of increasing neoliberalization and globalization (Raven 1995: 162–63; Goldbard 2006: 23; cf. Macfarlane 1977: 631–32; Delanty 2003: 31–37; Clarke 2014: 49–54). The Northern Ireland-specific approach to post-conflict community arts has two core prongs, which I will call ‘face-to-face’ and ‘space-to-space’. The face-to-face aspect of this imaginary is rooted in the notion that close interaction between individuals from different backgrounds (national, racial, ethnic, religious, and so forth) is crucial to building tolerance and

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peaceful co-living within diverse societies. This notion is at the core of numerous peacebuilding activities (as discussed in Chapter 3), as well as intercultural projects aimed at building links and respectful relationships among members of different cultural, racial, and ethnic groups (Tracey and Shields 2015). The space-to-space aspect, meanwhile, emphasizes changing participants’ relationships with their environment, an activity that is seen as particularly vital in a region with a history of militarized space and ongoing high levels of segregation. Space-to-space community arts activity in the post-conflict understanding focuses strongly on sites of partition and division, either by mobilizing individuals to move across such boundaries, as in the Wedding Community Play, and as in the approach to urban space evidenced by the 4 Corners Festival, which serves as my case study in Chapter 3, or by calling attention to the perceived unnaturalness of the peace walls and imagining alternatives to their presence. The post-conflict approach to and understanding of community arts thus capitalizes on the increased possibilities offered by the relatively less violent state of post-Troubles Northern Ireland, taking advantage of new opportunities for face-to-face interaction and space-to-space im/mobility in order to imagine and portray a society no longer riven by conflict, prejudice, and ethnopolitical divisions. It envisions the role of community arts as facilitating these face-to-face and space-to-space encounters, and thus providing opportunities for potential individual transformation, which it is hoped will eventually translate into societal transformation. The acts of repair in the Northern Ireland community-arts art world during the 1990s – occasioned by larger political acts of repair in the form of the ceasefires and, eventually, the Good Friday Agreement – facilitated further acts of ideological repair, by providing opportunities for previously disparate community artists and arts organizations to determine and coalesce around shared art world ideas and values. A reflection from Martin Lynch, one of CAF’s founding members, is instructive for understanding the importance of this moment to Northern Ireland community arts history: What was new about CAF was the fact that we named community arts in a way that it had not been named before. There was a group called Neighbourhood Open Workshops providing arts in the community, but they never referred to it as community arts. The term wasn’t new it went back to the sixties in the UK but we were the first here to set out and say, ‘We are going to call this community arts and we are going to try and get everyone to identify with it’. (Quoted in Floyd et al. 2013: 16–17)

The new art world infrastructure of the ceasefire period thus provided opportunities for diverse and disperse members to engage in terminology work, to collaborate to develop a shared language and definition for the labour they were undertaking. Both the formation of CAF and the development of a shared definition of community arts comprise repair work within the cracked art world.

Community Arts in Context 29

And here we can circle back to the question with which this chapter opened: what does ‘community arts’ actually mean? And what is the Northern Ireland art world’s emic definition of this term? The development of a shared definition by and for the community-arts art world is a core piece of the post-conflict narrative, and the definition itself is still highly influential today. The agreed definition that emerged in this period is straightforward, easily remembered, and consists of four planks: access, participation, authorship, and ownership. The planks are often cast in terms of human rights, usually with reference to Article 27 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights: ‘Everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits’ (UN 1948; cf. Matarasso 2019: 51–52). A rights-based understanding is evident in this description published by Community Arts Forum, which intentionally echoes the language of Article 27: Access: Everyone has the right to participate in the creative process, to speak, to be listened to and ask questions. Participation: Everyone has the right to be actively involved in the creative process. Authorship: Everyone has the right to contribute to the creative process. Ownership: What we have recorded through our active participation belongs to us collectively. (CAF 2004)

Community artist Gerri Moriarty, who was also involved in CAF in the 1990s, describes the four component parts in greater detail, while also drawing on this rights-based discourse: As someone who was deeply engaged with CAF’s work at this period, I would describe these as increasing the right of everyone to make use of all the resources required to make and enjoy the arts, increasing the right to actively share in the benefits of involvement in the arts, increasing the right of everyone involved to originate ideas and material, and increasing the right of participants as well as artists to make decisions and exercise power. (2017: 125)

The order to the four components is crucial here, as the community artists who created this definition and who continue to use it today see these as steps that build upon one another, often over a period of time: an individual or community must first be given access to arts practice, and only then can they participate; without participation, there can be no authorship; and without authorship, no ownership. The older people’s theatre initiative discussed in Chapter 2 is a particularly good example of this layering of steps, as over time the participants took on additional ownership of the drama group, choosing their own repertoire and directing their own rehearsals. While not all community arts initiatives will achieve this high level of ownership, which was accomplished over multiple years, this is the general direction towards which the fourfold approach strives.

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Importantly for the community-arts art world, this practitioner-developed definition was also incorporated into the official state language of policy and funding through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. The ACNI has a dedicated artform policy and funding portfolio for community arts, and it also supports community arts projects through a number of its other funding streams, including Intercultural Arts, Arts and Disability, Arts and Older People, and Circus and Carnival Arts, ‘each of which reflect strong Community Arts values’ (ACNI 2014: 3; see Table 1.1). The ACNI official policy definition of community arts is worth quoting in full here, as it demonstrates how the Arts Council contextualizes the emic, artist-created definition within policy expectations as to what community arts is meant to do or deliver: Community art is the process of harnessing the transformative power of original artistic expression, producing a range of social, cultural and environmental outcomes. Looked at politically, socially, culturally and/or economically, community arts aim to establish and maximise inclusive ways of working, providing an opportunity for communities and their participants to continue to find ways to develop their own skills as artists and for artists to explore ways of transferring those skills. Through this process, community arts aim to maximise the access, participation, authorship and ownership in collective arts practice. (ACNI 2014: 2; emphasis mine)

Thus, the ACNI definition directly incorporates that of CAF, though it is worth noting that where the community artists’ understanding prioritizes the process of community arts, the Arts Council definition foregrounds ‘outcomes’. Though it is a central component of the post-conflict narrative of community arts in Northern Ireland, it is important to note that ‘access, participation, authorship, and ownership’ is not a strictly post-conflict definition or orientation. Nevertheless, one commentator with whom I interacted during my research suggested how the language of this definition might be specifically applied to a post-conflict setting, or how it might fit within the post-conflict imaginary. In December 2014, I attended a ‘Community Forum on Arts Provision in Rural Communities’, held at the Sean Hollywood Arts Centre in Newry and co-hosted by Community Arts Partnership and the Rural Communities Network. During this event, a CAP representative referenced the first line of the ACNI definition: ‘Community arts is the process of harnessing the transformative power of original artistic expression’ (emphasis mine). This representative explained that the idea of creating ‘original’ art is used in contrast to ‘copying’ or ‘continuing’ ‘tradition’, specifically a tradition of politically motivated arts that promote sectarianism and division. Thus, while ‘access, participation, authorship, and ownership’ is undoubtedly applicable in any number of contexts, it has also been at times strategically deployed to specifically further the Northern Ireland art world’s post-conflict imaginary. With that said, the remarkable staying power of the fourfold definition is certainly due to its broad

Community Arts in Context 31

Table 1.1  Arts Council of Northern Ireland artform categories during the period of research. Information from ACNI (2017), table created by Kayla Rush. Arts Council of Northern Ireland Artform Categories Literature, Language, and Culture Literature Language Arts International Arts Traditional Arts

Participatory Arts

Performing Arts

Visual Arts

Arts and Disability Circus and Carnival Community Arts Voluntary Arts Arts and Health Intercultural Arts Arts and Older People

Dance Drama Music and Opera Comedy ‘Take It Away’

Acquisitions Architecture Craft Film and TV Public Art Visual Arts ‘Re-Imaging’

Note: ‘Take It Away’ refers to a zero-interest loan scheme for the purchase of musical instruments. ‘Re-Imaging’ refers to the ‘Building Peace through the Arts: Re-Imaging Communities’ programme, which seeks to replace murals perceived as sectarian or divisive with images considered to be politically neutral and more community-friendly (see Hill and White 2012; Rolston 2012; Hocking 2015: 98–99).   In the years since my research completed, the ACNI has made slight changes to the art form categories, reflecting new and shifting funding priorities. Music and Opera has been changed to simply Music. Under the Visual Arts heading, the ACNI has added Own Art, which provides interest-free loans for purchasing artworks, and the Art Lending Scheme, providing opportunities for organizations to borrow and display artworks from the ACNI’s Contemporary Art Collection. Under the Participatory Arts heading, meanwhile, further categories have been added for Youth Arts and the ARTiculate Young People and Wellbeing Arts Programme, reflecting the ACNI’s continued interest in art and health and increased investment in participatory arts programming for younger people (ACNI 2021a).

applicability, as it speaks to both the needs of a post-conflict state and, as I will explore in the following section, those of a post-post-conflict imaginary.

Beyond the Troubles: Post-Post-Conflict Community Arts It is prudent to begin by stating what this new term I have introduced – ‘post-post-conflict’ – is not. As with my use of ‘post-conflict’, the post-postconflict is not a historical claim, i.e. that Northern Ireland has somehow moved or progressed into a state of being ‘beyond’ its post-conflict (that is, post-Troubles) status. Post-conflict-ness itself is a contested and troublesome term, as ethnopolitical and paramilitary violence remain a feature of life in Northern Ireland, though certainly at a reduced level and within a landscape that has become more ‘normalized’ (see in particular Chapter 4 of this book). During the very first period of field research that I carried out in Northern Ireland, in 2013 and 2014 (Rush 2018, 2019), my research participants felt so strongly that the conflict had not truly ended that they erected a small monument in their community to ‘mark 45 years of conflict in Northern Ireland, 1969–2014 … A “Peace Agreement” was signed in

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1998, yet we are still in the process of coming out of conflict’. For at least some Northern Ireland residents, then, even the post-conflict seems to still lie out of reach. The year 1998 serves as a useful historical bookend for recognizing how everyday life and politics in Northern Ireland have changed in the subsequent decades, for all the reasons discussed in the previous section and more, but simply marking anything post-1998 as post-conflict, or indeed daring to choose a moment in time to bisect conflict from postconflict from post-post-conflict, is to elide the complex ways in which the Troubles continue to impact on contemporary lives, as well as the uneven and incomplete dispersal of the so-called ‘peace dividend’ – that is, the promise of economic and social gains that were meant to issue from the peace process (Knox 2016). Rather, as with post-conflict, I take post-post-conflict to be an imaginary, a way of viewing society and ordering its narratives. Importantly, the postpost-conflict imaginary is emergent – somewhat elusive, always coming into being, and in many ways being actively made by my research participants, even as it is simultaneously rendered incomplete by the competing and copresent conflict and post-conflict imaginaries. Within my own research, the post-post-conflict imaginary took the general form of wishing and working to highlight priorities beyond the dominant ethnopolitical divide, and to underscore the ways in which everyday struggles in Northern Ireland are often quite similar to those found in other contemporary neoliberal societies without recent histories of conflict. For example, community artists and community arts workers increasingly sought to work with and highlight the experiences of recent migrants to the region, and a number of large-scale, well-funded, and well-reviewed intercultural projects were undertaken during the period of my research, including the publication of a dedicated volume on intercultural community arts practice (Tracey and Shields 2015). A large swathe of community arts during this period also developed targeted programming for older adults, emphasizing the new needs and experiences of ageing societies in the twenty-first century, a set of lived realities that is by no means unique to Northern Ireland (see Chapter 2). The post-postconflict imaginary was not limited to artists, but was widespread among community arts participants as well. Matt Jennings found very similar attitudes among his research with community theatre participants in Derry/ Londonderry and Drogheda: [I]t is regarded as far more productive to address other concerns altogether. Participants are reported to be more responsive to topics of contemporary social concern, such as intergenerational communication, the impact of recent immigration, or the difficulty of holding down a job in the current economic climate. After such a long period of violent conflict, people are reluctant to reinforce the predominance of the issue. (2009: 114)

These desires were clear in many of my research participants’ responses to me and to how I presented my research. My description of the project

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to new acquaintances took on a fairly set form, one both fascinating and telling in the similarity of responses it elicited. After describing the basic parameters of my research – ‘community arts in Northern Ireland’ – I would usually say something to the effect of, ‘So many of my friends are researching conflict and the legacy of the Troubles’. Here, almost invariably, my interlocutor would begin to look a bit crestfallen. Then came the turn: ‘But I’m not doing that’. At this simple phrase, I could see the respondent’s body language change, become more welcoming, more open to communication. Some participants became visibly excited at this, and most expressed pleasure that I was studying something ‘beyond’ or ‘more than’ the Troubles. I credit this meeting between my own framing and my research participants’ desires to be seen in this way as crucial to the success of and overall positive response to this research. It is worth noting that at least some of my participants’ responses were likely rooted in my own identity. I am American, with an obvious North American accent, and as such these discussions were invariably held with that knowledge unspoken but very present. The Troubles seem to hold a particular fascination for many Americans, and certainly during my time there my own university attracted numerous American and other international students (myself included) who were drawn to Northern Ireland by interests in the conflict and the peace process. Many of these fellow students and researchers are my friends, and they produce excellent work. But while they never said it directly, likely out of politeness, I suspect that many of my research participants were tired of being asked about the Troubles by people who sound just like me, and of being portrayed to and by others as ‘suffering subject[s]’ (Robbins 2013) when in fact they wished for themselves and their artistic labours to be seen in their complexity, as the work of agentive actors living and working in a contemporary neoliberal society with all its attendant problems and possibilities. Within the community-arts art world, the responsibility for limiting or blocking the emergence of a post-post-conflict society was often laid at the feet of the region’s politicians. Many active in the art world, particularly among local leaders involved in advocating for changes to arts policies, felt that an entrenched conflict- or post-conflict-based view of Northern Ireland was responsible for holding it back, and was in fact limiting political imaginations regarding what was possible. Of course, it is not so simple as this: for example, while art world members correctly point out that political rhetorics in Northern Ireland tend to reify the ‘two communities’ and thus ignore the many migrants who make their home in the region, Ulrike Vieten and Fiona Murphy note that these migrants also experience Northern Ireland as a post-conflict place, arguing that ‘all newcomers, apart from the established majority and minority communities are affected by an ideological sectarian divide’ (2019: 177). In other words, there is not an easy divide between politician ideals and art world ideals, post-conflict and post-post-conflict imaginaries, but rather a complex state of affairs in which

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the imaginaries overlap with one another in a ‘historically situated’ (ibid.: 183) cluster of everyday experiences. However, given the importance of politicians to the art world’s narratives, it is worth detailing the particular post-conflict imaginary of their elected representatives here. Northern Ireland’s consociational power-sharing agreement is tenuous and somewhat easily disrupted, as in the period shortly after I concluded my fieldwork, from 2017 to 2020, in which there was no sitting devolved government in the region (Birrell and Heenan 2017). When it is functioning, the government maintains a precarious almost-balance dominated by its two largest parties, which also represent Northern Ireland’s two main ethnopolitical positions and identities: the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), representing the Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist community; and Sinn Féin, representing the Catholic/Nationalist/Republican community. The two parties are largely opposed to each other on most points, and even where there may be some room for compromise, they tend to perform vocal opposition to one another. Under the power-sharing system set up under the Good Friday Agreement, the top government posts of First Minister and Deputy First Minister, which despite their names are meant to be ‘identical’ in terms of power, are required to be filled on a cross-community basis, with one spot filled by an official from each of Northern Ireland’s two main ethnopolitical communities (Gilligan 2016: 40). During my period of research, the years immediately preceding, and those since, the two posts have been occupied by the DUP and Sinn Féin, respectively. The various Ministries are then proportionally split up, but are also required to be filled on a cross-community basis (ibid.), and the largest roles tend to swap between Sinn Féin and the DUP with every reapportioning of positions: such was the case with the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (DCAL), and with its successor, the massive Department for Communities (DfC). I spoke casually with several civil servants during my research, and they noted that this consistent flip-flopping of the culture brief between two oppositional parties meant that arts funding and policy became a casualty of the hostility between Sinn Féin and the DUP. One civil servant with whom I spoke told me that she would love to see what Alliance Party leader Naomi Long would do in the Minister for Communities role – Alliance positioning itself as a crosscommunity or non-sectarian alternative to the dominant parties – but that she did not think this would ever happen, as the DUP and Sinn Féin both very much wanted to have a say in how the DfC was run. The flip-flopping of the successive Culture Ministers’ party loyalties, and the actions with which they backed these up, illustrate very well the sway that the post-conflict imaginary has on Northern Ireland cultural politics, as well as the ways in which such actions were perceived by art world members as limiting their ability to imagine and realize a post-post-conflict society. They also demonstrate how certain types of artistic and cultural practices, and the financial supports available (or absent) for them, are

Community Arts in Context 35

politicized within the Northern Ireland cultural landscape. When speaking of the region’s Culture Ministers, my research participants typically began their narratives with Nelson McCausland, a DUP Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) who served as the Minister of Culture, Arts and Leisure from 2009 to 2011. As Culture Minister, McCausland was particularly interested in and supportive of funding for marching bands and UlsterScots heritage; he regularly pens op-eds for the Belfast Telegraph detailing his rationales for supporting these cultural activities (e.g. McCausland 2015a, 2017). Ulster-Scots heritage, culture, and language are closely aligned with and viewed as cultural interests of the Protestant community, as the name ‘Ulster-Scots’ refers to Scottish Protestant settlers in Northern Ireland and their descendants. And while there are marching bands active in both Catholic and Protestant communities (PwC 2006), bands tend to be strongly associated with the Protestant community as well. After leaving his ministerial role, McCausland continued to support these aims, often in tandem with heated criticisms of his successor in the post, Sinn Féin MLA Carál Ní Chuilín (e.g. Belfast Telegraph 2015; McCausland 2015b; Rutherford 2015). Ní Chuilín, for her part, often criticized her predecessor’s policies, and the two at times had heated words in the Assembly (see, for example, Chapter 5). Ní Chuilín removed the extra funds that McCausland had set aside for bands, branding such initiatives as sectarian, and instead funded such cultural priorities as Irish-language learning initiative Líofa and annual festival Féile an Phobail, held in the predominantly Catholic area of West Belfast. While both of these initiatives are at least theoretically open to all Northern Ireland residents – I met and knew of a number of Protestants who enjoyed attending events at Féile or were interested in learning the Irish language – Ní Chuilín’s funding priorities tended to be strongly associated with the Catholic community. In May 2016, at the end of Ní Chuilín’s tenure, DCAL was disbanded and most of its duties absorbed into the new, much larger DfC. DUP MLA Paul Givan was appointed the inaugural Minister for Communities. Givan completed the pendulum swing back towards DUP cultural priorities, cutting funding for Líofa bursaries (C. Young 2017); reinstating a McCausland scheme to supply musical instruments to bands, which funding had been cut by Ní Chuilín (BBC News 2016); and instituting a £1.9 million scheme for grants to ‘community halls’ (BBC News 2017).5 The community halls funding was decried as sectarian by Sinn Féin MLAs, who stated that it seemed primarily aimed at funding Orange Halls – that is, meeting places for the Orange Order, a Loyalist institution. Givan announced the scheme at an Orange Hall, seemingly confirming his opponents’ accusations that the funding was meant primarily for Orange Order recipients (ibid.). When in 2016, Givan posted to Twitter a photo of himself lighting a bonfire on the night of 11 July – a ritual which, together with the Twelfth of July, serves as the centre of the Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist parade season – art world members used the image to highlight their frustrations with the

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back-and-forth funding situation. One critical user retweeted the photo and added a new caption, making a pun on the Minister’s surname: ‘Paul Givan: £200,000 funding for loyalist band instruments. Paul Taking: £500,000 removed from Arts Council funding’. This pithy pun – ‘Paul Givan, Paul Taking’ – sums up very well community artists’ understandings of and experiences with the Culture Minister role. Research participants frequently expressed to me, and to each other both in person and in online spaces, deep frustrations with the perceived back-and-forth, ‘tit-for-tat’ nature of funding priorities within DCAL and the DfC. In particular, they felt that it served to perpetuate ‘Orange versus Green’ politics – ‘Orange’ referring to the Protestant community, ‘Green’ to the Catholic community. To put it in the language that I have been using in this chapter, then, art world members felt that Northern Ireland’s politicians were stuck in the post-conflict imaginary, and that their disproportionate power over arts funding meant that they were keeping the art world trapped in that imaginary along with them.

The Post-Post-Conflict Imaginary in the Cracked Art World I have described the saga of the successive Culture Ministers at some length because this, too, forms a vital part of the story that art world members tell themselves about themselves. The 2000 and 2007 protests mentioned above comprise key events in the post-Troubles story of community arts (NVTV 2011; Floyd et al. 2013: 34), and these protests and the funding that they won for community arts practice serve as important precursors and models for the protest that I examine in Chapter 5. Funding and policy protests and demonstrations serve as key unifying events that bring together disparate members of the art world. They also serve as acts of repair, as art world members work together to unify their aims and present a united front to the Culture Ministers and other members of government (cf. Rush 2022). Conflicts with Culture Ministers and government bodies, then, while highlighting cracks within the art world, simultaneously catalyse acts of repair. The fourfold ‘access, participation, authorship, and ownership’ definition is another type of repair, one which has proven resilient, long-lasting, and quite effective. Solidifying around this definition so strongly gave the community-arts art world of the 1990s far more power in terms of speaking to policy and policymakers. Adoption of this definition by the Arts Council is a further act of repair between the funding body and the funded, one that continues to assist in reducing potential mismatches of language that could prevent some community arts organizations from being funded (though we might reasonably assume that individuals and organizations who do not ascribe to this definition could perhaps find themselves left out of the funding process as a result). Art world members are cognizant of, and willing to employ, the power of undertaking such acts of repair in order to reach their collective aims.

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The account of the Culture Ministers also underscores crucial aspects of how art worlds work when there is an element of state sponsorship. The Culture Ministers and the Northern Ireland government wield an enormous amount of power, and this power allows them a disproportionate ability to shape and reshape the art world through policy priorities, availability of funds, and bureaucratic requirements. This is particularly painful for art world members because the arts represent such a small portion of the Ministry’s remit – especially so with the advent of the DfC – and thus find themselves competing with other budget interests from sport to housing. The Ministers’ own political positionings also demonstrate how cracks in the art world can map onto, and in this case potentially even exacerbate, other social and political cracks. While art world members present themselves as repairers of Northern Ireland’s ethnopolitical divide – a crucial component of the post-conflict narrative – they are viscerally aware that their repair work can only do so much, especially where they perceive a lack of political will from those in power. The contemporary community arts story in Northern Ireland is thus one of intense tensions: between hope in the believed-in transformative power of community arts, and despair over a seeming lack of will to transform at the highest levels of political power; between recognition of the very real divides that continue to persist in Northern Ireland society, and acknowledgement of its changing and diversifying demographic landscape; between conflict and post-conflict and post-post-conflict imaginaries, which overlap and jostle one another for space in both contemporary experiences of the present and collective imaginings of the future. The post-post-conflict imaginary is emergent, and elusive, but that does not mean that it is absent.

Notes 1. Interestingly, a civil servant within what was then called the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (DCAL) told me that this definition was quite good. DCAL and community arts workers were at significant odds throughout my period of fieldwork (see especially Chapter 5), and these divergent responses to my definition are interesting, and a little bit troubling. 2. It is likely that Northern Ireland’s relatively peripheral geographical and political position within the United Kingdom also played a role. Wales, another small and less politically powerful country within the UK, was also ‘a relatively late participant in the community arts field’ (Clements 2017: 104). 3. The Cultural Traditions Group was incorporated into the newly formed Community Relations Council (CRC) in 1990 (Hamayon-Alfaro 2012: 51). 4. As I am using the term, a social imaginary is not that of society writ large, as it is often presented in philosophical writings on the idea (e.g. Castoriadis 1987; Taylor 2007), but is rather applied specifically to the community-arts art world, thus operating within one particular slice of society. While the post-conflict imaginary certainly has ramifications and representations beyond the art world, here I examine its specificity within that smaller sphere. 5. Upon the reconstitution of the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly in January 2020, Deirdre Hargey of Sinn Féin was appointed Minister for Communities, thus

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continuing the trend of swapping the DfC back and forth between the two dominant parties. I have not included Hargey in this write-up for two reasons. First, by that point in time I had left Northern Ireland and embarked on a new research project, and I was thus less closely connected to my (now former) fieldsite. Second, Hargey’s appointment came shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic began to affect Europe on a massive scale, and as such during her time in office both government and art world priorities have been vastly different, in a way that I simply cannot cover in this book. A quick search of the DfC website seems to indicate, however, that the Líofa bursary scheme axed by Paul Givan was reinstated around the same time that Hargey assumed office (DfC 2020b).

2 Becoming Actors in Later Life

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Older People’s Community Theatre

Characters:

Ten individuals in an acting troupe. All are aged between 60 and 85. Six women: GRÁINNE, AOIFE, ROBERTA, SARAH, DEBORAH, and AGNES. Three men: EDWARD, DECLAN, and RICHARD. Aoife and Edward are a married couple. The director: JAN. Setting: An otherwise empty theatre during the middle of the day. The rows of stadium-style seats have been retracted, neatly stacked at the back of the room, leaving a large open floor space. The thick green curtains are open, revealing a stage at the same level as the floor; with the seats out of the way, the line between ‘stage’ and ‘audience’ no longer exists. Off to the side, a plastic folding table holds teacups, a few thermoses of coffee, and a tin of biscuits. Handbags litter the floor nearby, accompanied by plastic shopping bags, out of which peak an array of brightly coloured clothing and some cheap wigs. In the middle of the open theatre space, the nine actors stand arrayed in a flattened semicircle, facing Jan. All are dressed in conservative street clothes: muted trousers and cardigans, shoes with low heels for comfortable walking. JAN: Now for this next exercise, I want you to practice speaking to an audience. When you’re having a conversation on stage, you don’t face the person directly; you face the audience and direct your dialogue towards them. [She spreads her arm wide, indicating the actors, who today will also serve as the audience.] Each of you stand where I’m

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standing and improvise a bit of dialogue. It can be anything you like. Focus on making eye contact with everyone in the group. Here, like this. [She affects her ‘posh’ persona, lifting her chin and raising the pitch of her voice to sound snobbish. She begins to berate an invisible maid, a favourite improvisational example.] You stupid girl, you call this clean? [She runs her index finger over an imaginary surface, then lifts it towards the group.] It’s filthy. Filthy! Just look at that layer of dust. [The wagging finger becomes a jabbing accusation.] You can’t do anything right! I ought to throw you out on the street. [As she speaks, Jan keeps her torso sideways, facing her imaginary interlocutor, but slowly swivels her head so that by the end of her monologue she has successfully made eye contact with each of the nine actors.] [The actors applaud and laugh quietly. Jan takes a perfunctory bow with a smile on her face.] JAN: Now your turn. Let’s start from the end of the row and work our way down. [She waves a hand towards Gráinne, who is standing at the end of the line. Gráinne and Jan switch places, and Gráinne casts her eye over the semicircle of her peers.] GRÁINNE: [One hand is balled into a fist, planted firmly on her hip. With her other, she begins to wag her finger liberally at her audience. Her voice grows louder and higher pitched as she speaks. Like Jan, Gráinne swivels as she speaks, wagging her finger along the entire line of actors.] Which one of youse is having an affair with my husband? I know it’s one of youse. I know he’s been sneaking around. I know he’s been cheating on me with some hussy. Now which one of youse is it? ROBERTA: [standing third in the semicircle, between Aoife and Sarah. She throws her hands in the air and shouts gleefully:] It’s me! [Raucous laughter from the assembled actors as Gráinne resumes her place in the line. Aoife is next, and she takes the place vacated by her predecessor.] AOIFE: [facing Roberta] You’re having an affair with her husband? [She points to Gráinne.] Sure, you can have one with mine. [She gestures dismissively towards Edward, who is standing further along the line, next to Deborah.] He’s no good at all, he is. You might as well have him. [More laughter from the actors as Roberta replaces Aoife.]

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ROBERTA: [proudly] I’m having an affair with her husband. I’m not ashamed, and I don’t care who knows it. [Roberta and Sarah swap places.] SARAH: [also addressing Roberta] You’re having an affair with her husband? Bet you’re having one with mine too. You brazen hussy! You ought to be ashamed of yourself! [Deborah replaces Sarah.] DEBORAH: [addressing Roberta accusingly, slightly hysterically] You’re having an affair with her husband? [She jabs her hands in Gráinne’s direction.] He’s mine, I tell you! Mine! I’m pregnant with his child! [She slouches and sticks out her stomach, stroking an imaginary pregnant belly.] [The actors laugh even louder as Deborah returns to her spot. It is now at last the turn of Edward, the other accused party, who takes his place facing the semicircle.] EDWARD: With all of you accusing me of having an affair, I might as well go out and have one! [He throws his hands in the air and stomps theatrically back to his place as the actors dissolve in fits of laughter. The stage lights fade to black.] [The anthropologist steps out of the shadows, where she is wont to lurk, and assumes centre stage, illuminated by a lone spotlight. She spreads her arms to indicate the scene that has just occurred on stage and addresses the audience directly.] ANTHROPOLOGIST: This scene was pulled from my fieldnotes. The names have been changed to preserve the privacy of the rehearsal space, and some of the details have been added or altered to create a smoother, slightly more coherent introduction to this group of actors. For them, of course, it wasn’t an introduction; it was business-asusual, just another Thursday afternoon rehearsal, another improvisation exercise set by the director to warm them up and hone their acting skills. [She begins to pace a bit as she continues her monologue.] You might notice that I’ve written myself out of this scene. In reality, I was there in the midst of that semicircle, improvising along with them, albeit rather badly. This was not an epistemological choice, but rather an artistic one: my improvisation – a ballet teacher, as a matter of fact – didn’t add to or build upon this delightful ongoing story they’d

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chosen to create, this sordid tale of adulterous spouses, jilted lovers, illegitimate pregnancies. [She stops pacing to deliver the next line, her voice thoughtful.] It’s not really what we expect of older people brought together to learn drama, is it? [She resumes pacing.] Note their quickness and their willingness to broach taboo subjects, and to take on roles that would never be assigned them in a mixed-age theatre. Observe as well their improvisational skill, the playfulness that keeps it within the realm of makebelieve. No one is ever mentioned by name, did you notice that? It’s always ‘me’, ‘you’, ‘him’, ‘her’, ‘my husband’, ‘that hussy’. Edward, poor man, is not just one husband who may or may not be philandering. He is the stand-in for multiple husbands; he is all of their husbands, and none of them. He shapeshifts and changes to meet the needs of the story they are telling, as they all do. They adapt and play off each other’s stories, and together they shape something quite remarkable. This group didn’t start out this skilful, though. Many of them were first-time actors when they joined the group, or actors who had taken a multi-decade break from the theatre before returning in their retirement. The skill as actors, the confidence in flirting with accepted social norms, and the level of comfort with one another that all allowed this scene to occur were built over time, over the course of hundreds of hours spent together rehearsing, improvising, and socializing. And over the course of this time, they changed. They became new people: they became actors. And this is the story that, with their help, I would like to tell you today. [The stage lights fade to black.]

Setting the Scene: People, Organizations, Institutions The actors we met in the opening scene first came together as participants in Acting Up, a community drama group for older people. Acting Up was founded by the Northern Ireland-based arts organization Kaleidoscope in 2012. By 2015, when I began my fieldwork with the Belfast Acting Up group, the programme boasted ‘over 120 members – with an average age of 71’ in groups throughout Northern Ireland (Wallace Consulting 2015: 33). Like many other artistic organizations in Northern Ireland, Kaleidoscope is a professional production company with an ‘outreach’ arm, and it is this latter component that carries out the organization’s community arts work. The Acting Up programme was conceived and developed by Kaleidoscope’s founder and artistic director, Kerry Rooney, and funded through a threeyear grant from the Big Lottery Fund earmarked specifically for projects engaging older people. In a January 2016 interview, Kerry described his original vision for the project to me:

Older People’s Community Theatre 43

Basically the idea was … that we would recruit older people, and then we would take them through this twenty-week process, which would involve them learning lots of drama skills and getting to know one another and getting an opportunity to work with one another. And then at the end of that process to produce something so that they had something to show for all their efforts over the twenty weeks.

The programme was wildly successful, and many of the older people recruited to the Acting Up groups were eager to remain involved. Kerry explained, Our plan was in each year of the programme to set up two groups. That we would take two groups a year. Now things did change. Because what happened was, we were supposed to set up a group, do the programme and then go away and that was the end of the programme. But what happened was the groups wanted to keep going, we had a desire to keep going. And so even though the groups were started in, say, 2012, the Newry group was the first to start in April 2012, and it’s still going now in 2016. (Emphasis his)

The success of the initial three-year programme garnered the attention of community arts stakeholders elsewhere in the UK, and in 2015 Kaleidoscope was awarded funding for a six-month pilot programme in North West England, with an eye to rolling Acting Up out on a UK-wide scale (Shields, McMahon, and McLean 2016). The Belfast Acting Up group began meeting in March 2014. This first year, participant Meriel Grant explained to me, had begun with a series of games and exercises meant to help them ‘loosen up’, working on building memory, mobility, and projection of their voices.1 ‘And then about three weeks later’, she continued, ‘he [Kerry] actually gave us improvisation. And we were all born improvisers! [laughs] And we had the most wonderful fun. And in-depth things. Some people had a great feeling for tragedy, as well as comedy’ (emphasis hers). Their first production, called The Coach Party, was then based off the characters they had created during these improvisations, as fellow participant John Hayes explained: He was studying us all the time, we didn’t realize for a while, but he was studying us. And in his mind he was building up a play. Sorting people to fit into the different ideas that he had. So in the end he wrote a play which involved everyone, and they were cast before it ever happened. From watching the improvisations. … That was basically how it started, through the improvisations.

By the time I joined them in May 2015, rehearsals were underway for a second production, a one-act comedy titled The W.I. Inspector Calls, in which a local Women’s Institute chapter prepares for the arrival of the regional inspector (Rooney 2013). After about six months of weekly rehearsals, the group gave two performances in October 2015, the first at Finaghy Methodist Church and the second in Belvoir Players Studio, both located in South Belfast. The period following those performances signalled

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a break in Acting Up’s programming, as the groups typically took the winter months off, and as Kaleidoscope’s initial three-year grant was coming to an end. The organization was in the process of applying for further funding, but the programme’s future was uncertain. The actors, however, were eager to continue meeting and acting, and so they began to organize their own rehearsals under the organizational umbrella of the University of the Third Age (U3A). The U3A is a global movement loosely comprised of locally organized groups, meetups, and events for older adults. Local, regional, and national chapters are given significant leeway in both institutional shape and the types of programming on offer (see Villar and Celdrán 2012).2 The Belfast chapter’s website describes the U3A as ‘a learning cooperative of older people which enables members to share many educational, creative and leisure activities’. It currently lists more than fifty groups, whose activities and interests include sport, games, art, history, languages, and socializing (Belfast U3A 2018). Many of the Acting Up participants were involved in other U3A groups, with the U3A serving as one of the key recruitment locations for initial Acting Up membership; thus, the new partnership was something of a natural choice for them. While their original plan had been to read plays together or perform short sketches, the group participants ultimately decided to produce a full-length stage play, settling on British playwright Sue Townsend’s (1996) Womberang (pronounced to rhyme with ‘boomerang’), a one-act comedy set in a gynaecologist’s office waiting room. Group member Meriel Grant, an experienced actor and drama teacher, took over as director. I started attending in February 2016, after hearing that they were meeting again. At this point Womberang had been cast and rehearsals were underway. The group gave two performances of the play in summer 2016, one at Belvoir Players Studio and the other at St Bride’s Church Hall in South Belfast. The proceeds from the church hall performances of both plays, as well as those from the Belvoir showing of Womberang, were all donated to local charities. The Finaghy Methodist performance of The W.I. Inspector Calls raised funds for Action Cancer, the Belvoir performance of Womberang for diabetes research, and the St Bride’s Womberang performance for telephone helpline charity Samaritans. In all three instances, the idea and the impetus to donate the funds came from the actors themselves.3 Despite the changes in overseeing organizations, the two iterations of the group retained a great deal of continuity. More than half the participants in the U3A drama group had also been members of Acting Up, and they continued to rehearse weekly at the same place – Belvoir Players Studio – and at the same time – Thursday afternoons. While directorship had been passed on to Meriel, at the group’s request Kerry visited rehearsals on occasion and gave the actors feedback and ideas. He also assisted them in choosing dates and locations for the final performances, and he printed the publicity posters and fliers for the production. Nevertheless, even with these continuities, there was a certain shift between the two iterations. While both groups

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certainly fell under the umbrella of ‘community arts’ that I have outlined in Chapter 2, this movement from a more traditional community theatre group facilitated by a community artist to a participant-initiated and -led amateur ‘performing group’ – as Meriel described it to me – is not to be discounted. Their movement in this direction reflects an increased ownership of the theatre-making process, as well as an increased understanding of themselves as persons who act, as persons who are passionate about acting, who do drama and do so of their own accord. Altogether, twenty participants, not counting myself, passed through the Acting Up/U3A drama group during its first three years of existence, eleven of whom were involved over multiple years. Of these eleven, five were involved in all three projects. Eight participants total attended rehearsals for and acted in The Coach Party in 2014, fourteen were involved in The W.I. Inspector Calls, and fourteen in the production of Womberang. In the case of Womberang, however, only ten were cast in dramatic roles. Of the other four, one served as the play’s director, and the other three attended rehearsals and informally filled various assisting roles, such as prompting and understudying. The Belfast participants ranged in age from their early sixties to their early eighties, with an average age of about 75. Eighteen of the twenty total participants were women, which is not unusual: community and amateur drama, at least in Northern Ireland, tend to be overwhelmingly female in their demographics. The U3A’s membership also tends to be comprised predominantly of women (Ware 2013; Patterson et al. 2015: 1586–87). The Arts Council of Northern Ireland claims that older men ‘are typically three-times [sic] less likely than older women to participate in the arts’, noting that 70 per cent of participants involved in projects funded by the Arts and Older People Programme, which operated from 2010 to 2016, were female (ACNI 2018: 7–8). The group members came from mixed Catholic and Protestant backgrounds, with a slight majority belonging to or having roots in the Protestant community. Most lived in South Belfast, though some travelled from elsewhere in the city, and in several cases from smaller towns outside Belfast, to attend. Most had been born and raised in Northern Ireland, but two members were originally from counties in the Republic of Ireland. I did not perceive any ethnopolitical tensions within the group, nor did Kerry, according to his response when I raised the question in our interview. I believe the actors themselves would agree with this assessment. Political tensions or topics were not often discussed, at least not in my hearing. My primary mode of gleaning participants’ ethnopolitical backgrounds was, in fact, their discussions of their church involvement. Many of the actors were active members of local churches, and this was often a topic of discussion, as churchgoing and volunteering with religious organizations are important aspects of their social lives. Nevertheless, as Kerry pointed out in our interview, it was vital to secure rehearsal space in a perceived neutral location, such as the Belvoir Players Studio, particularly when first inviting

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people to join the drama group. However, after some time had passed and the group members had become more comfortable with one another, they were easily able to work within religious spaces without any issues. They spent a month rehearsing in a Church of Ireland hall in August 2015, when Belvoir was unavailable due to its children’s theatre summer scheme; and they gave performances in two different church halls, one Protestant and one Catholic. In all three cases, the locations were arranged by drama group members who either attended the church themselves or had connections to the church through friends. I suspect that this absence of political tensions is due in part to the programme’s location in, and the predominance of representatives from, South Belfast, an area that tends to skew more middle-class and where one is more likely to find Catholics and Protestants living and sharing space in mixed-community neighbourhoods. Importantly, South Belfast was also the area of the city in which arts events continued largely uninterrupted during the Troubles. While numerous other Belfast theatres closed in the early 1970s due to safety concerns, and while City Centre venues such as the Grand Opera House suffered damage from bombings, South Belfast’s Lyric Theatre ‘experienced minimal disruption during the Troubles’ (Foley 2009: 3). In interviews, many of the actors spoke of continuing to attend theatre and arts performances in South Belfast throughout the Troubles, and several mentioned the Lyric’s continued operation throughout the conflict as an important point of local pride. This is the context, then, in which these actors’ narratives are situated, and from which sprung the experiences they related and the transformations they witnessed in both themselves and others.

Becoming Actors The scene recounted at the opening of this chapter alludes to two different types of change: first, the temporary changes in demeanour, personality, speech, and action that the actors affect when getting into character; and second, the longer-term, more permanent changes within the actors themselves, such as increased dramatic skill. Richard Schechner’s work on performance provides a useful set of terms with which to discuss these various types of change. Drawing on the writings of ethnographers like Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, Schechner describes the relationship between temporary and permanent changes, calling these ‘transportation’ and ‘transformation’, respectively. He writes, I call performances where performers are changed ‘transformations’ and those where performers are returned to their starting places ‘transportations’ – ‘transportation,’ because during the performance the performers are ‘taken somewhere’ but at the end, often assisted by others, they are ‘cooled down’ and reenter ordinary life just about where they went in. The performer goes from the ‘ordinary world’ to the ‘performative world,’ from one time/space reference to another,

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from one personality to one or more others … But when the performance is over, or even as a final phase of the performance, he returns to where he started. (Schechner 1985: 126)

Schechner takes initiation rites among the Gahuku people of Papua New Guinea as an archetypal example of transformative performance: initiates enter the ritual as ‘boys’, in the example he gives, and leave as ‘men’ (ibid.: 127–29).4 Conversely, he names ‘aesthetic theater’ – his term for theatre performed on the stage – and trance dancing as quintessential examples of transportative performance: ‘[W]hen the performance is over … [the performer] returns to where he started’, as quoted above. Schechner is quick to add, however, ‘People are accustomed to calling transportation performances “theater” and transformation performances “ritual.” But this neat separation doesn’t hold up. Mostly the two kinds of performances coexist in the same event’ (ibid.: 130). He points to initiation rites once again as exemplary of this: the initiates are transformed from ‘boys’ to ‘men’, while the adult men assisting in the initiation are transported, returning at the end to the same status they held at the ritual’s beginning (ibid.: 130–32). Transportation and transformation similarly coexist in community arts. As actors, the older participants in Acting Up and the U3A drama group transported themselves into roles on the ‘aesthetic’ theatre stage. Moreover, community arts programmes, which are generally aimed at beginners or non-specialists, allow participants to try on new roles as actors, performers, and artmakers in a transportative way. Their participation is temporary, at least initially. After ‘giving it a go’, participants could choose to discard the label of ‘actor’ if it did not suit them, and several did. However, most of the Acting Up participants did, in fact, find the role of ‘actor’ to be one they enjoyed taking on, and many have now added it to their long-term activities, and thus to their more permanent definitions and understandings of themselves – instances of transformative change. As Schechner points out, these distinctions are blurry; the ‘temporary’ and the ‘permanent’, the transportative and the transformative, mutually inform and interact with one another in interesting ways. In order to trace these overlaps, this chapter adopts a narrative approach, examining the stories that the older actors told about themselves and others, real and imagined, primarily within the context of ethnographic interviews. A focus on the narratives that older participants tell about their community arts involvement provides insights into the ways in which they experienced and conceptualized change, both transportative and transformative, in and through their involvement with the drama group. Let us begin by taking a look at transportative performances among the drama group’s participants, and specifically the narratives they told about their characters and the processes by which they transported themselves into their roles.5 While conducting the interviews, I asked each of the actors about the characters they were playing – how they felt about their

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characters, how they got into character, whether they had any difficulties with their characters. Our conversations focused primarily on their roles in Womberang, as at the time these interviews occurred the group had been working solely on that play for four or five months. In their answers, many of the actors demonstrated an intersubjective approach to transportation, in which elements of the character were drawn from either their own experience or that of others, and often a mixture of both. For example, Valerie Goggin said of her character, protagonist Rita Onions, ‘The character is very much me. I’m quite, as a person, impatient. And if I had to queue in a shop and I had a lot of things to do, I would nearly walk to the top of the queue and say, “Clear off, I’m first”. It’s sometimes very hard not to do it’. Valerie’s description references the play’s opening, in which Rita enters the waiting room of the gynaecologist’s office. When not immediately served by the receptionist, Rita retrieves a large handbell from her purse and rings it loudly to get the woman’s attention, then proceeds to berate her for keeping Rita waiting. Valerie added, ‘So the character’s a lot like me. I mean not exactly. She’s larger than life. But I would be similar to that’ (emphasis hers). Valerie connected with her character by seeing portions of her own personality within Rita’s, and she transported herself into the role by drawing on these. At the same time, because the character of Rita is exaggerated, ‘larger than life’, Valerie could perform actions towards which she might feel an impulse, but which she would never carry out in her daily life, such as ringing a bell impatiently when a queue is moving slowly. This interplay of persons and personalities is at work in a number of different spaces – in the actors’ rehearsals, in their discussions with each other, in their private efforts to learn the lines and connect with their characters, and so forth – and it moves back and forth between actor and character, as Janet Kiefert explained to me. Janet played the colourful character of Mrs Lovett, whom she described to me as follows: ‘She’s quite a busybody. She’s quite nosy, she wants to know everybody in the waiting room, she wants to know their business, wants to know everything about them’. She continued, I don’t think I may well have enjoyed the other characters, maybe I wouldn’t’ve been able to give it as much as what I can Mrs Lovett. So maybe that is a wee bit like me. And I feel as if I’m [laughs], I feel as if I’m becoming a wee bit more like Mrs Lovett actually. You know. I feel I’m a wee bit like, I’m starting to talk like her, a wee bit more, and taking on the character, I don’t know whether that’s something that happens to most people or whether you have to leave that at home, leave that behind, but I just feel that, you know, there might be a danger there. [laughs] That I might be Mrs Lovett in the end. (Emphasis hers)

None of these processes are instant or static. Nor are they exclusively internal, implicating only the individual actors in their respective roles. The transportations that occur during their final performances in front of spectators are effected through long-term processes of rehearsals, in which the actors work together to craft these transportations.

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Others become involved in these processes in a variety of ways. There is, of course, the give and take of the rehearsal process, in which actors negotiate with their peers how the parts ought to be played and how all of the play’s individual components fit together into a whole performance. Still others not involved in the drama group are implicated in these transportative processes as well. Several of the actors, particularly those who did not feel as closely connected to their characters as Valerie or Janet, explained that they felt that getting into character was made easier by their life experiences. In fact, most of the participants viewed their age as an enormous advantage in acting, precisely because they have more life experience on which to draw. Marion Allen, who played Rita’s best friend Dolly, joked that she was starting to be ‘typecast’, because in Womberang, ‘I’m associated with a bottle, and I don’t mean a soft drink’. (Late in the play, Dolly reveals a bottle of gin she has brought in her bag, and the women in the waiting room proceed to get quite drunk together.) Meanwhile, in The Coach Party, Marion said, laughing, ‘I think I was very badly miscast there, [as] a nymphomaniac alcoholic!’ When I asked Marion how she handled playing characters so very different from herself, she answered, Well I’ve seen a lot of, not necessarily nymphomaniacs, but I’ve seen a lot of alcoholics in my considerable age. … I think when you come to my advanced age, you’ve had a lot of fun in your life. You’ve also had a lot of sadness. And I can’t say it comes naturally to me, I think, but I don’t really have any great difficulty in going into a part.

Angela, who played assistant hospital administrator Mrs Cornwallis, made a similar comment. I asked Angela, who is quite laid back in her demeanour, how she approached playing a character who is so ‘uptight’, as I put it to her. She laughed and answered, ‘I know a few Mrs Cornwallises. I think we all do, yes. You’ve worked with people like that. And yes, she is quite a common character I would say’. Hazel McGovern, meanwhile, played Evelyn Connelly, an older woman with terminal cancer. In an emotional moment in the play, Evelyn reveals her diagnosis to the other women in the waiting room, explaining that she ceased all treatments for her cancer when her hair started falling out because, ‘I’m not dying bald. I’ve always had nice hair’ (Townsend 1996: 22). This part was very different from Hazel’s inaugural role in The W.I. Inspector Calls, in which she had acted the production’s ‘tart with a heart’ (as Kerry described it), who spends the play’s duration dramatically wailing that her married lover will never leave his wife for her. In our interview, Hazel and I spoke about the differences between the roles and the challenges of her part in the current production. She said, In the last play, I was a flirt. And I was the same person at all times. But in this one, I have the comedy aspect and the sad, because the person is dying. But she’s also a fun person. So while she’s dying she’s going to have a few drinks and get

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up and dance. And sometimes I think, I wonder, if there’s anyone in the audience who’s ill. … I speak in my part about losing my hair. I spoke to one of the cast members last week, and that actually happened to them. I won’t say who. But they lost their hair through stress. So, I think we all touch on everything that’s in the play. You know. It’d be hard for us to all get to our age without having experienced some of the tragedies of life, but also the fun of life. (Emphasis hers)

I asked Hazel how she worked on getting into character, since Mrs Connelly is in a very different life situation than her, and is in fact a decade or two older than Hazel herself. Hazel replied, I’ve seen many women like that. Maybe they’re not dying. But I know the type. Especially Belfast women. People from Belfast are very friendly, so it’s natural, in a waiting room, women would start to talk. And then if you have someone like Rita, who’s the protagonist, she’ll draw everybody. Their own particular problems or situation. You know. I think with people like that all around us it’s quite easy to put yourself in that character and see what happens. (Emphasis hers)

In managing her transportation into the role of Mrs Connelly, Hazel drew on a number of sources: her fellow participant’s experiences with losing their hair, her own experiences of life in Belfast and of time spent in waiting rooms, and even imagined audience members, since, as she revealed, she was mindful that there might be spectators present who were ill or had experienced cancer themselves. Hazel’s transportation narrative about Mrs Connelly is thus intersubjective, drawing on the voices and narratives of others, some known, some imagined. But hers is also a narrative of transformation. In the lines above, Hazel not only tells a story about Mrs Connelly; she is also telling a story about herself, about her increased confidence and skill as an actress. In The W.I. Inspector Calls, she played a character who, while interesting and humorous, only required a limited range: ‘I was the same person at all times’. Her role in Womberang, however, required more transportative skill, as she was called upon to portray a more complex character, a role that embodied, as Hazel put it, ‘both the comedy aspect and the sad’, ‘the tragedies of life but also the fun of life’. As with transportation, her transformation is also intersubjectively informed: the imagined characters she brings to life aid her processes of transformation. By learning to transport themselves in increasingly difficult and complex ways, Hazel and her fellow drama group members built and improved their acting skills, and in so doing underwent a process of transformation, from the status of ‘not actor’ to that of ‘actor’. While conducting interviews, and specifically while asking participants about their routes to involvement with Acting Up and the U3A drama group, I found that most of the actors envisioned their involvement as part of, or a product of, a long-term life trajectory: a life project that, importantly, does not cease upon reaching the age of retirement, and one which envisions and constructs for itself a future as well as a past.

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For several, participation in the group was a natural continuation of a lifelong interest in drama. This was the case for Joan and John Hayes, who are long-time amateur drama enthusiasts and participants, and for Meriel Grant, who spent decades involved in youth theatre in Northern Ireland, and who has taught theatre to young people in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria as well. For Angela and for Doreen Johnston, meanwhile, it was a chance to revisit an interest from which each had stepped away earlier in her life. Doreen explained that she had been involved in musical theatre in the early 1990s but had left that behind for a number of years. She told me, ‘Musicals, I’ve been in mostly. And you know, I really am sorry I didn’t take up drama a bit earlier. Now that I know what’s involved, and the crowd of people you’re with and everything, it’s really magic. … I’m sorry I didn’t do this a bit earlier, but anyway. Better late than never’. Angela, meanwhile, had spent some time acting as a young woman, but had given it up. She said, ‘I was [involved in drama] many many years ago, when I was a lot younger I was in the Belvoir Players. But, oh, just circumstances. I gave it up and always would quite liked to have continued. So this was an opportunity, much later on of course’. Several participants who were involved in earlier plays, but not in Womberang, told me stories similar to Angela’s: involvement in acting as teenagers or young adults, eventually leaving it behind for the demands of work and family, and finally returning to the theatre in retirement and older age. For the remainder of the Belfast troupe, this was their first brush with acting; this was true for the majority of the participants in the Acting Up groups elsewhere in Northern Ireland as well. However, many of these fledgling actors also described their participation in this group as a next step in a lifelong trajectory. Most mentioned having enjoyed theatre or cinema throughout their lives, and a number stated that the ability or desire to act must have been there all along, with the older people’s acting troupe serving as the catalyst that finally brought that ability to fruition. There is a sense of inevitability here that, on its surface, might seem to contradict the idea of transformation, which hinges on the notion of rupture – of a distinct differentiation between past and present, then and now. Yet this same inevitability, or an even more inevitable version thereof, is characteristic of initiation rituals. In the example deployed by Schechner, rites of passage that mark the transition from boyhood to manhood are expected; they are inevitable. A transformation need not be surprising to be transformative. Or where it is surprising, as for some of these actors it was, when they discovered a skill or passion buried deep within themselves, it need not represent a categorical break with a past self. It can, instead, be incorporated into a narrative trajectory, a life story, as the logical next step, as many of these actors have done. Valerie Goggin’s narrative exemplifies both of these aspects of transformation – rupture and continuity. In our interview, she made a case for continuity even as she began the new pursuit of acting, telling me, ‘I’ve

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probably always known that I could act, a bit. I’ve always known I was capable of it. But just didn’t go anywhere with it’ (emphasis hers). She went on to tell me that getting involved in drama through Acting Up and the U3A drama group has served as a springboard to other acting opportunities. At the time of our interview in early 2016, she had recently become involved with an all-ages amateur drama group in South Belfast called the South Bank Playhouse. Her involvement with them began in 2015, when she auditioned for a role in their production of The Heidi Chronicles. She described that decision to me as a natural next step in her acting journey: ‘In for a penny in for a pound. Valerie sallies round one night and does an audition for one of their plays. And I got the part’. Her narrative constructs a progression in acting skill, moving from smaller parts to larger ones, and from simpler transportations to more difficult ones. Of her role as Fran in The Heidi Chronicles, she told me, It was all set during women’s liberation and how women who fought for the liberation actually ended up with very little out of it, it was the girls that came behind that got the most. And in it I’m, part of it’s in [the] 1970s, and I played [laughs] I had to wear, you know, like an army shirt and combat trousers and boots. And I was Fran. Every other word was ‘eff’. I was gay, you see. So anyway it was a small part. I learnt a fair bit from that. I did audition for the spring play, but the parts were too big, and I didn’t obviously get any, but it would’ve been too big. Although after I do this play [Womberang], I would tackle bigger parts, cause the part I’m playing is bigger in this. I know they’re – I’m auditioning in the autumn for, they’re [the South Bank Playhouse] doing Macbeth. So I might give that a go, and I’ve a done a couple of their Saturday classes on Macbeth. How to act it and blank verse and all that sort of thing. (Emphasis hers)

Like Hazel’s, Valerie’s narrative charts and constructs a distinct transformative progression in her acting career, moving not only from ‘not actor’ to ‘actor’, but also from ‘less skilled’ to ‘more skilled’, as she slowly builds the confidence and ability to take on larger and more challenging parts. Janet Kiefert’s narrative, meanwhile, also has a continuity to it, but the emphasis is on experiences of rupture, of sharp distinction between past and present. In our interview, she contrasted her current self, her actor self, with memories of her past self, particularly memories of her time in school. Janet is a strong actor, as are all the drama group participants, and in her acting she comes across as very confident in her skill. However, she described herself to me as having previously been much less confident, saying, ‘I’m quite proud and pleased with myself too, what I have achieved. From someone who at school was very very timid. Very very shy. No confidence, used to stand in the corner, wouldn’t bother with anybody, very reluctant to speak’. Janet saw a distinct transition from that shy child to someone who today, as a result of her involvement with the drama group, has gained significant confidence, ‘grown to have a passion for’ acting, and hopes to continue acting ‘for a long time to come’.

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It is worth noting that neither Valerie’s nor Janet’s narrative limits itself to the spheres of past and present; both also include an imagined future trajectory. With so many community arts initiatives for older adults concentrated on memory work and recollections of the past, the narratives these actors tell, which include their future plans, serve as an important corrective. As Cathrine Degnen reminds us, to speak at all of transformation and changing conceptions of self in later life is unusual (2012: 6–9). These older actors’ narratives are instructive, and indeed almost transgressive, in their refusal to conform to social expectations of what older age looks like. They remind us that one’s movement through life and the ongoing construction and reconstruction of one’s life story do not cease, particularly not at the arbitrary transition points (such as retirement) denoted by public policy or social consensus. Now, I cannot claim to have any special insight into what this transformation feels like in progress, but I can tell you that I well remember the one time that I, for a brief moment, truly felt like an ‘actor’ during my fieldwork with this group. Prior to this, my most recent acting experience had been at the age of 8, when I played Helena in my third grade class’s adapted version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.6 I did not take on a role in either of the Acting Up plays I witnessed: The W.I. Inspector Calls had already been cast by the time I began attending rehearsals, and while I was offered the role of pregnant character Lynda in Womberang, not being able to commit an appropriate amount of time to the production I declined. I was content with this, having no strong desire to act on stage. Nevertheless, I found myself doing a fair bit of acting during rehearsals, filling in for this or that participant who was ill or away on holiday that week. In this way, I played nearly every part in The W.I. Inspector Calls at least once, and several roles in Womberang as well. When I did step into these roles, albeit briefly and with the knowledge that taking on the role was temporary – an even briefer transportation than those experienced by the actors themselves – I found myself extremely conscious of my limited acting abilities, particularly alongside my research participants, who were making great strides as actors. My fieldnotes from these experiences are replete with descriptors such as ‘stiff’ or ‘wooden’ in regard to my own performance, contrasted against the more ‘fluid’, ‘natural’, or ‘convincing’ portrayals effected by those acting alongside me. This, then, is why I remember so vividly the one moment when I truly did feel like an actor. This occurred in late May 2016, after I had been with the group for a year. On this occasion, a rehearsal for Womberang, Valerie was absent, and I was asked to step in and fill her role so that the others could rehearse a scene. The scene in question occurs near the end of the play, and it sees Rita chasing Mrs Cornwallis around the waiting room. I was enjoying playing the role, as in this chaotic scene the actor playing Rita performs a series of faux martial arts movements and shouts bizarre things like, ‘I am not a common sense person thank Christ! I’d sooner be a raving lunatic than

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have common sense’ (Townsend 1996: 28–29). In one of the most enjoyable lines to deliver, Rita, exaggerating the play’s prior occurrences while also threatening the prim hospital administrator with unwanted media attention, shouts, ‘I can see the headlines in the Belfast Telegraph now, four inches high – “Old Age Pensioner Degraded, Shock Birth in Waiting Room”. By the time the Sun gets hold of it it’ll be “Old Age Pensioner Gives Birth in a Bottle”’ (ibid.).7 As I delivered the final line, on a whim I decided to pause after the second instance of the word ‘birth’, and again after the next word – ‘in’ – dropping the pitch of my voice ever so slightly to settle into the final words – ‘a bottle’ – with a sort of triumphant finality. There was no particular motivation or logic for this interpretation, other than that it felt right to me in the moment. When I had uttered the last line, the other actors burst into spontaneous applause. This was a habit of theirs, though notably only after they had transitioned into an independent, self-directed acting troupe: whenever one of their number delivered a set of lines in what they considered a particularly skilful or moving manner, the other actors would acknowledge this with applause. This was the first and only time it happened to me. But in that moment, for a brief, fleeting instant, I became an actor, in the same sense that I thought of my research participants as actors. My brief transportative experience provides some insight into the ways in which the actors themselves experience these changes. It highlights, in particular, the intersubjective nature of transformation: I became an actor, however briefly, through their acknowledgement rather than through any decision of my own. Moreover, this habit of applauding skilful performances during rehearsals, and the ways in which it helped shape the actors’ experiences of transformation, demonstrates that the organizational break with Kaleidoscope and the subsequent transformation of the group’s institutional structure were actually vital components in achieving this transformation from ‘not actors’ to ‘actors’ that I have so far described. This point of rupture was necessitated by a break in organizational funding and was initially unwanted by the participants themselves, who all stated that they enjoyed and learned much from Kerry’s facilitation. However, it proved formative in allowing the group members to continue their individual acting trajectories. They took increased ownership of the group, electing a director from among themselves and choosing scripts and auditioning parts on their own. With no paid ‘expert’ leading them, and with the drama’s author no longer present, rehearsals became more democratic affairs, with the actors working together to negotiate how a part ought to be played or how the characters ought to physically interact with one another. This unwanted rupture, this institutional and financial crack in the art world, in fact became a space of opportunity, one that allowed the older participants to advance their transformations further than they might otherwise have been able. Thus, here we can begin to return to the language of the cracked art world that has been laid out in previous chapters, and to examine what it can tell us about this remarkable group of older actors.

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Acting Up in the Cracked Art World Acting Up and the U3A both emerged within the context of a massive global demographic shift: declining birth rates, coupled with increased lifespans as a result of advances in medical care, have resulted in populations whose average age is on the rise, and in the most extreme cases countries where citizens over the age of 60 outnumber those under 18. Ageing populations have raised significant anxieties over the long-term effects that this demographic transformation will have on national and international healthcare and welfare resources. In Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom, these anxieties are further exacerbated by increasing pressures on the National Health Service and concerns about its sustainability, as well as the ongoing programme of austerity, which has seen repeated cuts to welfare funding under the banner of ‘welfare reform’. In response to these concerns, both public and private non-profit sources have begun to earmark funds specifically for older people’s activities, including arts activities, on the basis that maintaining interpersonal networks and keeping active in older age benefit older people’s physical and mental health, and that as such, funding these activities represents a financial investment that will ultimately reduce strain on the healthcare system. This was one of the stated rationales behind the development of an Arts Council of Northern Ireland funding stream specifically targeted at projects for older people. The ACNI introduced its Arts and Older People Programme in 2009; its purpose was to disperse small grants to organizations looking to carry out shortterm projects with older residents of Northern Ireland (Wallace Consulting 2017). A 2017 programme evaluation report supports this health-based reasoning, stating that encouraging ‘active, positive and productive ageing’, including older peoples’ involvement in community arts, can play a role in ‘preventing physical, mental and emotional ill health’, which in turn ‘could help mitigate against pressures on the health and social care system further down the line’ (ibid.: 23). This policy focus on health and the use of community arts to relieve stress on the welfare system is not, however, the main goal of others involved in this art world. While those involved in the labour of making community arts – artists, facilitators, arts managers, and so forth – use this health-based language to argue for the value of their work and the funding necessary to make it, in my experience they are more inclined to talk about increasing quality of life for older people, and of changing public perceptions of and narratives about ageing and older adults in society. This was one of Kaleidoscope’s main interests in creating the Acting Up programme, as Kerry and I discussed in an interview: Kayla: And I think also from an audience perspective, you don’t see older people on the stage as much. Especially in community settings. You see a lot of kids, a lot of younger people.

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Kerry: Exactly. That’s a big part of it for us. It’s about raising that visibility of older people. Just the sheer visibility of them. You’re right because, often if you’re going to a community theatre, or a piece of community theatre, it’s the young people of that community. But what about the older people? You know? They’re not seen. They become invisible. And our Acting Up programme is an opportunity for them to have visibility. To be seen. … Usually it’s grannies or granddads that are coming to see the grandkids in the nativity. Whereas, by bringing grandchildren and letting them see their grandparents in that setting as active and, you know, people who are vital people, we might over time be able to effect a societal change, where we stop thinking about old age as a period of decline and start thinking of it more as a period of rejuvenation and renewal and opportunity. But that starts with changing perceptions across the board. But that’s what we’re trying to do. That’s the exercise we’re engaged in.

The participants themselves, meanwhile, do not generally take up either of these arguments when discussing their involvement in the drama group. Rather, they speak of personal fulfilment and the changes they see in themselves: increased confidence, emotional transformations, seeing themselves in a different way. They speak of newfound interests or ‘passions’, of ‘learning something new’, of ‘keeping busy’ in retirement. Most of all, they speak of enjoyment, friendship, and sociality, aspects that were mentioned by every single interviewee, and which came up frequently in casual conversations as well. In other words, the art world is cracked, with each member holding their own unique perspective and set of values. Each understands and participates in this art world differently, by different means and for different ends. The participants’ goals do not match those of the artist-facilitators, whose aims in turn are different from those of the funders, whose perspectives are different still from the plays’ audiences, the participants’ families, myself as researcher, and so on, ad infinitum. On each side of a crack there is a slightly different focus, a different perspective through which the programme is viewed. Now this crack was, during the time of my research, more a hairline fracture than anything else: at that moment there was no irreconcilable disjuncture (nor does one appear, to my knowledge, to have emerged since). For the most part, this corner of the art world seemed to function relatively well. Some of this is due to the recognition, on all sides of this seam, that crackedness is the basic state of the world – that different perspectives can and must coexist, and can in fact enrich the outcomes of a project. Elsewhere in our interview, for example, Kerry noted the importance of those personal benefits that the older people had named as important to them, saying, ‘We’re trying to help older people to have the same social and creative opportunities that younger people, or people in general, have’. Likewise, the actors were aware of the health- and social welfare-based narratives that are often used to fund arts activities for older people. Valerie raised and agreed with this point during our interview, stating that funding arts groups for older adults ‘would save the NHS millions’. Others in the group mentioned that participating in the drama group had had a positive

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effect on their mental health, or that they had seen improvements in the mental, social, and emotional health of others. John Hayes, for example, related the changes he had witnessed in a participant who had joined during rehearsals for The Coach Party. He said, ‘One little lady that we had [in the group] had lost her husband recently. And she found a whole new outlet for life, very suddenly changed her life from being in deep despair having lost her husband, to something that triggered off a whole new relationship for her with people’. There are two key lessons to be taken from this particular corner of the art world and the relative tameness of its cracks. First, this case highlights the somewhat capricious nature of the cracked art world. The acting group and the art world that facilitates its existence function pretty well for now. At the moment it is not bogged down by the deep fissures that plague other portions of the cracked art world. There are specific reasons for this, which have to do with both policy and privilege. Arts programming for older people is currently en vogue throughout the UK, due to the anxieties described above. As it is a funding priority (and a trend), arts projects for older people are more likely to be funded, and thus arts organizations are less likely to be conflicted and embattled over the limited funding opportunities available to them. Additionally, this art world remains functional due to the high levels of maintenance and repair put into it, especially by the participants themselves. Repair is an active task: it requires intentionality and labour to address and mitigate the cracks and breakdowns in the art world. The most significant act of repair discussed in this chapter is the drama group participants’ decision to continue meeting through the winter of 2015–16, after having performed The W.I. Inspector Calls. Acting Up was on hiatus while Kaleidoscope was in the process of applying for continued funding for the drama groups, and as the programme was not funded to run year-round. This sort of piecemeal, shorter-term funding often frustrates community arts workers, as it frequently brings successful projects to an abrupt end, including in many cases where a continued lifespan would have been preferable for all involved. In this instance, however, the project’s participants stepped in to repair the crack. They arranged continued institutional sponsorship through the U3A and raised the funds themselves to cover the costs of using the Belvoir Players Studio rehearsal space, with each participant contributing two or three pounds per week to this end. These acts of repair are the result of care, but also of privilege. The participants were fortunately in a position where they could perform this maintenance work: each was able to afford the small monetary contribution necessary to rent the space, and all were able to arrange regular transportation to Belvoir Players Studio. Art world repairs are not always as possible, or as relatively straightforward, as they were in this instance. The second key lesson to be taken from this cracked art world is the generative nature of the cracks themselves. Cracks in the art world are sites

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of deep difficulty and struggle, yes, but they are also zones of possibility. From these points of disjuncture, these disconnections where expectations and interests do not entirely align, arise opportunities. Crackedness has a subjunctive quality to it, as Steven Jackson reminds us: ‘Breakdown disturbs and sets in motion worlds of possibility that disappear under the stable or accomplished form of the artifact’ (2014: 230). Older people are well aware, likely better than most, of the narratives that society tells about them, and the corollary fact that a portion of the funding for activities in which they are involved stems from anxieties about ageing populations. In response, they seize the opportunity presented by these anxieties, strategically using public and policy concerns to accomplish the ends that matter to them. They use the results of these social narratives, and the resources they provide, to improvise a new narrative about themselves. They flip the script on its head; they write a new story of their own making, of their own becoming.

Notes 1. I was able to interview all of the participants who acted in Womberang, and each was given the option to choose whether to use their own name or remain anonymous. Where an interviewee’s first name and surname are both given, this is the participant’s own name, which I am using with that person’s fully informed consent. Where only a first name is given, the participant requested to be made anonymous, and thus the name is a pseudonym. Participants were given the options of using their own first name without a surname or using a pseudonym of their choosing, but none selected these routes. Descriptions of rehearsals, such as the extended scene that opens this chapter, have been anonymized. 2. Catherine Ware’s demographic survey of U3A chapters in London and the surrounding region gives an indication of the breadth of interests covered by local U3A groups, and of how these can differ notably between chapters (2013: Appendix 2.2). 3. The Belfast group appears to have been the only branch of Acting Up that was involved in charity work through donating funds. However, at least one other group was involved in charity work in a different way: a local news article from May 2015 states that the Bangor Acting Up group staged a performance for the members of the local Chest Heart and Stroke chapter (Flowers 2015). 4. Schechner draws this example from Kenneth Read’s (1965) ethnography The High Valley. See also Schechner (1988: 166–75). 5. While transportation out of character is equally important in Schechner’s understanding, this was not discussed by my research participants and did not seem to be as important to them. 6. In case you are wondering what a Shakespeare adaptation for primary school children looks like: the dialogue had been simplified and updated, no longer being cast in verse, and wherever the word ‘ass’ appeared in our scripts, it had been scrupulously scribbled out by some adult hand and replaced with the word ‘donkey’. 7. Townsend’s text has the Standard as the newspaper name here (1996: 29). The actors chose to replace the play’s English place names and location indicators with familiar ones from Northern Ireland: Heathrow Airport became George Best, the Standard became the Belfast Telegraph, and ‘the Towers’, the Leicester mental health institution in which Rita is said to have spent time, was exchanged for ‘Purdysburn’, a mental health hospital in South Belfast that is no longer operational, but of which all the participants would have been aware.

3 Restoration and Resurrection

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Religion and Dialogue in Community History Theatre

History is everywhere. It seeps into the soil, the sub-soil. Like rain or hail, or snow, or blood. A house remembers. An outhouse remembers. A people ruminate. The tale differs with the teller. —Edna O’Brien, The House of Splendid Isolation

Carrying out fieldwork in the mid-2010s, it was impossible to ignore the ongoing Decade of Centenaries, the commemoration of the historical and political events occurring between 1912 and 1922 that have shaped Ireland’s history (Evershed 2018: 5–11). Both the fine-arts and community-arts art worlds were deeply involved in commemorating and retelling these hundredyear-past events, and nowhere more so than in the realm of theatre. On stages throughout Northern Ireland – in professional theatres, church halls, and community centres alike – pre-Troubles history was brought back to life for twenty-first-century, post-Troubles audiences. The Decade of Centenaries is bound up in post- and post-post-conflict claims about Northern Ireland in important ways, as many of the events commemorated are closely associated with, and mythologically important for, one or the other of the region’s ethnopolitical communities. Thus, community-arts-created and -sponsored historical theatre that deals with these events can provide insight into the ways in which this art world imagines and presents its own visions for Northern Ireland’s present and future through examinations of its past. In this chapter, I examine a pair of plays that deal with the legacies of the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme, both of which had their hundredth anniversaries in 2016, and each of which represents a crucial historical touchpoint for one of the region’s two main ethnopolitical identities. The Battle of the Somme (1 July–18 November 1916), one of the bloodiest battles of the First World War, is closely associated with Britishness, and thus generally with the Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist community. Meanwhile, the Easter Rising (24–29 April 1916), an uprising that

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sought to overthrow British rule in Ireland, is associated with Irishness and the Catholic/Nationalist/Republican community (see Jarman 1999; Grayson and McGarry 2016). As Jarman puts it, ‘Of all the commemorations in Northern Ireland, those of 1916 are arguably the most important … both communities draw much of their ideological sustenance’ from the respective commemorations, and ‘[b]oth events helped to consolidate contrasting notions of collective identity in a period of political upheaval, and served to emphasize the divergent paths that the two cultural traditions were pursuing’ (1999: 174). The two plays under examination in this chapter, entitled Halfway House and Stormont House Rules!, were written by community playwright-historian Philip Orr and sponsored by the evangelical Christian organization Contemporary Christianity. Halfway House was staged in six cities across Northern Ireland during the week of 18 January 2016, with one performance each night, Monday through Saturday (Contemporary Christianity n.d.; Table 3.1). After the initial six performances, Halfway House continued to be performed regularly across the region throughout 2016, most often in churches and community centres. The Belfast performance, which I attended, and which provides the ethnographic description of the play’s performance, was staged at Fitzroy Presbyterian Church, which is located next to Queen’s University in South Belfast, with a congregation that is primarily middle-class and educated. Stormont House Rules!, meanwhile, was first performed at the Duncairn Centre for Culture and Arts, a converted Presbyterian church in North Belfast, which is now a popular arts venue located in a predominantly working-class area, directly adjacent to an interface between predominantly Catholic and Protestant communities. The Duncairn performance of Stormont House Rules! was sponsored by the 4 Corners Festival, an ecumenical Christian festival promoting peace and reconciliation in Belfast. In this chapter I examine the work and aims of the non-actors who created and facilitated these two pieces of community theatre – the playwright, the Table 3.1  List of performances of Halfway House during its initial, week-long run. Information from Contemporary Christianity (n.d.), table created by Kayla Rush. Performances of Halfway House Week of 18 January 2016 Date

City/Town

Venue

Monday, 18 January Tuesday, 19 January Wednesday, 20 January Thursday, 21 January Friday, 22 January Saturday, 23 January

Larne Newry Lurgan Belfast Enniskillen Omagh

McNeill Theatre, Larne Leisure Centre Sean Hollywood Arts Centre Jethro Centre Fitzroy Presbyterian Church Enniskillen Library Omagh Library

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sponsoring organization, and the festival organizers – alongside the experiences and understandings of the plays’ spectators. The chapter is written from the perspective of a spectator, rather than that of a co-participant, but a spectator with ‘insider’ knowledge, as I sat on the organizing committee of the 4 Corners Festival from 2015 to 2017. I examine the community arts dialogues that were facilitated and constructed around these performances, suggesting that these are indicative of larger discourses about post-conflict peacebuilding in Northern Ireland. Furthermore, I argue that the plays themselves are indicative of a broader post-Troubles shift in how crosscommunity relationships are represented in art. I place these within the context of their religious framework, pointing to the religious language and ideologies that often underscore peacebuilding efforts and discourses in Northern Ireland and beyond. In so doing, I draw on Schechner’s notion of ‘restored behaviour’, examining how restagings of historical events shift with time and politics, such that historical restorations respond primarily to the interests and needs of the present, rather than those of the past.

Scene I: 21 January 2016 The sanctuary of Fitzroy Presbyterian Church buzzed with activity. Friends and neighbours chatted among the dark wooden pews, the columns of the pipe organ soaring high above their heads. The congenial atmosphere felt like the minutes before the start of a church service, save for the Beatles tunes playing softly in the background. At precisely 7.30 p.m., the music stopped, and those assembled fell silent as the lights dimmed and a spotlight focused on the platform in the middle of the sanctuary, turning it into a minimalist theatre stage. A white-haired man walked onto the stage. He introduced himself to us as Philip Orr, the author of Halfway House, the play we had all come to see. He explained that the play is set in 1966, in a snowed-in pub called the ‘Halfway House’, located in the Sperrin Mountains. As he described the particular historical setting of the mid-1960s – a time of significant social change and in Northern Ireland the years directly preceding the Troubles – the Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ began to play softly, and two women joined the playwright on stage, entering from opposite doors on either side of the platform. Over the course of the next hour, we watched as the two women, Bronagh and Valerie, weathered the snowstorm, of which we were occasionally reminded by an audio clip of a howling winter wind. Following alongside their conversation, we soon learned that one woman is Protestant, the other Catholic; one’s father fought in the Easter Rising, the other’s at the Battle of the Somme. The essence of the play rests in these parallels: both women grew up in Downpatrick, a town in County Down, but due to the divided nature of the community they had only heard of each other’s families, never met – ‘a question of “same place but separate lives”’, as one puts it (Orr 2016b: 5).1 Both are former teachers – one trained at predominantly

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Protestant Stranmillis College, the other at Catholic St Mary’s (see McVeigh and Rolston 2007: 18) – and both are now middle-aged with grown children. Both have retired from teaching. The two women are equally proud of their respective parents’ roles in the events of 1916, and both tell stories of national and familial hurts occasioned by the other ‘side’. The telling, and the listening, while sometimes a bit combative, is ultimately empathetic and self-aware. For example, midway through the conversation Bronagh, the Catholic woman, tells Valerie that the Ulster Special Constabulary (known as the ‘“B” Specials’) regularly visit her family’s home to search their barns and house (Orr 2016b: 15–16; cf. Mulcahy 2006: 7, 27–30). She reveals a great amount of hurt at this invasion of her family’s property and privacy. Shortly after, Valerie hesitantly discloses that her father and uncle both joined the ‘B’ Specials after the First World War, and we can see her struggling to reconcile her own pride in their service with Bronagh’s experiences (Orr 2016b: 20–21). The following exchange takes place at the end of this telling: Valerie: But what you also have to realise, Bronagh, was the fear, back then. Uncle Joe still says you could have cut it with a knife. Bronagh: The town was miles away from the riots in Belfast and it was miles from the border. Valerie: But we were afraid. Bronagh: Afraid of whom? Valerie: Afraid of you. (Ibid.: 22)

There is, however, a certain unevenness to these parallels, in that Valerie can celebrate her father’s military service openly, while Bronagh’s father’s involvement in the Easter Rising is kept secret, his treasured medal hidden from view (cf. Daly and O’Callaghan 2007: 8–9). In moments such as these, we can see the societal tensions simmering beneath the surface of life in Northern Ireland, both then and now. These big questions are, in turn, juxtaposed against the more mundane fabric of everyday life: Bronagh is driving to pick up her son; Valerie talks about caring for her elderly father. The play ends on an ambiguous note: Valerie: Can I ask one more question? Bronagh: Go ahead. Valerie: Do you think this country lost something when we two ladies retired from the classroom? [stage directions:] Much laughter but with a serious, even a somber edge Music on the jukebox – [Simon and Garfunkel’s] ‘The Sound of Silence’. (Ibid.: 31)

The lights went dark as the audience applauded. When the lights came back up in the sanctuary, another man took the stage. He explained that he was a representative of Contemporary Christianity, the evangelical Christian organization that had commissioned

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and published the play as part of a project reflecting on the dual centenary commemorations of the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme. He brought the night, and thus the performance, to a close by posing two questions to the assembled audience: ‘What did you learn?’, and ‘Is there any hope?’ The man’s questions point to the drama’s community arts goals. It is not community theatre in the same way that the theatre group in Chapter 2 is; Halfway House was acted by paid professionals, as was Stormont House Rules! These questions, however, signal that Halfway House is meant to engage community audiences in a community arts manner: by bringing the audience – the community – into the discussion, foregrounding their voices and encouraging reflection on contemporary social issues and the possibility of change. It is still a type of community arts, but the location of the ‘community’ in relation to the art has changed. Along with the location of the community, the location of potential transformation has also shifted, and transportation and transformation (see Chapter 2) have been somewhat uncoupled, though they are still very much linked. The actors were transported each night into the roles of Bronagh and Valerie, a transportation achieved through rehearsals and acting techniques (Schechner 1985: 117–27). When actors perform for an audience, the audience is transported along with them, entering into the world that the actors have created through their practice and skill. While much of the work of transportation on the audience’s part is chosen, in that a spectator chooses to attend the theatre, the actors play a role in facilitating the audience’s transportation. By giving performances that audiences will understand as authentic, believable, empathetic, or skilful, the actors make it easier for audience members to transport themselves, or to be transported, in the context of spectatorship (cf. Goffman 1959: 28; Schecher 1985: 144–45; Gell 1998: 68–72). Thus, the transportations taking place on either side of the ‘abyss’ between actor and audience (Benjamin 1998: 1) are intimately linked. The man’s questions – ‘What did you learn?’ and ‘Is there any hope?’ – also signalled the possibility of, and in fact a desire for, transformation. He wanted audiences to learn from the experience, to engage with its artistic materials and use them as tools in their longer-term individual transformative trajectories. The Fitzroy production of Halfway House highlights several key aspects of the play’s community arts project, and thus the particular types of transformation that its writer and producers wished to evoke in their audiences. The first important feature to note is the setting of the play in 1966, the year in which the fiftieth anniversaries of both the Somme and the Rising were observed and celebrated. Historians Mary Daly and Margaret O’Callaghan tell us that the fiftieth anniversary commemorations of these two events are vital to understanding the commemorations that occur in the present day, and to our contemporary understandings of history. They argue, ‘Much of the battle for control of the representation of the history of modern

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Ireland and its profound connection with debates about “the North” is incomprehensible if the commemoration of 1966 is ignored’ (2007: 2). A historian himself, playwright Philip Orr is clearly aware of this: in Halfway House, both women speak of and express excitement about the upcoming commemorations within their respective traditions and families. Daly and O’Callaghan later add, ‘Fifty years from the Somme and fifty years from the Rising, 1966 was a pivotal moment for the two partitioned entities on the island of Ireland’ (ibid.: 8). That it is also the pivotal, middle moment – the temporal ‘halfway house’ – between 1916 and 2016 is not lost on Orr and his audience; the play recounts some of the historical journey that led from 1916 to 1966, and then asks its audience to reflect on the implied journey to come, the fifty more years from 1966 to 2016. The spectre of the Troubles looms over the play as well, unbeknown to the characters, but well known to the majority of audience members. We can only view and understand the play in light of our own knowledge of Irish history, both before and after the year in which it is set, and for most viewers in Northern Ireland this means knowledge that the Troubles would begin only a few years later. Philip Orr pointed this out in a media interview about the play, saying, ‘It introduces some dramatic irony because we know, as an audience, what the two women don’t know – that the Troubles are going to start three years down the line’ (quoted in B. Campbell 2016). In light of this fact, the question ‘Is there any hope?’ takes on a specific meaning for our present time. As spectators, we know that hopefulness on the characters’ part will have no effect on the historical events to come; as such, the implication is that the hope must come from us and must be directed towards our own as yet unwritten future. Given the play’s particular historical positioning, an unspoken question hangs in the air, regarding how the coming fifty years – from 2016 to 2066 – will take shape in Northern Ireland. The second important aspect highlighted by the Fitzroy production is the way in which the drama was framed by its ecclesiastical setting, indicating a specifically Christian approach to peacebuilding and peacebuilding discourse. As mentioned above, Halfway House and Stormont House Rules! were commissioned by the evangelical Christian organization Contemporary Christianity as part of a project addressing the 2016 centenary commemorations.2 The project, entitled ‘1916, A Hundred Years On’, also received funding from the state-sponsored Community Relations Council (CRC). In a short booklet introducing the project, Orr explains why the Christian organization felt it was important for them to enter the public dialogue around history and commemoration, particularly in 2016: Christian churches and individual Christians played an often adversarial role in the events of a hundred years ago – it is surely the responsibility of present-day Christians and non-Christians alike to reflect on this troubled and important period of history.

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After all, two significant political documents of this period, the [Ulster] Covenant of 1912 and the Proclamation of 1916, invoked the blessing of the Christian God. The Easter Rising infuriated Protestant clergy in Ireland whereas attitudes amongst most of the leaders of Irish Catholicism changed from hostility to sympathy. It is also vital to recognise that throughout the Great War from 1914 to 1918, most clergy in Germany and Britain were equally convinced that God was on their side and that the soldiers at the front were doing His will. (2016a: 3)

This statement mirrors the language of others in the Christian community in Northern Ireland with regards to the centenary commemorations. Consider, for example, the thesis of a paper published online by the Methodist Church in Ireland, which argues that ‘Faith communities are communities of moral and ethical formation. They may have a role in enabling a more ethical and therefore inclusive form of remembering …’ (McMaster 2007: 7). Both Orr’s and McMaster’s arguments reflect a shifting understanding of the role of faith in public and political discourse, one that was also very evident in the ethos of the 4 Corners Festival. We might call this new perspective a ‘cosmopolitan’ one. As Pnina Werbner describes it, ‘[C]osmopolitanism is about reaching out across cultural differences through dialogue, aesthetic enjoyment, and respect; of living together with difference’; it ‘emphasise[s] empathy, toleration and respect for other cultures and values’ (2008: 2). Within the specificities of the Northern Ireland Christian context, this cosmopolitan understanding recognizes past uses of Christian faith and language in the context of war, conquest, conflict, and empire to be incorrect, and indeed unchristian. This perspective views the role of faith to be one of peacemaking, and it promotes a level of plurality in public and political life, arguing that Christians of different denominations ought to be able to be friendly and work together for common goals (though not necessarily attend church together) on the basis of a common, ‘shared’ faith in the Christian God (see Power 2012: 78–85; Ganiel 2016: 238–40, 252–55). The ‘1916, A Hundred Years On’ project was, then, part of a broader Christian project to engage with questions of the past, recognize the churches’ roles therein, and assert a new, more inclusive Christian vision for intercommunity relations in Northern Ireland in the twenty-first century. Notably, the Belfast performance of Halfway House was sponsored by the Fitzroy/Clonard Fellowship (Contemporary Christianity n.d.), a cross-community, ecumenical partnership between (Protestant) Fitzroy Presbyterian Church in South Belfast and (Catholic) Clonard Monastery in West Belfast (see Ganiel 2016: 10–12). The Fitzroy/Clonard Fellowship brings together Catholic and Protestant Christians, seeking to promote mutual respect and reconciliation on the basis of a sense of shared faith and on understanding built through cross-community friendships. As in Halfway House, the focus is on individual relationships as a space in which conversation and eventually, perhaps, reconciliation might be achieved.

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Thus, Fitzroy is no stranger to conversations of this nature; the physical space in which the play was held was already accustomed to the relational style of peacebuilding that Halfway House implicitly encourages. This idea of dialogue – specifically respectful dialogue – is key to the project of Halfway House. In fact, the play’s goals might be seen as partially didactic, meant to demonstrate a particular type of dialogue that will serve its peacebuilding purposes. In this way, Orr’s dramas echo the aims of certain types of community arts, inasmuch as they aim to instruct and to model right behaviour, and in so doing to hopefully transform their audiences. Take, for example, Bertolt Brecht’s description of ‘didactic theatre’: ‘The stage began to instruct … Choruses informed the audience about facts it did not know … Wrong and right actions were exhibited … The theatre entered the province of the philosophers – at any rate, the sort of philosophers who wanted not only to explain the world but also to change it. Hence the theatre philosophisized; hence it instructed’ (2000: 23–24).3 As Brecht hints, there is a moral component to this sort of theatre, a differentiating between ‘wrong and right actions’. We see this in the case of Halfway House, though notably not with regard to the actions of 1916- and Troubles-era combatants. Rather, here the differentiation of ‘wrong and right actions’ is enacted with respect to the relational meeting of divided and potentially combative ‘others’. The play argues most clearly for a particular type of dialogue – what I will henceforth call ‘good dialogue’ in this chapter – that its producers and supporters feel is most conducive to relationship-based peacebuilding. In Halfway House, Bronagh and Valerie perform and model this good dialogue for the audience: while they may disagree on certain points, they never raise their voices or interrupt each other, and each actively listens and attempts to empathize with her counterpart. Tellingly, the two characters have an equal number of spoken lines, so that neither dominates the dramatic action. Importantly, this type of dialogue also carries, for its advocates, the potential for individual transformation. Over the course of the play, we see Valerie’s and Bronagh’s perceptions of historical events shifting ever so slightly: while neither appears to fundamentally change her stance on the events of the past, the women seem to develop a more inclusive, cosmopolitan perspective, one that recognizes and allows for both sets of experiences. The play’s didacticism and exemplary modelling is meant to encourage spectators to imitate the characters’ behaviour by participating in good dialogues of their own. A reviewer who attended the Larne production commented on this phenomenon of good dialogue and the way in which it encouraged the audience to participate in similar conversations, writing, ‘[T]he quality of listening on stage was echoed in the venue’s café afterwards as people sat round and discussed the play over a cup of coffee’ (Meban 2016). The same was true of the Fitzroy production, where attendees were eager to chat over coffee in the atrium after the close of the play. John Paul

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Lederach, an influential scholar and practitioner of this type of peacebuilding (who, importantly within the context of this chapter, also works from a Christian perspective), describes the aims of this dialogue process, or as he calls it, ‘conversation’: ‘Conversation has the unique quality of providing a meaningful space of participation and interchange. In conversation, I gain entry into another’s thoughts and feelings. I share my thoughts and feelings. Together we have a sense of mutuality. The proxemics of conversation and voice is one of direct access and contact’ (2005: 56–57). Lederach’s description illustrates very well the high hopes that proponents of peacebuilding place in these processes of dialogue or conversation, as well as the popular discourse used to promote such exchanges. The language of dialogue and relationships is common in secular peacebuilding discourses as well (e.g. Murray and Murtagh 2003). For example, at a CRC conference held in Belfast in September 2015, speakers repeatedly pointed to dialogue, and the relationships perceived as necessary for dialogue to be sustained, as the keys to developing a peaceful civil society. A long-time community worker from North Belfast told assembled audience members that many people feel ‘uncertainty, anxiety, and fear’ towards those whom they do not know. These feelings can be countered, he said, by ‘developing relationships and getting to know each other’ through ‘sustained high-quality contact’. Another veteran community worker, a woman from Armagh, described to us what she felt these sorts of dialogues and relationships ought to look like: ‘There has to be give and take’, which includes ‘having difficult conversations’. The chair of the CRC, Peter Osborne, made similar comments when he addressed the audience, telling us that ‘relationships [will] dismantle bigotry, relationships will dismantle hatred, relationships will dismantle sectarianism’. The actual results of such projects, though, are generally more modest than this rhetoric indicates. While Halfway House might have sparked good dialogue and listening in the audience who witnessed it, it is important to note that most of the play’s attendees had already ‘bought in’ to the type of peacebuilding activity the play suggests, as evidenced by their presence at Fitzroy. As Anat Biletzki points out, ‘dialogue’ is a buzzword in peacebuilding discourse, with ‘hundreds of educational programmes and cultural events’ dedicated to ‘producing, developing and enhancing the capabilities of (warring) parties and their constituents to engage in dialogue’ with one another (2007: 351–52). Taking the example of Israeli–Palestinian dialogue groups in the 1990s, she tells us that ‘dialogue’ was so common that it became a joke in the public arena, with the concept being lambasted by ‘the Israeli general public, not to mention comedians and intellectuals, deriving ironic pleasure from the perceived futility of dialogue as a substitute for real peace’ (ibid.: 352). Furthermore, Biletzki notes that attempts at transformation through dialogue often failed to stick; in the case of the children’s ‘dialogues camps’ that she examines, ‘[A]s these children said, a week, or a month, or a summer of “dialogue camp” had created friendships and

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relationships; but many of these friends had found themselves, at the end of the day, on different sides of a wall and a war’ (ibid.). Thus, while community arts performances promoting this sort of dialogue are certainly valuable, as evidenced by the overall very positive response to Halfway House, the expectation that they will effect transformation within their society should be tempered, as their audiences are self-selecting and thus more likely to be those who have already ‘bought in’ to this type of peacebuilding – a sort of ‘preaching to the choir’.

Scene II: 6 November 2015 On a grey Friday afternoon in November, I attended my first meeting of the 4 Corners Festival planning committee. Several weeks prior, I had met with one of the founding committee members, North Belfast parish priest Father Martin Magill. Father Martin had explained that the committee was comprised mainly of local clergy from Northern Ireland’s four major Christian denominations – Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Church of Ireland – and that the festival’s primary aim was to facilitate the movement of people across physical and social barriers, from one ‘corner’ of the city into another. The ‘four corners’ of the festival’s name refer to the geographical areas of North, South, East, and West Belfast, each of which has its own particular history and character. Father Martin had also mentioned at the time that the theme of the upcoming 2016 iteration of the festival would be ‘listening’. The meeting was held in Fitzroy Presbyterian, the same church I would enter two and a half months later for the performance of Halfway House. The twelve-person committee met in the newly remodelled office of Fitzroy’s minister, Reverend Steve Stockman. Once introductions had been made, as I was not the only new member of the group, Steve opened the committee meeting with a prayer. Among other things, Steve prayed that the events of the festival would be ‘prophetic’ for the city of Belfast, and that the festival would be a form of holy ‘resistance’. The 4 Corners Festival serves as both a product of and an exemplar for good dialogue and ‘the art of listening’. The festival originates from the cross-community, interdenominational friendship between Steve and Martin – Presbyterian minister and Catholic priest. This foundational relationship is highlighted in the festival’s literature and other various forms of self-description, emphasizing the centrality of person-to-person relationship-building across ethnopolitical lines to the 4 Corners project. Although less emphasized in the festival’s discourses, their friendship also signified a coming together of two of Belfast’s opposing corners, and of different social classes: middle-class Fitzroy in the university area of South Belfast, which tends to be both more affluent and more diverse, and Father Martin’s working-class, economically deprived North Belfast parish, the church itself (Sacred Heart Catholic Church) situated on the Oldpark Road, very near

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an interface area. (Father Martin has since moved parishes and currently serves in another of Belfast’s ‘corners’.) In the summer of 2016, the two men were jointly awarded the CRC Annual Award for Civic Leadership, in recognition of the way that their friendship has modelled peacebuilding relationships and shaped the 4 Corners Festival (CRC 2016). Martin and Steve’s friendship joins a long history of peacebuilding efforts through ecumenical activity during and after the Troubles, in which personto-person relationships among clergy of different denominations played a vital role (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney 2011: 41–55). In fact, the relational origins of the 4 Corners Festival mirror those of the Fitzroy/Clonard Fellowship, a ‘programme of dialogue between Presbyterians and Catholics premised on the personal relationship between the [Reverend] Ken Newell and [Father] Gerry Reynolds’ (ibid.: 43). The festival committee knew and celebrated this history, not least because of their connections to Clonard and Fitzroy. (A lay worker from Clonard Monastery also sat on the committee.) Reverend Ken Newell was a featured speaker at the 2016 festival, his talk sited at Catholic St Patrick’s Church on Donegall Street, a location which had recently become a contentious flashpoint for anti-Catholic performances during loyalist parades. And when Father Gerry Reynolds passed away in late November 2015, less than a month after the first committee meeting I attended at Fitzroy, committee members discussed the possibility of adding an event that would address his legacy. (It was ultimately decided that the event should be shelved for a later year, as multiple events reflecting on Reynolds’s life and peacebuilding work were already scheduled throughout Belfast for the coming few months.) The 4 Corners Festival is thus heir to a well-established Northern Ireland tradition of ecumenical peacebuilding activity rooted in interpersonal relationships across ethnopolitical divisions. The festival’s unique structure also speaks to its particular moment in time. The purposeful movement of festivalgoers across community lines is of particular note here; as discussed in Chapter 1, this specific type of urban movement only became realistic following the ceasefires, opening up possibilities for entirely new ways of practicing and enacting peacebuilding-focused community arts activity. The festival’s membership and programming also point to the region’s changing demographics, as organizers increasingly work to include voices of Northern Ireland’s migrant populations. For example, the first event of the 2016 festival discussed the challenges faced by refugees and asylum seekers,4 and a 2017 festival event featured participation from Northern Ireland’s other faith communities, including Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Baha’i. Following Steve’s prayer, the group moved on to examining the planned events for the upcoming 2016 festival. It was clear to me that the committee members had already spent a lot of time planning and working on the events. Since my meeting with Martin, the festival theme had been solidified, with ‘The Art of Listening’ chosen as the year’s title. One of the

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events discussed during this time was a historical play, which was being coordinated by David Andrew Campton, the minister at Belfast South Methodist Church. David explained to those of us assembled that his original plan had been to stage a performance of Philip Orr’s historical drama Dresden, but that he hadn’t been able to find an appropriate space because of the play’s set and technical requirements. David told us that the Belvoir Players Studio had been offered as an option, and that that space would suit Dresden’s technical needs. However, the committee was disinclined to take this offer, with several members mentioning that one of the festival’s main goals was to hold events in unexpected locations, such that staging a play in a theatre would feel a bit too ordinary or predictable for their taste. David then went on to say that Philip was currently developing a new play called 1916, which David described to us as a ‘dialogue piece’ that would be ‘eminently portable’. The committee members responded very positively to this, stating that a play about 1916 would be much more relevant, given the approaching centenaries. One committee member added that it would be a ‘more edgy’ option. David was instructed to further pursue this option through continuing conversations with Philip Orr and with Contemporary Christianity, who were sponsoring the play’s development. Over the course of the next few months, the 1916 play eventually became two separate, but closely related, dramas, Halfway House and Stormont House Rules!, each dealing with the legacy of the shared commemorations from a different perspective. At a later meeting, as Stormont House Rules! was beginning to take shape, David described this new play to us as a ‘dialogue’, with Martin, who by that time was assisting in the planning of the drama event, adding that the audience are envisioned as ‘participants’ as opposed to ‘spectators’. Given their orientation to urban spaces, the festival committee felt that it was important to present Stormont House Rules! in the opposite ‘corner’ of the city from the Halfway House production, in order to attract a different audience than the earlier production. The performance of Stormont House Rules! was scheduled for the Thursday night of the festival, and the Duncairn Centre for Culture and Arts chosen as the location. The choice of the Duncairn Centre adds a further layer to the ecclesiastical framing of the two plays, as the arts centre sits in the renovated building of the former Duncairn Presbyterian Church. While the Duncairn Centre is not an overtly religious space, as it hosts concerts, dramas, conferences, art exhibits, and community arts events for groups from a wide variety of backgrounds, its architecture still suggests a church, and as such, conceiving of it as a religious space is easy. The building’s façade has remained largely unaltered, and while the interior has been significantly remodelled, some of the original architectural features have been kept strategically intact, including stainedglass windows and plaques memorializing congregants who had died in military service. The Duncairn Centre is run by the 174 Trust, a Christian cross-community and peacebuilding charity in North Belfast who describe their mission

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as ‘aiming to provide a local Christian witness without denominational bias or sectarian prejudice’ and providing ‘a safe, shared space where difficult conversations can occur’ (174 Trust n.d.). The 4 Corners Festival has a good working relationship with 174 and the Duncairn, having staged events there in the past. Philip Orr has ties to the Duncairn and 174 as well: he has written a book on the history of the 174 Trust (Orr 2011), and from April to June 2016 he hosted a lecture series at the Duncairn on ‘fascinating people who had an important association with the north of the city’, including politicians, artists, and religious figures. The production of Stormont House Rules!, and its particular, intentional siting at the Duncairn Centre, thus served to reinforce the festival’s aims of a distinctly Christian approach to contemporary peacebuilding in and through community arts practice.

Scene III: 4 February 2016 One of Duncairn Presbyterian’s restored stained-glass windows soared over our heads. In the light of day, it would have cast colourful blocks of light onto the walls and floors of the space. As it was, though, it was a chilly winter evening, and it had already been dark for hours. I took a seat at the back of the Duncairn Centre auditorium, near Martin, Steve, and a third man whom I did not recognize, but who obviously knew the two ministers well. The audience filled the rows of chairs set out, though those rows only took up about half the available space. There were around seventy-five people in attendance, mostly male and all White, save for one Black man seated in the row in front of me. Stormont House Rules! has a similarly minimalist stage set-up to Halfway House, but the ways in which the two plays differ speak volumes. The two wooden lecture podiums, the only props needed for the play, had been set up on opposite ends of the stage, with the majority of the stage space remaining desolate between them. Stormont House Rules! consists of a fictional debate between two politicians, one nationalist/republican, the other unionist/loyalist. To my surprise, the two actors in the Duncairn performance were the same two women who had performed Halfway House at Fitzroy, though their ‘sides’ had been reversed, the woman who had played Protestant Valerie in Halfway House now a republican politician, and the woman who had played Catholic Bronagh now a unionist one. (‘Republican’ and ‘Unionist’ are the terms by which the two characters describe themselves in Stormont House Rules!, so these are the terms I will use in my description of the play.) I found myself wondering whether the characters in the drama were originally intended to be women, as female politicians are still a minority in Northern Ireland (as elsewhere in the world), or whether they were written as male but performed by women out of convenience, since the two actresses already had a working relationship with Philip Orr and Contemporary Christianity.

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Stormont House Rules! delves deep into the complexities of Ireland’s history, with its main focus on the characters’ interpretations of the Proclamation of 1916. Each politician presents and interprets the text of the Proclamation, the events of the Rising, and the history of Ireland in such a way as to prove that the Proclamation was either ‘a touchstone of … hope’ and ‘freedom’, in the case of the republican politician, or that it ‘brought great harm to this island’, as the unionist politician argues (Orr 2016c: 3). The characters are incredibly knowledgeable, with their arguments spanning Irish history, North and South, from the fifteenth century up to the present day, with some forays into global and colonial history as well. It has much of the feel of a debating exercise to it, given that the two politicians are very well prepared and well informed, and, though combative, they adhere to fairly strict debating rules and formats. While the two are respectful and do not interrupt each other – once again, modelling the good dialogue practices seen in Halfway House – neither do they seem to find much common ground. The play ends with each stating her case, but neither having budged in her stance. The audience listened attentively, occasionally laughing or otherwise reacting to the drama’s content. Occasionally, these reactions were more critical. At one point in the play, the unionist politician asserts that the Easter Rising and the Proclamation purposefully utilized the language of Catholicism, arguing, ‘The liturgy of the Catholic Church for Easter Sunday contains a section known as the Proclamation – in which the priest reads out the good news that Christ is “Risen from the dead”’ (Orr 2016c: 22). At the uttering of this line, Father Martin turned to the rest of us seated in the back row, his eyes large and his expression dismayed. ‘There isn’t!’ he exclaimed in a whisper. Shortly after, the same character states, ‘So it would seem that [Pádraig] Pearse wrote this document in Catholic vocabulary and staged his Rising according to the Catholic calendar’ (ibid.). Martin assumed the same expression and whispered, ‘It’s Easter!’ Those of us in the back row giggled quietly at this. As Easter is a holiday celebrated by nearly all Christian groups, and as Catholics and Protestants celebrate Easter on the same day, facts of which we were all aware, we found this line a bit silly. When the play ended, the same man from Contemporary Christianity who had spoken after Halfway House stood up and addressed the audience. He encouraged us to split into groups and discuss the play a bit. In so doing, he referred to Halfway House as well, calling that play a ‘gentler’ and ‘softer’ discussion of the same topic, and characterizing Stormont House Rules! as a more ‘adversarial’ approach. He directed us to discuss which of these approaches is a better way of dealing with issues of the past. The introduction to the script stipulates that audience members, who are meant to ‘act as participants in this event rather than remaining as spectators’, be given printed copies of the Easter Proclamation and of the recent Stormont House Agreement (NIO 2014, 2015), ‘with the section on the past highlighted’ (Orr 2016c: 1–2; cf. McGrattan 2016). Orr further maintains that

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‘more importantly, they should receive a small note-pad and pencil’ with which to ‘take notes’, in order to facilitate a ‘mediated discussion/debate’ post-performance (Orr 2016c: 2). While these suggestions were discussed in 4 Corners Festival committee meetings in preparation for the play, they never came to fruition, likely due to the fact that the post-play discussions for both Halfway House and Stormont House Rules! were facilitated by a representative of Contemporary Christianity rather than someone from the 4 Corners Festival. I ended up chatting with the man sitting next to me, the one I hadn’t recognized at the beginning of the performance. He introduced himself to me as Darren.5 Darren explained that he had seen Halfway House as well, and he said that he liked that play better, for the same reasons mentioned by the speaker from Contemporary Christianity – a ‘softer’ and ‘gentler’ approach. He asked me which I preferred, and I replied that I thought I liked Stormont House Rules! better for having subverted my expectations. I explained that Halfway House was the sort of way I would expect a ‘peacebuilding’ play to deal with the 2016 commemorations and centenaries, while Stormont House Rules! takes a more ‘unusual’, unexpected approach. I also mentioned that the play was very dense with history that I, as an outsider, did not know, and Darren agreed that he too had learned new historical details from the play, though he himself is from Northern Ireland. He brought up the inconsistencies that Father Martin had noticed, and he said that he would like to know how much of the play was factual, as Martin’s statements had made him doubt its accuracy in parts. The small discussion groups were then instructed to come together for a conversation among the entire audience. The discussion was fairly short, and relatively few audience members seemed inclined to share their thoughts aloud in this whole-group setting. Most commonly, several spectators commented that they found it interesting and refreshing to see two women politicians debating, since politics is so heavily dominated by men in Northern Ireland. One woman in the audience commented that she found the two women easier to listen to than she would have two men. While no one asked about it aloud in the discussion, I found myself drawn back to the question of whether the characters had been intended as women. I obtained a set of scripts to both plays later that night, as they were on sale in the back of the Duncairn auditorium, and through these I found out that in the script the characters in Stormont House Rules! are named Sean Donnelly and Basil Craig, and thus originally conceived as male. Interestingly, and not entirely known to us at the time, Northern Ireland was in the middle of significant political changes that would impact on this experience of gender. Less than a month prior, in January 2016, Arlene Foster had taken up the role of First Minister and leader of the DUP upon the resignation of Peter Robinson (BBC News 2016a). A year later, in January 2017, Michelle O’Neill would be named leader of Sinn Féin in the North of Ireland upon the resignation of Deputy First Minister Martin

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McGuinness (McDonald 2017).6 Thus, within a year of this first staging of Stormont House Rules!, the notion of two women politicians debating in this manner would be far more imaginable than it was at the time. The audience’s surprise at the depiction of women as politicians, and their lack of surprise at the depiction of women in ‘good’, conversational dialogue in Halfway House, speaks to entrenched stereotypes around gender and peacebuilding. In Northern Ireland, as in many other places that have experienced violent conflict, women’s involvement as combatants in violence and armed conflict has been downplayed or glossed over, with an emphasis instead on women’s roles as wives, mothers, lovers, or victims (Aretxaga 1995). In this vein, what Marie Hammond-Callaghan calls a ‘maternalist discourse’ has ‘dominated’ peacebuilding projects in Northern Ireland, casting peace activism as a naturally feminine activity (2012: 98; cf. Charlesworth 2008; Duncanson 2016: 48–57). In this understanding, men break down and women repair. The choice of women actors to perform both Halfway House and Stormont House Rules! confirms these stereotypes in some respects, not least because the two women characters in Halfway House are largely telling the stories of their male relatives. However, foregrounding women’s voices in these plays simultaneously challenges the domination of commemoration narratives by men, presenting the stories in and through female voices and (to some extent at least) perspectives. As the audience dispersed, I spotted a few friends from the local art world in the audience, including an artist named Emily. I asked her about her thoughts on the play. She told me that she liked it, but she ultimately found it unrealistic, as if such a conversation were to actually occur between two politicians in Northern Ireland, ‘somebody would’ve said something really fucking stupid’. She cited a recent, well-publicized instance in which a former DUP councillor had declared that St Patrick was a Protestant, using this as an example of the sorts of bizarre and historically inaccurate things that local politicians sometimes say. (This was widely considered an absurd statement in Northern Ireland because St Patrick was well known to have lived many centuries before the Protestant strain of Christianity emerged and split from its Catholic counterpart.) Emily’s sentiments echo very common views of local politicians: throughout the course of my research, and in prior research I had conducted in Belfast as well, research participants and acquaintances repeatedly expressed the opinion that politicians in Northern Ireland do not have the public’s best interest in mind, and that their issues and petty squabbles are not those of their constituents (see Chapter 1). I asked Emily whether she had also seen Halfway House, and she replied that she had. When I asked which play she liked better, she answered confidently that she preferred Halfway House, as ‘I could relate to it’. Emily’s response points to the ways in which these sorts of community arts performances might break down, might fail to take their spectators along with them on their dialogical journeys. For Emily, watching two women have a conversation in a pub was relatable, whereas two imaginary

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politicians debating in a well-informed manner, without saying something ‘really fucking stupid’, simply stretched the imagination too far. Ironically, it seems that Martin and Darren did discover something in the characters’ debate that might be incorrect, in the unionist politician’s casting Easter as a specifically Catholic holiday and drawing attention to the (apparently nonexistent) ‘Proclamation’ in Catholic Easter services. Darren also experienced a breakdown in his experience of the play, but for a seemingly opposite reason: namely, that one of the characters did say something seemingly incorrect, whereas Emily found that an apparent lack of ‘stupid’ statements rendered the play unbelievable. These critical responses to the drama call attention to the ways in which individual experiences of spectatorship can differ. In her discussion of audience responses to operas portraying historical events, Yayoi Uno Everett writes that the viewing and interpretation of performance ‘is a deeply personal activity in the sense that it is shaped by the viewer’s prior knowledge of the source material, the cultural values s/he brings to the table, as well as the extent of her/his immersion into the given opera’s production history’ (2015: 197). These experiences of spectatorship are also shaped by the fleeting nature of performance. Within the moment of spectatorship, viewers only have recourse to what they hear and remember. Without recourse to a script or notes, particularly in a play so densely packed with historical detail, it can be very difficult to recall everything that has transpired, and so we remember the moments or impressions that have most affected us. These conversations also point to a further difficulty, in which participants struggled to envision how to effect a large-scale, bottom-up approach to peace, moving respectful dialogue from the realm of individual, interpersonal conversation – such as that between Bronagh and Valerie in Halfway House – into the realm of politics, into ‘Stormont House’ itself. Much of the work of past peacebuilding has depended on a decoupling of the individual and the nation (cf. Svašek 2012: 156), emphasizing that peaceful relationships can be formed between like-minded individuals engaging in good dialogue with one another and abiding by the rules of that good dialogue. In other words, the emphasis has traditionally been on individuals, not states or governments or politicians, repairing the region’s broken civic and political life. As with the Fitzroy performance of Halfway House, by attending a drama sponsored by the 4 Corners Festival many of the spectators signalled that they had already bought into the work of relationship- and dialoguebased peacebuilding. Thus, it was likely easier for them to believe and relate to a depiction of two individuals conversing in a casual setting like a pub – two individuals repairing their divisions through conversation. This becomes more difficult when the dialogue is placed in the mouths of figureheads, characters representing the region’s two main political traditions and meant to represent its two biggest political parties, which are engaged in a deeply adversarial relationship. As they struggled with this presentation,

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the spectators revealed the difficulty of believing in the ability – or even the desire – of politicians to engage in good dialogue and to repair Northern Ireland’s brokenness. They revealed the difficulty of believing in transformation at the political level. John Brewer, Gareth Higgins, and Francis Teeney provide a useful distinction between ‘social’ and ‘political’ peace processes, a distinction that is relevant to the disconnect experienced by the audience members who attended Stormont House Rules! (2011: 34–38). For these authors, political peace processes are the work of governments and official actors, resulting in peace agreements and the regulations that maintain them. Social peace processes, meanwhile, are relational, ‘forms of peacemaking designed to bridge the social cleavages around which violence coheres – in order to restore broken relationships, effect reconciliation, and achieve something akin to forgiveness and compromise’ (ibid.: 36). Social and political peace processes are ‘recursive, each facilitating and enabling the other’ (ibid.: 37): political peace processes provide the means by which social ones can occur – for example, by taking measures to provide for the safe movement of people into other parts of the city – while social peace processes can bolster the population’s will to support political measures like peace agreements. As these authors note, ‘The churches’ expertise lies in the social peace process’ (Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney 2011: 5; though see that volume for many ways in which churches and clergy were involved in political peace processes as well). And it is small wonder, for the language of brokenness and healing is central to the Christian message. Both Stormont House Rules! and the ambivalent audience response thereto provide an interesting insight into both the willingness and the difficulties of Christian groups – particularly those working within a community arts context, which also favours interpersonal relationship-building – to speak to and engage with political peace processes. The political dialogue played out on stage technically followed the requirements for good dialogue, but it does not appear to have been experienced as good dialogue by its viewers. Why is that? Perhaps one clue comes from the politicians’ intractability: while they are certainly willing to debate, they appear to lack the will to listen, the ‘art of listening’ of the festival theme. Good listening, then, is an equally important component to (if not even more important than) gracious speech in good dialogues. This inability to listen – both to each other and to the needs of the people they represent – was viewed by many of my research participants, friends, and acquaintances as stoking and perpetuating the three-year shutdown of the Northern Ireland Executive that began in January 2017. There are also the plays’ subjects to consider. Where Valerie and Bronagh draw on personal and familial experiences, ‘Basil Craig’ and ‘Sean Donnelly’ speak of history writ large: history as found in agreements and battles and political machinations rather than in their effects on everyday residents of Ireland on both sides of the border. Many of those with whom I spoke

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found Halfway House not only ‘gentler’, but also more ‘relatable’ – more similar to the stuff of their own lives. Finally, the audience’s ambivalence towards Stormont House Rules! may be connected to churches’ historical (and relative) unease with entering the political realm, a point on which Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney (2011) repeatedly touch, and which they see as having limited churches’ and Christian organizations’ ability to effect peace during the Troubles. Of the proliferation of cross-denominational clergy friendships, these authors write, ‘There was a political lesson intended here, where close personal relations between the [church] leaders would be the model for political compromise and reconciliation, but without the mention of politics’ (ibid.: 96). The performance of Stormont House Rules! highlights this dis-ease, while also pointing towards a potential willingness among (some) Christian organizations to overcome it. While understandably not as successful as its more straightforward, social-peace-process-based counterpart, Stormont House Rules! poses vital questions about the roles that faith communities and faith-based organizations have to play in the present day.

Scene IV: 25 May 2016 On a sunny morning in late May, I met Philip Orr in the coffee shop of the Duncairn Centre. During our interview, he described for me his interest in what he called ‘layers of history’, which is to say the ways in which historical meanings accrue and interact, particularly when attached to specific places. Philip described the process by which historical meanings accumulate by quoting an extract from the final stanza of Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Bogland’: ‘Every layer seems camped on before’. The full stanza reads as follows: Every layer they strip Seems camped on before. The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless. (Heaney 1990: 17–18)

Heaney refers here to the unique environmental ability of bogs to preserve items long buried. In the poem, he names several other common or wellknown Irish bog finds: ‘the skeleton [o]f the Great Irish Elk’, ‘[b]utter … recovered salty and white’, and ‘the waterlogged trunks [o]f great firs, soft as pulp’ (ibid.). The process of uncovering these objects is one of digging down into millennia of peat, slowly uncovering history piece by piece, layer by layer, an apt metaphor indeed for the ways that memory and meaning accumulate to places, objects, symbols, and historical events. Historical theatre constitutes a type of performance that Richard Schechner calls ‘restored behavior’: ‘living behavior treated as a film editor treats strips of film. These strips can be rearranged, reconstructed; they are independent of the causal systems … that brought them into existence:

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they achieve a life of their own’ (1982: 39).7 Restored behaviour can take a variety of forms and is evident across many diverse genres of performances. A restored performance usually stems from a perceived point of origination in the past – what Schechner calls the ‘original’ – whether a ‘factual’ historical event or a mythological one (ibid.: 43–44), though of course the boundary between ‘myth’ and ‘fact’ is extremely blurry. The ‘original’ is then reworked and re-presented, its component parts edited, ‘rearranged, reconstructed’, in the manner of editing a movie, as Schechner suggests. Restored behaviour is the process by which a performance emerges out of the bogland of history. Layer by layer, each iteration contains within it resonances of previous performances; of similar, related performances; and of the historical event being reconstructed: ‘every enactment of a historic event is a re-enactment, not only of the originary moment from the past, but of how that event has been represented since’ (Roche 2007: 303). This process of restoration is deeply of its moment. History and its restorations serve the present, and the artist’s (or historian’s) purposes therein. Dominic Bryan writes, ‘The marking of a centenary is an act of contemporary politics. A decade of centenaries is a contemporary construct. It is only important if we, academics or the wider society, make it important … [T]he commemorative practices are constructed in the present, for the present’ (in Bryan et al. 2013: 66). Jonathan Evershed, meanwhile, argues, ‘[W]e must not forget that commemoration is intrinsically political. What and how groups, societies, or communities remember are political choices with political consequences’ (2018: 14). The fact of the matter is that every restoration has a motive; there are no innocent, which is to say no unmotivated, re-presentations of history. Thus, Halfway House and Stormont House Rules!, while meticulously plundering history’s bogland – and that Philip’s writing was informed by significant historical research was never in doubt, as several spectators pointed out to me – say more about their present context than they do about the pasts that they restore. What is perhaps most interesting about the centenary artistic restorations of the events of 1916 are the shifts they reveal in how ‘other’ experiences of history are presented and imagined. Consider, for example, the reception of Frank McGuinness’s 1986 play Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme, a production of which toured in 2016 to both the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, as well as to several other locations throughout the UK. McGuinness, born in County Donegal in the Republic of Ireland and hailing from an Irish Catholic background, famously drew his inspiration for Observe the Sons of Ulster from living for the first time in a majority Protestant community, while teaching in Coleraine at what was then called the New University of Ulster (Grene 1999: 245). Nicholas Grene considers Observe the Sons of Ulster an exercise in ‘imagining the other’ and encouraging audiences to do the same, as ‘[f]or southern Catholic nationalists Ulster Protestant Unionism is as other as you can get … The play represents therefore a new sort of

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imaginative reaching out in Irish drama’ (ibid.: 242–44). He adds that plays of this sort ‘can be seen as part of this attempt at re-imagining ourselves, not as ourselves alone, sinn féin amháin, but ourselves in our plural difference’ (ibid.: 242–43). Helen Lojek similarly notes that in both the play’s premiere and each of its subsequent stage revivals, Observe the Sons of Ulster has been heralded as ‘an icon of cross-cultural understanding’, ‘an indication of increased understanding by Irish Catholics that Irish Protestantism is also part of the island’s culture and heritage’ (2004: 77–79). There is a major shift evident between the nature of the good dialogue presented and performed in Observe the Sons of Ulster and that evidenced in Orr’s plays. In the former, the playwright imagines that community which is ‘other’ to him, probing its trauma and writing from a place of empathy. It is indeed a type of good dialogue, but much of the work of dialogue is implicit, having already taken place within and on the part of the playwright himself. In Philip Orr’s plays, however, the dialogue is presented physically on stage, within the frame of the performance. This great shift, then, is one from ‘imagining the other’ to imagining ways in which oneself, or someone very like oneself, might encounter the other, whether in an everyday situation such as a snowbound pub or in a political debate.8 In this understanding, then, history and historical theatre are being utilized as instruments of repair. The crack under examination is the most prominent one in Northern Ireland society, a division that continues to affect numerous areas of everyday life. This crack is also the basis for Northern Ireland’s particular governing structure, a consociational powersharing agreement that is perennially precarious, as evidenced by its collapse in 2017 and the subsequent long road to restoration. Both political and social peace processes turn their repair efforts towards this crack – political processes on a larger scale and through more formal means and social peace processes on an individual, person-to-person scale, seeking to mend the division one relationship at a time. Despite their smaller-scale focus, though, social peace processes often have an eye to the macro, hoping, believing, and even stating (as seen earlier in this chapter) that these social, relational, individual acts of repair and care can trickle upward to society as a whole, and to the political side of peacebuilding (cf. Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney 2011: 96). In the Decade of Centenaries and its corresponding artworks, pluralism and cosmopolitanism in history and commemoration are instrumentalized as potential repairs. In seeking to do this, Contemporary Christianity and the 4 Corners Festival echo the relatively hegemonic approach and policies of state agencies and community relations bodies – a focus on historical ‘fact’ as liberatory and on the mining or recovery of lesser-known historical facts as a potential route to peace (Evershed 2018: 75–86). (And it is worth noting that the 4 Corners Festival has consistently enjoyed good relationships with government bodies, notably the Community Relations Council and many of Belfast’s successive Lords Mayor from all ‘corners’ of the

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political spectrum.) In this logic, divergent – that is, cracked – views and interpretations of the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme are not the result of divergent political stances so much as they are ignorance – a lack of access to the facts, the real, the truth: ‘The (peace-building) project of correcting the avowed aberrations in the historical record that have rendered it divided rather than shared is thus presented as an exercise in empiricist objectivity: in starting from the historical facts’ (ibid.: 83). There is a sort of wishful thinking in this type of repair, a belief that cracks could be properly restored if only everyone took a more informed, more enlightened view of the contentious historical events of Northern Ireland’s history. Orr’s project in the two plays is perhaps adjacent to this type of repair, in its focus on historical accuracy and providing information, further enforced by his unheeded directive to provide the audience of Stormont House Rules! with the written texts of the Proclamation and the Stormont House Agreement. But it is not the same, and his work provides a more nuanced presentation of both this type of commemoration and of the cracks that exist in the world in which these events are remembered. I suggest that his particular approach is, rather, more closely aligned with evangelical Christianity than with state policies of remembrance and peacebuilding. Stormont House Rules! in particular is deeply logocentric, concerned with texts and the careful, informed interpretation of their meaning. Logocentrism is also a feature of Christianity – Jesus is literally called ‘the Word’ in the opening passage of the Gospel of John – and especially so among evangelicals, who are known in part for their ‘Biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible’, that is, the scriptural text (Bebbington 1989: 2–3).9 Stormont House Rules!, then, is less an exercise in ‘correcting the avowed aberrations in the historical record’ (Evershed 2018: 83) and more a hermeneutical exercise with which churchgoing attendees will feel familiar and comfortable. The two plays also demonstrate a cognizance of the fact that the cracks in Northern Ireland’s society are not so easily papered over. While both restore behaviour, neither restores society. The ending to Halfway House, in particular, is ambiguous, so that we are never sure how transformative Bronagh and Valerie found their encounter. However, tellingly, neither play features a substantive individual transformation. Audience members are then encouraged to reflect on the possibility of transformation, but these reflective spaces are never presented as (potential) conversions – merely as a point of conversation. The plays’ reparative, restorative work, then, and that of its sponsoring organizations, diverges from more official commemorative policy as identified by Evershed, by siting the plays’ hopes in the acts of dialogue, and of interpersonal hermeneutics, as opposed to the work of commemoration itself. This is a more nuanced view of the role of history in the present, and a more realistic-seeming one as well. It is, perhaps, a more personally informed, on-the-ground view of repair in a deeply cracked

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Northern Ireland – one that recognizes the possibility for change, but also the practicalities and limitations of peacebuilding work and social peace processes.

Coda: Community Arts and Eschatological Imaginings Within sight and easy walking distance of the Duncairn Centre lies the newly built Girdwood Hub, a massive modern building project and crosscommunity leisure centre erected on the site of a former British Army barracks. The very sighting of Girdwood Hub from the Duncairn Centre is the result of the recent removal of barriers separating the communities on either side of the Girdwood site (Belfast Interface Project 2017: 12, 48; Figure 3.1). Both the removal of the barriers and the construction of the new leisure centre constitute significant changes to the North Belfast landscape. The organizers of the 4 Corners Festival were delighted by the new Girdwood space and hosted two of the 2017 festival events in the ‘Shared Space’ area in the building’s foyer, including the official festival launch. The building was first suggested as a location by Father Martin, whose church at the time was located very near Girdwood. When he first raised the possibility of using the building during the festival, Martin excitedly described the site’s repurposing to us as an example of ‘redemption’ and ‘resurrection’ in city spaces.

Figure 3.1  View of Girdwood Hub as seen from outside the Duncairn Centre. The removal of the road barrier allows for visual and physical access between the two sites. Belfast, 14 September 2021. © Kayla Rush.

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Schechner’s restoration of behaviour paradigm provides useful language with which to discuss the future towards which these restorations would like to move, to transform. As Schechner points out, restoration of behaviour is an ‘eschatological’ process, linking past to present to future: The past … is recreated in terms not simply of a present … but of a future … This future is the performance being rehearsed, the ‘finished thing’ to be made graceful through editing, repetition, and invention. Restored behavior is both teleological and eschatological. It joins first causes to what happens at the end of time. It is a model of destiny. (1985: 79)

Schechner’s use of ‘eschatology’ brings us back to the two dramas’ specifically Christian approach to good dialogue and peacebuilding, for eschatology is an important component of the Christian faith (see, for example, Webster 2013: 173–202). Father Martin’s comments about the Girdwood site remind us that ‘restoration’ carries with it deeply spiritual connotations, which connect it closely to eschatological hopes and expectations. While Philip’s plays themselves were not overtly religious, their framing within explicitly Christian contexts links them to these Christian eschatological hopes for the urban spaces of Belfast. Thus, these plays restore history in Schechner’s sense for the purposes of restoring in a religious sense. For Christian peacebuilders and artists, who believe in a fall and a redemption – a redemption facilitated through a resurrection – to restore something broken on a small scale is to play a part in a cosmic restoration, within the redemptive course of history. These restorations point to a hoped-for eschatology, one in which the universal brokenness of the world has been permanently repaired.

Notes 1. The choice of Downpatrick as the women’s shared hometown is socially and religiously meaningful. Downpatrick is named for, and traditionally held to be the burial place of, St Patrick, a religious figure closely associated with Ireland and claimed by both Catholic and Protestant residents of the island. 2. Evangelicalism is a particular type of conservative Christianity comprised primarily, though not exclusively, of Protestant adherents (see Ganiel 2008; Mitchell and Ganiel 2011). Contemporary Christianity is the current iteration of what was once called, and is still better known as, the Evangelical Contribution on Northern Ireland (ECONI). Brewer, Higgins, and Teeney credit ECONI with ‘the single most significant role’ in the peace process among churches and Christian organizations (2011: 27). They also note that ECONI has strong historical links to Fitzroy (ibid.: 218), partially explaining the choice to host the initial Belfast performance in that space. 3. Orr’s community arts example is not to be too closely conflated with Brecht’s Lehrstückstheater (often translated as ‘didactic theatre’). While there are certainly overlaps in terms of didactic goals and approaches, Lehrstückstheater comprises a particular pedagogical approach that plays with the categories of ‘audience’ and ‘performer’, in a way that Halfway House and Stormont House Rules! did not (see Baugh 1994: 237–40; Benjamin 1998: 20–21; Bradley 2006: 7–8). 4. The refugees and asylum seekers event in 2016 was co-sponsored by EMBRACE, a

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local interdenominational Christian organization that describes itself as ‘working together to promote a positive response to people who are seeking asylum, refugees, migrant workers and people from minority-ethnic backgrounds living in Northern Ireland’ (EMBRACE 2019) – its language thus echoing the cosmopolitan approach to the 2016 commemorations taken by the 4 Corners Festival and Contemporary Christianity. 5. ‘Darren’ is a pseudonym, as is ‘Emily’, whom I mention later in this section. Persons named non-pseudonymously in this chapter are those whom I interviewed after the fact, all of whom had visible, public roles in the productions of one or both of the plays. 6. Michelle O’Neill was named Deputy First Minister and Arlene Foster reappointed as First Minister when the government was re-formed in January 2020. 7. Cf. Goffman, who also uses the language of performance as ‘strip[s]’ of behaviour, though not as specifically as Schechner does (Goffman 1974: 10). See also Schechner (1985: 35–116). 8. This shift in the location of dialogue is evident in many other post-Troubles theatre works as well. The Wedding Community Play is one such example (see Chapter 1). From the realm of more traditional – that is, non-community-arts-related – theatre, Nicola McCartney’s 2001 play Heritage exemplifies this shift with specific reference to the events of 1916. Set among Irish immigrants in Canada against the backdrop of the First World War and the Easter Rising, Heritage features Catholic and Protestant families not only in dialogue with one another – though not always good dialogue – but also entangled in familial and romantic relationships (McCartney 2014). 9. The other three corners of Bebbington’s ‘quadrilateral’ – what he considers to be the four key markers of evangelical Christianity – are ‘conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; … and what may be called crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross’ (Bebbington 1989: 2–3). For a discussion of crucicentric practices among evangelicals in Northern Ireland, see Rush (2018).

4 Layers of the Post-Post-Conflict

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Street Art and Urban Narratives in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter

I join a small-but-growing knot of people outside the Dark Horse pub, on the cobblestones of Commercial Court. This pedestrian-only street (a rarity in Belfast’s city centre) is often used in tourist images to promote the city’s nightlife, given its unique picturesque qualities: the low red benches, the vintage Guinness ads on the walls, the zig-zagging fairy lights hung overhead. Further down the narrow street sits the more famous Duke of York pub, a key staple of places to drink in the city. The Duke of York was, in fact, where I had my own first night out in the city back in 2013; newly arrived international students at my university were ushered to the Duke of York en masse to experience something deemed an essential part of Belfast culture. I have been to Commercial Court many times, not only for the Duke of York, but also for the Festival of Fools, an annual community circus festival; several iterations of Culture Night Belfast; and, somewhat frequently, as a visitor to Community Arts Partnership, which has its headquarters a few doors down.1 Adam Turkington, a well-known local community arts curator and our tour guide for the day, joins shortly after. He asks people whether they have their tickets, and we retrieve them from backpacks, purses, and bags. A woman with a continental European accent walks up and says that she’s overheard him saying there is a walking tour about to start. She asks whether she can join and how much it is. I make small talk with her afterwards, and she tells me that she is visiting Belfast with a friend. She says she wanted to explore the city this morning, prior to attending a concert – of ‘Irish bagpiping’, she tells me – at the SSE Arena this afternoon. As more people show up, Adam directs us through an arched alleyway into the Duke of York car park. I have seen the alley before, but have never been back in the car park (and indeed, wasn’t even aware there was a car park here). In the car park, every available wall space is covered in vividly coloured paintings of ironic Belfast scenes: famous local television characters in BDSM gear, misspelled graffiti on the sides of the Harland and Wolff cranes, and the Albert

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Clock with its hands eternally set to 16.90. Adam tells us that he likes to begin the tour here because there is so much to look it; however, he notes, he does not consider this to be street art. Rather, this area, he explains, falls into the localized mural tradition, one rooted in local political murals, though he sees this as a ‘third way’ – a set of neutral, non-sectarian murals. He goes on to explain that the local mural tradition is ‘political’, and that similar types of political murals can be seen on walls in Berlin and Bethlehem. Street art, on the other hand, he tells us, grew out of a movement that started in New York in the 1970s, which paralleled the rise of ‘turntabling’ and the hip-hop scene. He explains that these traditions arose as a way for artists to be ‘combative’ ‘without killing each other’. He further notes that the street art he is describing, and which we will see today, is now a worldwide phenomenon that appears in most major cities. * * * The ‘Cathedral Quarter’ area of Belfast’s city centre is vitally significant to the local community arts scene. It is inextricably bound up with the local art world’s origin stories, and it continues to be upheld as a crucial centre of artistic activity and action. It draws its name from St Anne’s Cathedral, the imposing 1904 Church of Ireland building whose Romanesque façade and spires contrast with the hodgepodge of other architectural styles in the neighbourhood and bump anachronistically up against the stern modern lines of its closest, much younger neighbour, the 2012-built Metropolitan Arts Centre (Belfast Cathedral 2018; The MAC Belfast 2020). While its exact geographical boundaries are somewhat fuzzy and contested, the Cathedral Quarter generally describes the area immediately north-east of Belfast’s city centre. It is characterized by older buildings situated on narrow streets and alleyways. The neighbourhood is home to a number of popular Belfast nightlife spots, independent performance venues, and the headquarters of a many well-known local community arts organizations. Most approximations of the Cathedral Quarter take its main thoroughfares to be Donegall Street and North Street (Figure 4.1), and the arts residents of the neighbourhood tend to cluster along these two routes. In this chapter, I examine the case of a ‘street art walking tour’ in the Cathedral Quarter, described through the lens of my own experience as a participant. The reasoning for this is twofold. First, the walking tour allowed for embodied engagement with many different spaces within the Cathedral Quarter, and thus with different visualities, spatialities, and narratives about community arts and urban space. Second, tour guide Adam Turkington is a long-serving and well-connected member of the communityarts art world, and he thus presents a unique and insightful perspective on the Cathedral Quarter through the specific lens of community arts. A freelance arts curator (‘curator’ is his preferred term, as he explained to me in an interview) who runs his own company, Seedhead Arts, Adam also organizes the street art festival Hit the North, during which most of the artworks that we visited during the tour were created. Given his work in

Figure 4.1  Map of the Cathedral Quarter, using the boundaries set by Belfast City Council for the Cathedral Conservation Area. Other estimations define the Cathedral Quarter slightly differently. Map © Google Maps, image edited by Kayla Rush.

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this role, he had intimate knowledge of most of the pieces visited during the tour, presenting an in-depth view into the different pieces’ creators, histories, and interactions with urban space. His detailed presentation and performance indicated an enormous personal investment in the street art work, and in the Cathedral Quarter more generally, over a period of many years. At the time, Adam was also the organizer of Culture Night Belfast, a major outdoor, street-level festival organized in the city annually, with the Cathedral Quarter as its main hub. His discussion of knowledge gained in these roles, as well as my own engagement in and knowledge of the Cathedral Quarter gained through these various events, will further inform and enrich the ethnography that follows. Throughout this chapter, I use my account of the walking tour as a jumping-off point for discussing the ways in which temporalities and meanings accrue to places and materialities within the Cathedral Quarter, creating a unique time-space that is best experienced from ‘down below’ (de Certeau 1984: 93). I begin by presenting street art as community arts, suggesting that Belfast’s, and specifically the Cathedral Quarter’s, street art scene is both a localized response to Northern Ireland’s better-known political mural tradition and part of a transnationally recognizable orientation to postindustrial urban space. I explore the notion of street art as community art through two models: that of brecciation, a process whereby different meanings and temporal resonances coexist in the urban environment; and of co-creation, in which post-production street art serves as a crucial tool for individuals creating and articulating counterhegemonic views of the city, past, present, and future. Following this, I examine competing spatiotemporal narratives of the Cathedral Quarter through a non-linear series of ethnographic snapshots from the walking tour. These snapshots are loosely grouped into discussions of conflict, post-conflict, and post-postconflict narratives – which, it should be noted, do not map neatly onto past, present, and future time-spaces. These are compared to and enriched with accounts of other experiences in and knowledge of the Cathedral Quarter, gleaned from ethnographic research, interviews, and historical sources. Finally, I analyse these street art encounters through the lens of the cracked art world, suggesting that urban brecciation is a visual and physical form of the cracked art world (as opposed to simply a representation thereof), while also highlighting deep-rooted inequalities within urban space and the uneasiness of the post-post-conflict imaginary.

Street Art as Community Arts While surveying the murals in the car park, Adam tells us that one of the things that sets this apart from street art is that it is all ‘brush work’, while street art, at least in his opinion, is ‘aerosol’. He notes that he also sees a difference between street art and graffiti, but says he will get into that later. * * *

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Though we did not return explicitly to this question of definitions during the course of the walking tour, it is possible to piece together the local definition of street art, and how that fits into localized notions of community arts, by process of elimination. My goal here is not to set out a definitive understanding of street art everywhere, but rather to craft a rooted, embedded definition of what ‘street art’ means in the specific context of the Cathedral Quarter. While this understanding draws on notions of global street art and on perspectives developed elsewhere, it will ultimately be unique to Belfast and Northern Ireland, and to the community-arts art world therein; not all artists who paint walls in Belfast and beyond will agree with this typology. That Adam Turkington’s voice figures so prominently in discerning this definition is appropriate, given his central role in developing this particular street art scene. In this understanding, first of all, street art is necessarily differentiated from Northern Ireland’s well-documented political mural tradition. This follows the more general trend among community artists to distance themselves from practices perceived as sectarian or divisive, as discussed in Chapter 1; it also follows efforts by the state to ‘re-image’ Northern Ireland’s walls with images considered apolitical or non-divisive. One differentiator between the two types of art is the method of creation: ‘brush work’ for murals, ‘aerosol’ for street art. Another, more important point of differentiation is content. Street art, in this understanding, is detached from the ethnopolitical distinctions between Northern Ireland’s ‘two communities’. In its political leanings, or lack thereof, street art is further differentiated from what Adam referred to as ‘third way’ or ‘neutral’ murals – that is, political murals that comment from outside of the ‘two-community’ or ‘Orange-versus-Green’ binary, such as the paintings in the Duke of York car park. A key exception is the ‘Son of Protagoras’ piece discussed in the following section. Both street art pieces and third-way murals are, then, politically ‘neutral’, but the latter are more likely to be explicitly political, and more likely to comment on specific local history. In the pieces discussed during the walking tour, murals were also more likely to be visually complex and feature a lot of different elements, whereas street art pieces were more likely to focus on and elaborate a single image or scene. In its form, the tour itself also poses a sort of non-sectarian opposite to the city’s more famous black taxi tours, in which tourgoers are taken to various political murals, against which backdrop the history of the Troubles (and, at least in some cases, the post-Troubles period) is narrated (McDowell 2008). These are also extremely localized, but since they are not pedestrian activities they cover more ground and visit murals spaced more widely apart than the Cathedral Quarter tour. Street art is also necessarily differentiated from public art in this understanding. The term ‘public art’ is typically, though not exclusively, used to refer to state- and local-government-sponsored artworks in public space, and thus is more likely to represent hegemonic state interests than

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those of individual artists or local community members. Bree Hocking in particular has emphasized the top-down nature of public art, presenting an excellent analysis of state use of public art in Northern Ireland as a way of articulating visually ‘the state’s vision for urban space’, ‘the state’s vision of civic life’, and ‘the “type” of citizen desired for reconstructed spaces’ (2015: 3). In Belfast and Northern Ireland, the most prominent and visible forms of public art are the ‘re-imaged’ murals used to replace images seen as too political or divisive (see e.g. Hill and White 2012; Rolston 2010, 2012; Hocking 2015) and large sculptural works in public spaces (Ulmer 2017: 493). While public art is by no means apolitical, like the third-way murals contemporary public art projects in Northern Ireland tend to focus on images or symbols that depart from traditional depictions of or associated with the Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist community or the Catholic/ Nationalist/Republican community. The Cathedral Quarter’s street art, conversely, is perceived and portrayed as something entirely separate from state visions of urban space, and it tends as well to shy away from depictions of local history, the latter being a common theme for re-imaged mural works. History was very rarely the subject for Cathedral Quarter street art, with artists appearing to prefer contemporary or fantastic subjects. The most difficult distinction to make is that between street art and graffiti (cf. Ross 2016: 1–3), and here especially artists working on walls will likely hold a diversity of opinions. Within the context of the street art walking tour, graffiti was presented as ‘tagging’ – that is, as graffiti artists creating recognizable and repeatable texts or logos as a way of leaving their mark on urban space (A. Young 2012: 298). Street art, on the other hand, was more varied and more visual. Another issue in making this distinction was legality – or say, rather, permission. While street art is by no means always the result of a planned process, such was the case with all of the art we saw in the Cathedral Quarter. Each piece had been commissioned for and created during the Hit the North Festival, whereas graffiti or tagging was presented as a more illicit or covert act – as vandalism, in other words. With that said, though, Adam explained to us that he always set aside several Cathedral Quarter walls during Hit the North for local graffiti teams with whom he has built relationships, in order to ensure that they feel they have a place in the local street art scene, thus further blurring the lines between the two types of art. Furthermore, he argued, if graffiti artists are not made a part of the artistic conversation, they will join it anyway by tagging the works created during Hit the North. (Hit the North pieces were still tagged to varying degrees, and we saw several examples of this on the tour, ranging from small, barely noticeable tags to enormous pieces that completely covered the street art underneath. See the final section of this chapter for a description of one of these.) Street art, then, is perceived and framed in this specific context as an artistic act facilitated by an artistic event. It is also presented as a reaction to and conversation with the built urban environment. Within the specific

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realm of street art, Adam identified three types: aerosol paintings on walls; ‘paste-ups’, or paper posters affixed to walls; and ‘yarn bombing’, the wrapping of objects such as fences and lamp posts in knitted or crocheted lengths of textile (Haveri 2016). Aerosol paintings were by far the main focus of the tour, as this is Hit the North’s area of commissioning. However, Adam did point out paste-ups where they appeared, providing the artist’s name and other information where he knew it. He also drew our attention to a single piece of yarn bombing on the tour, a piece positioned just beneath the ceiling of an arched walkway, created by Belfast textile artist and yarn bomber Redhead Thread. The dearth of yarn bombing examples was likely due to the tour’s temporal distance from Culture Night, held annually in September, as Redhead Thread creates many of her yarn bombing pieces during and for that event. Given the organic nature of the materials used, it makes sense that yarn bombing creations would not hold up to the elements; that this piece persisted is likely due to its protected location, as well as its being overhead, generally out of reach of most pedestrians. Admittedly, this sort of artist-created street art does not fit with more traditional notions of community arts. In the space of production, the street art pieces align more closely with the realm of ‘fine art’, as the pieces are commissioned, curated, and single-authored (or, in the cases of street art teams, collectively authored by a unified, named group of artists). However, the emic perspective situates Hit the North and the resulting pieces squarely within the community-arts art world: Hit the North is co-sponsored by Community Arts Partnership, and has been since its first iteration in 2013; CAP holds workshops and specialized tours for youth and community groups to allow them to engage in the street art medium (CAP 2015b). Furthermore, Adam labels his work as community arts, and this is an important part of how he presents Hit the North and his many other artistic activities. In our interview, Adam described himself as a ‘curator’ with an explicitly community arts perspective, taking the accepted Northern Ireland definition of community arts as ‘access, participation, authorship, and ownership’ (see Chapter 1). He explained that he focuses on bringing together groups of people with shared interests – ‘building community’ – and on coordinating and curating events that allow for maximum inclusion. He argued, ‘Curating for me is empowerment. So what you do is you empower things that maybe aren’t accessible to people, and turn them into something that is accessible’. And this is where a processual perspective on community arts, one focused not just on the moment of creation but on the moments that follow, of co-creation and adaptation and (re)interpretation, is especially useful. If we look only at the moment of origination, of spraying paint onto a wall, then street art as created during Hit the North cannot be community arts. But community arts has never been exclusively about the act or product of creating an artwork; it is a process, and that process encompasses how the work is perceived and used after its creation. In the case of street art and

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Hit the North, the community-arts-ness of the thing lies primarily in the work’s post-production lives, in the ways in which the work is (re)mixed, (re)adapted, and (re)interpreted by others who dwell in and move through urban space. The street art walking tour is one component of this, as it presents a framework within which city dwellers, tourists, and other interested parties can interact with and dialogue about the works and their significance. This is the perspective that I will develop throughout the remainder of this chapter: that street art facilitates community arts encounters in urban spaces, and in so doing allows and empowers individual urban dwellers to reimagine and understand their city. In developing this approach, I utilize two key theoretical perspectives: brecciation and co-creation. Urban geographers and urban studies scholars have frequently used the notion of the ‘palimpsest’ to describe temporal coexistences in city landscapes. ‘Palimpsest’ traditionally refers to monastic scholarly products; as pieces of vellum were written upon, erased, and overwritten, traces of the original writing(s) could still be seen, creating a visual in which the most recent piece of work was layered over its predecessors. The older layers were still faintly visible, exerting some visuality in the present. As Nadia Bartolini puts it, ‘The palimpsest enables something that has disappeared from sight to resurrect; a trace to linger’ (2014: 520). The palimpsest-as-metaphor has been taken up by scholars of urban space to describe the ‘linger[ing]’ of the past in the present urban landscape: ‘Specifically, the metaphor of the palimpsest is useful to evoke the traces – both material and immaterial – left on the urban landscape and the impact that these might have on citizens’ (ibid.: 520–21). Contra this dominant metaphor, Bartolini suggests that urban spaces might be better described via the metaphor of ‘brecciation’ – a geological process whereby ‘sedimentary fragments from different origins … are consolidated or cemented together’ – to describe ways in which the ‘tangible past’ coexists and entangles with the tangible present (2014: 523). She writes, ‘Brecciation, therefore, suggests that there may be more to urban sites than hidden traces and linear formation. It considers places where tangible evidence of the past resurfaces in the most innocuous positions and awkward spaces’ (ibid.: 524). I would like to suggest that Bartolini’s point can be taken even further, and that to the ‘tangible’ past and present we might add the intangible, and the future. Thus, we might include in brecciation such intangible and affective aspects as memories, affects, emotions, hopes, and desires. The urban landscape, then, is layered, but not neatly; pieces of the past break through into other times, both visible and ghostlike, and visions of the future cast their shadow over the present. In the case of Belfast, this means that urban places are not only simultaneously past, present, and future city; they are also simultaneously entangled in experiences, visions, and affects of conflict, post-conflict, and post-post-conflict. Brecciation is not, however, an objective process, a thing that exists in a vacuum. Urban brecciations, and the tangible and intangible markers

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of past and future that comprise them, are negotiated and reimagined by those who use urban spaces, and street art is no exception. Martin Zebracki and Joni Palmer refer to this in their work on public art as ‘everyday cocreation’, writing, Co-creation may involve mental appropriations (e.g. endorsement, rejection) and physical actions (e.g. tactile interactions, or even vandalising) … Co-creation could ambiguously reveal support and resistance to hegemonic conventions of commissioned artworks and provide bottom-up, unsolicited curatorship. This alternative condition can unsettle official frameworks of public art production and, accordingly, deconstruct conformist dichotomies between expert and layperson, public and private, legal and illegal, and so on. (2018: 4)

Street art provides a means through which these acts of co-creation, of making the city, can be effected. It is not the only means, and it interacts with other tangible and intangible features of the urban landscape, as I detail throughout this chapter. Street art is, however, a hypervisual aspect of the landscape, particularly on the scale of whole walls (its usual scale in this setting) and given the high prevalence at which it is seen in the Cathedral Quarter. It stands out, it confronts, and in so doing it has the power to prompt reaction, interpretation, and even appropriation within its viewers. While such co-creations are not necessarily counterhegemonic, they provide a space in which counterhegemonic narratives can be developed and articulated from the bottom up. Street art narratives like these can call into question the state’s and the city’s understandings of and visions for Belfast’s city centre spaces in the twenty-first century. The street art walking tour provided one such context in which participants could reimagine and co-create the urban spaces of the Cathedral Quarter and the art that adorns its walls, though one that is perhaps somewhat circumscribed by the authority-led, curated nature of the walk (Andron 2018). There was certainly a ‘public transcript’ (Scott 1990) in the form of the stories Adam told about the pieces’ creation; in addition to his authority as tour guide, Adam holds further authority in his role as facilitator and commissioner for many of these works, and thus his interpretation carries much weight in how these pieces are viewed and interpreted by viewers during the tour. One way of viewing the street art walking tour would be to understand it as a sort of primer in understanding the local community-arts art world; the Cathedral Quarter and its relatively new profusion of street art form a vital part of that art world, and the tour provided (us) participants with a view into that world. In that respect, whether or not the walking tour is a community arts action, it is community arts by virtue of being part of, and accepted by, the community-arts art world. Moreover, while critiques such as Andron’s (2018) are vital in unpacking the uneven legitimization of street art and the complex relationships between street art scenes and state- and developer-led gentrification (see also McAuliffe 2012; A. Young 2012), these critiques do not appear to take into account

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the more complex ways in which viewers take in, synthesize, and improvise upon the hegemonic, public transcripts of such tours. Participants can, as Zebracki and Palmer point out, ‘endorse’ or ‘reject’ proffered interpretations or provide their own (2018: 4); they are active agents in these acts of interpretation, even where their participation is hidden or overshadowed by more dominant voices. The informal nature of the tour, including significant time spent walking without the guide speaking, allowed for participants to discuss with each other, sharing their own knowledge and potentially creating their own, alternative meanings for the pieces. These meanings were further complexified by the varied backgrounds of the attendees. Some were long-term Belfast residents, at least one of whom had significant knowledge of the art world and the Cathedral Quarter: at one point, she clarified the timing of an older piece of street art that Adam pointed out, and of whose date he was uncertain. Others, including myself, were more recent immigrants; one participant with whom I spoke several times told me that she had only recently moved to the city for work, and that she was exploring her new home on her days off. Still others were tourists, like the European woman I encountered at the start of the tour, who paired this with consuming more standard or ‘traditional’ performances of (Northern) Irishness during her visit to the city. As co-creation interacts with and is facilitated by these varying levels of knowledge or experience of localized urban space, it is also drawn into the complex web of conflict, post-conflict, and post-post-conflict meanings. These imaginaries all have traces in the urban environment and in the knowledge of urban co-creators. Vestiges of Belfast’s conflict and post-conflict pasts bump up against one another in the Cathedral Quarter, alongside traces and imaginings of its post-post-conflict present and future. Conflict, post-conflict, and post-post-conflict are brecciated; they are intimately bound up in this process of meanings layering, overlapping, and accruing to urban spaces, and they are implicated in the narratives that city dwellers, walkers, and visitors tell about the spaces in and through which they move. It is this particular aspect of brecciation that I seek to plumb in the sections that follow. Street art in the Cathedral Quarter highlights, I argue, the ways in which the conflict, post-conflict, and post-post-conflict imaginaries both compete and coexist in visual and geographical space.

‘The Fences Get in the Way’: Conflict Narratives Adam takes us to the gates at the edge of a small car park. We have to peer through the bars to see the next artwork. Adam tells us that he holds the tour on Sunday afternoons because all the shop fronts are down, and thus the art on their shutters is visible; but the downside, he tells us, is that this car park is closed off and we can’t get any closer. He spends a long time talking about this piece, titled ‘Son of Protagoras’, painted by French street artist MTO. He explains

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Figure 4.2  MTO, ‘Son of Protagoras’. Image permission received from Extramural Activity.

that MTO’s method of working involves staying in a place for a while, taking its pulse, before he decides what to paint. This painting is the result of this sort of artistic ‘residency’ in Belfast. Adam explains that Protagoras was essentially the original agnostic, one of the first to write that he saw no evidence for the existence of God. This painting, then, he says, is a commentary on how the artist views religion as a negative influence in the Northern Ireland context. He adds that MTO told him that the symbols on the two arrows piercing the dove – ‘the dove of peace’ – are those of the Catholic and Protestant churches, respectively. When writing up my fieldnotes, I search for this work online to ensure I have correctly spelled the ancient philosopher’s name. A post about the image from Northern Ireland mural and street art blog Extramural Activity bears the line, ‘[A]s the wide shot below illustrates, the fences get in the way’ (2014; Figure 4.2). * * * The ‘ring of steel’ ran through this area during the Troubles – the militarized barrier first erected in July 1972 to protect the city centre, then as now primarily a commercial and retail area, from Troubles-era violence, particularly car bombings (S. Brown 1985: 3). It would, in fact, have run very near to the wall where ‘Son of Protagoras’ can be found. Both the description and purpose of the ring of steel mirror those of Belfast’s better-known and

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longer-lasting patchwork of peace walls and gates that reduce, direct, and at times police the movement of people between primarily Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods. Political murals on the peace walls have become key tourist destinations; well-known examples include the ‘International Wall’ on the Falls Road, on which artists paint rotating images expressing solidarity with various international political struggles alongside those expressing support for the Nationalist/Republican cause; and the wall in Cupar Way, on which tourists have for years scrawled pleas and prayers for peace over and around larger painted works. Conflict narratives are nearly always close to hand in Northern Ireland’s urban landscapes, whether in tangible form, as plaques, political murals or graffiti, flags, or painted kerbstones (Bryan and Stevenson 2009); intangible, in the form of memories of conflict and its victims (DeYoung 2018); or internalized, embodied forms of response to the environment that are learned during conflict and may never fully recede (Mazzetti 2018: 53). Thus it is no surprise that conflict narratives have worked their way into the local street art; conflict is one crucial component that has shaped the local urban environment, both its physicality and its people. A few months after the walking tour, I interviewed Marilyn Hyndman of Northern Visions/NVTV, a local community film and television organization and a well-established presence in the community-arts art world. NVTV is headquartered in the Cathedral Quarter, and has been since its inception. Of working in what is now the Cathedral Quarter, she told me, Well I personally and others who became Northern Visions had been part of what was called the Belfast Arts Lab at that time. It was at the top of, St Patrick’s Cathedral I think it’s called, and Donegall Street, it was at the top there. … So remember that Belfast at this time, you know there’s bombs everywhere. You know it was a very grim time for the city, and it was close to North Belfast, the New Lodge and so forth, and those areas which were, you know, undergoing really tremendous change in terms of violence and the Troubles and so forth.

She went on to describe Northern Visions’ incorporation in 1986, and their headquartering in a second Cathedral Quarter building on Donegall Street Place. She specifically described this location to me in relation to the ring of steel: And this area as well in 1991, you know was again grim, because it was the area outside of the ring of steel of the city centre. So all the bombs were left here and, if you look at some of the statistics that you know it was the most bombed place, basically, in the city. Cause they could get no further, they couldn’t get beyond, you know, the security barriers and so forth.

As discussed in Chapter 1, the history of Northern Ireland’s communityarts art world is closely bound up with its history of conflict. Troubles-era conflict forms both the backdrop and the rationale for the particular history of community arts, both within Northern Ireland at large and within

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the Cathedral Quarter specifically. It was the conflict that drove arts organizations to headquarter here in the first place, in the 1970s and 1980s. Northern Visions was one of the first. Photography collective Belfast Exposed, which now shares a building on Donegall Street with Northern Visions, followed in the mid-1980s. Originally founded and headquartered at Conway Mill in Catholic West Belfast, the photography organization was, Hélène Hamayon-Alfaro reports, forced to ‘mov[e] to the city centre to keep its governmental funding’, as Conway Mill ‘was branded as a nationalist stronghold and suspected of entertaining close ties with Republican groups’ (Hamayon-Alfaro 2012: 46; see also Belfast Exposed 2018). The conscientious display of political neutrality is still visible in some of today’s Cathedral Quarter shops (Skoura 2019: 56), signalling that for many it is meant to be a place separate from Northern Ireland’s ethnopolitical divide. Thus, while the Cathedral Quarter cannot escape the vestiges of the conflict imaginary, it has long been a site for projecting and locating a post-conflict spatial orientation, and this has certainly boosted its perceived relevance to the community-arts art world.

‘Listed, At Risk, In Danger from Development’: Post-Conflict Narratives We are standing on Donegall Street, near the building that houses Northern Visions and Belfast Exposed. We are very near a number of other major players in the local art world, such as Community Arts Partnership and PS2. Adam points to an abandoned building across the street, the entire façade of which has been covered by an enormous artwork two stories tall. Against a dark grey background, a woman sits surrounded by animals. The colours are soft and the rendering simple, lending the piece a calm feeling. At the top of this, on either side of the woman’s head, are white vertical signs reading ‘ARCADE’ in red text. Adam tells us that this building was once ‘The Arcade’, or the North Street Arcade. It was bought up about fifteen years ago, along with most of the rest of this block, and in fact most of the spaces we are going to traverse during this tour. This was before nearby shopping centre Victoria Square was constructed, he tells us. He says that the development company that owns it wants to build a massive shopping centre here, not unlike Victoria Square, but it hasn’t happened yet. He says they ran into trouble with this building: because it is a ‘listed building’, protected by the government as having particular historical and architectural value, they are supposed to keep it in the state in which they bought it. After the building caught fire in 2004, he says that many people believed the developers burned it down so that they would be able to demolish it. He tells us that as a result the Arcade has sat here empty and boarded up for the past fifteen years. He adds that, as he has spent a lot of time working in the Cathedral Quarter during those intervening years, he can attest that the whole place would feel very different if people were given pedestrian access through the Arcade.

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He then tells us that this artwork has another layer, one that is not immediately apparent unless you know what the area was like fifteen years ago. He says that there was a pet shop in the Arcade, and when the fire happened all the animals inside perished, ‘burned alive’. This work, then, is intended as a ‘tribute’ to the animals that were killed in the North Street Arcade fire. As we walk on, the young woman walking next to me, the one who recently moved to Belfast for a job, strikes up a conversation. She tells me that when she originally saw this painting with the woman and the animals, she didn’t like it; she thought the style was too simplistic, almost childish. However, she says, she likes it now, now that she knows the story and the meaning behind it. * * * Built in the 1930s, the North Street Arcade is an Art Deco-style building with entries on both of the Cathedral Quarter’s main routes: North Street and Donegall Street. Thus, during its time it served as both retail space and pedestrian thoroughfare, increasing walkers’ ability to navigate through Cathedral Quarter spaces. Like most retail spaces in the city centre, the Arcade suffered during the Troubles, not least because it was the site of a 1971 bombing (Martire 2019: 339). However, as Agustina Martire writes, ‘the building had a resurgence in the early 2000s, when the arts community shared the space with small retailers. By 2004 the arcade was practically fully occupied’ (ibid.). I suggest that this lived memory of the North Street Arcade as a thriving hub for arts organizations, creative industries, and small retailers is crucial to the art world’s deep personal investment in, and valorization of, the Cathedral Quarter. I believe it represents for them, in many ways, what a positive, community-arts-led city could look like. It also stands in stark opposition to top-down narratives of ‘development’ and ‘regeneration’ that have dominated recent changes to the city centre skyline. A year and a half later, in November 2017, neighbouring buildings in the Cathedral Quarter burn down on back-to-back nights. One had, until recently, been the home of PS2 (‘P-S squared’), an established Cathedral Quarter gallery and key launching pad for young artists and experimental artwork. Many locals suspect arson, pointing the finger at owners Castlebrooke Investments, who recently applied to have a block of buildings in the area demolished, including the two that burned (e.g. UAH 2017). Less than a year after that, in August 2018, I am sitting in a drab city centre office building working a post-PhD temp job when a co-worker just returned from lunch break announces that Primark is on fire. From the windows on the far side of the room, we can see large clouds of smoke billowing over the top of City Hall. As with the Cathedral Quarter fires of the previous autumn, Belfast’s Primark – a chain retailer that sells inexpensive clothing and home goods – is located in a historic, listed building, this one over two hundred years old. The fire burns for three days, and for weeks after the building sits empty, a blackened, hollowed-out shell leering down on the city streets (BBC News 2019b). While there does not appear to be an official ruling of

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arson, many local residents, including many within the artistic community, point to similarities between this fire and others that have occurred in the city’s historic buildings. The unofficial ruling is that this is the next in a string of targeted destructions of urban built heritage, deliberately set to make way for yet another modern shopping centre that will undoubtedly, my research participants say, be soulless and ugly, lacking its predecessors’ roots in Belfast’s history. It is incredibly telling that, while searching the internet for news articles about the fires to cite in this paragraph, I found records of yet another Cathedral Quarter arson (this one officially ruled so by the Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service), which occurred in September 2019, and of which I had not been previously aware (BBC News 2019a). At the bottom of Donegall Street, we round the corner towards North Street – the only way to navigate between the two thoroughfares after the closing of the Arcade all those years ago. As we pass the beige-coloured edifice that sits abandoned on that corner, one of the men in the group points out recent graffiti on that building that reads ‘BALLS DEEP’, asking jokingly whether Adam knows the meaning behind that. Adam laughs and jokes back that he doesn’t know anything about that piece and can’t really speak to its meaning. However, he takes the opportunity to call our attention to the building itself. Adam notes that it is one of the most important historical buildings in the city centre. He tells us that this too is a listed building, and it is owned by the same development company that owns the Arcade and most of the other spaces around here. He says that they appear to have tried a different tack with this one by letting it rot, as they have let the roof fall into such a bad state of disrepair that there is now severe water damage inside. After the walking tour, I search for the building’s name on the internet to add some context to my fieldnotes. My search yields the building’s name, the Assembly Rooms, and a date of initial construction: 1769. The building has a rich history as a financial centre and an important piece of architectural history, having been designed and redesigned by a series of prominent architects. The Ulster Architectural Heritage Society’s online listing for the Assembly Rooms categorizes the building as ‘Listed, At Risk, In Danger from Development’ (UAH 2020). When I first heard the story of the North Street Arcade fire and the notion that the fire was set by developers, I chalked it up to a local conspiracy theory – a way of making sense of the sudden loss of a place with deep local importance to the community and the art world. Having heard it consistently throughout (and after) my fieldwork, though, and from a diverse variety of art world members – members whom, it should be noted, are not generally prone to conspiracy theories – and when I myself began to witness the suspicious pattern of arsons in historical buildings that I have recounted here, I realized that the argument had merit. This narrative of the fires is not new. Graffiti photographed on the same site in July 2004, long

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Figure 4.3  Graffiti on North Street Arcade, Donegall Street, Belfast, July 2004. Photo by icanseeformilesandmiles, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

before the current street art was spray-painted there, reads, ‘Who burnt us out? People before profit’, and, in a similar reference to the animals killed by the fire, ‘Fat cats get fatter[,] put the kittens out in the cold’ (Figure 4.3). While neither I nor my research participants can, of course, say with absolute certainty that the fires are part of a larger scheme to streamline retail-led regeneration in the area, the notion certainly meshes with their and my experiences of how urban development and regeneration efforts are effected in Belfast: from above, via public-private corporate partnerships, with relatively little input from local residents who use the space, and in ways that ‘promot[e] an idealized vision of citizen as consumer-tourist’ (Hocking 2015: 9). Efforts to portray Northern Ireland, and in particular Belfast’s city centre, as post-conflict and ‘open for business’ (Hocking 2015: 31; Baker 2020: 14) date to the early decades of the Troubles. Andrew McClelland describes a 1976 push to attract investors and property developers, wherein the Northern Ireland Department of Finance argued that ‘there is now considerably more construction than destruction’ in the region (McClelland 2016: 376). Stephen Brown, meanwhile, writes in detail of the ‘open[ing] up’ of the city centre that occurred between 1976 and 1980 (1985: 6).2 What Brown refers to as the further ‘revitalisation’ of the city centre in the early 1980s was tellingly retail- and developer-led, dominated by ‘the proposal,

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by a consortium of British property developers, to build a major (350 000 square ft) shopping complex in the Smithfield area of the city centre’ (ibid.). (The proposal did go ahead, resulting in the CastleCourt Shopping Centre; Coyles 2013: 338; McClelland 2016: 378–81). This strategy continued in the early 1990s, when Belfast City Council advertisements portraying ‘happy shoppers on the street’ depicted ‘an imagined place abounding with images of normal consumer lifestyle, [which] paid scant regard to the common experience of shoppers in a commercial centre blighted with terrorist incidents’ (Coyles 2013: 333). Retail-led regeneration has continued as a core strategy, and in the post-Troubles era these efforts have become intimately bound up with post-conflict narratives. Hocking identifies the public-private Laganside Corporation as the first player in this scene, beginning in the late 1980s (2015: 30). Laganside is, in fact, credited with first codifying and ‘formally establish[ing]’ the Cathedral Quarter as a specific urban area (CQB 2020); the moniker ‘Cathedral Quarter’ is itself a product of Laganside’s regeneration efforts, replacing the area’s prior designation as the ‘Half Bap’ (Mitchell and Kelly 2011: 314). Laganside was also responsible for major post-ceasefire and post-Troubles elements of the Belfast cityscape, including shopping centre Victoria Square, performance venues Odyssey Arena and Waterfront Hall, and the early stages of the Titanic Quarter, which lies east across the Lagan River from the city centre (Hocking 2015: 30–36; Boland, Bronte, and Muir 2017: 120–22).3 Waterfront Hall and Victoria Square, both of which feature large glass elements as crucial parts of their architecture, were identified by my research participants as particularly indicative of the move to post-conflict-ness. Glass, they argued, made for poor conflict architecture, as it was easily damaged by (and capable of causing further damage as a result of) bombings. (Their analysis is echoed by scholars writing on Belfast’s cityscapes; see e.g. Coyles 2013: 338–39). However, they also saw this as a sign of sameness and non-localization, for glass is architecturally very popular in many other cities, as evidenced by, for example, the London skyline. This is what Hocking refers to, after Castells, as the ‘civic identikit of place’: ‘largely abstract work overlaid with location-specific narratives or heritage references intended to add an element of local flavour or place identity to the work’ (Hocking 2015: 7–8). The civic identikit of place reached its zenith with the 2018 unveiling of Castlebrooke Investments’ video detailing their vision for the Cathedral Quarter, in which they revealed the new moniker chosen for the development: Tribeca, named not for any local distinguishing features, but for a distant, unrelated place an ocean away (Halliday 2018; Baker 2020). Stephen Baker writes that ‘Castlebrooke’s Tribeca promo [video] offers a glimpse of a sterile corporate imagination, advancing a version of capitalist cosmopolitanism emptied of civic and noncommodified bonds of solidarity’ (2020: 23) – a potent antithesis to the localized focus of community arts practices.

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Consistent throughout these various phases of urban development strategy is the notion of commercialization as panacea to the conflict and its legacies, and as a signifier of post-conflict status (Ramsey 2013: 165–68). Andrew Grounds and Brendan Murtagh describe this as a form of ‘Disneyfication’ (cf. Harris 2005: 49–53), whereby the state attempts ‘to distract investors and tourists from local patterns of segregation and territorial division’ – that is, from the visual manifestations of conflict (Grounds and Murtagh 2015: 1). The official line of thinking, it seems, is that to be post-conflict is to be commercialized, and to be commercialized is to be post-conflict; or, as Phil Ramsey fittingly renders it, Following the GFA [Good Friday Agreement] and the St. Andrews [A]greement, the setting up of the power sharing institutions and relative peace, there is an agreed interpretation: today, normal societies spend money. The best way to reach conflict resolution is to turn the antagonists into consumers. Rather than fighting on the streets, Northern Ireland’s people ought to be fighting for the best bargains in the aisles. (2013: 175)

Commercialization is, in this line of thinking, the core plank in the ‘post’ of ‘post-conflict’. This neoliberal, hypercommercial approach, which prioritizes and valorizes the investor and the consumer – as well as the tourist, who, as an outsider who must pay their own way, is something of a combination of the two – leaves little room for the non-commercial or less commercially driven aims of community arts. Small wonder, then, that these redevelopment strategies have been so consistently opposed by the community-arts art world. As Baker points out, Castlebrooke’s Tribeca video, indicative of this trend more broadly, implies that the Cathedral Quarter’s true residents are the middle-class and elite ‘mobile professional class, waited upon and entertained by subservient locals’ (2020: 13) – an understanding of belonging harshly antithetical to the deeply localized practices and understandings of community arts. That the street art walking tour became a site for the performance of an alternative, anti-development narrative is important, and telling. Far from an ‘objective’ or non-reflexive tour guide (Andron 2018: 1038–39), Adam presented himself as one deeply invested in the particular spaces of the Cathedral Quarter, as well as someone who has played a key role in shaping the visuality of those spaces. His personal investment in the area was evident in his clear enthusiasm for the art around him: unlike the tour guides discussed by Andron (2018), Adam did not selectively pick and choose on which artworks to comment, but instead pointed out virtually every piece of street art we passed during the tour.4 The pedestrian format of the tour provided an opportunity for participants to form their own affective bonds with the spaces by interacting with the artworks, the architecture, and the street layout in a physical, embodied form, rather than from a distance or simply while passing through. The walking tour provided Adam with a platform from which to share his exuberant love for the Cathedral Quarter, to

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critique the post-conflict developer vision for civic identikit commercialization, and to put forth the post-post-conflict vision that he shares with many in the community-arts art world.

‘Million-Pound Penthouses’: Post-Post-Conflict Narratives Over on North Street, as the walking tour nears its end, Adam points out the other entrance to the Arcade. Here, parts of the buildings still bear the marks of the fire, while their neighbours sit derelict and empty (Figure 4.4). Nearby, he also points out the former location of the Loft Collective, which he tells us was recently evicted, and thus dissolved, due to developer demands. He tells us that the developers want to knock all these buildings down to build student housing. He sees this as ridiculous, noting that they could instead put ‘million-pound penthouses’ in these old buildings. He tells us that the insides of the buildings are beautiful and unique, which would add to their value as expensive lofts, flats, or penthouses, though the architecture has been allowed to fall into disrepair through neglect and the buildings sitting empty for so long. He says that turning historic city centre buildings like these into expensive housing is what is done in many other cities, and he doesn’t understand why Belfast won’t follow suit. ***

Figure 4.4  Historical buildings sit empty and derelict on North Street in the Cathedral Quarter. Belfast, 28 February 2016. © Kayla Rush.

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The discourses of the community-arts art world do more than simply oppose the top-down, post-conflict development narratives put forth by the state and private corporations; they also work to advance their own vision for the future of the Cathedral Quarter, a vision that is decidedly post-post-conflict. The street art walking tour was ultimately, I argue, a post-post-conflict performance – a space in which to articulate and demarcate a post-postconflict vision for the city. In Adam’s performance, a crucial pillar of postpost-conflict-ness is Belfast’s potential to be a global city – a city not unlike others in Europe, with the availability of similar cultural offerings (cultural offerings that would be more obvious, and better received, were the art world not hamstrung by backward-looking state policies; see Chapters 1 and 5). This is, I suggest, why Adam mentioned theoretical ‘million-pound penthouses’: not as a pro-gentrification argument, but rather as a rhetorical device that asks, essentially, ‘Why can’t we be like other European cities?’ (Or perhaps more bluntly, ‘Why can’t we be normal?’) The post-conflict imaginary in and for Northern Ireland is uneasy at the best of times (see Chapter 1). The occasional outbursts of violence, the rather volatile power-sharing arrangement, and ongoing segregation in housing and education all serve as constant reminders that the conflict is perhaps not quite so distant as it might seem. Northern Ireland’s particular history and the enduring remnants of conflict have complicated the region’s entry into global markets and the global cultural sphere. In his book on contemporary art in Northern Ireland after 1998, which he terms ‘postTroubles’ instead of ‘post-conflict’, Declan Long address this particular dilemma, looking at how contemporary artists in Northern Ireland must balance a globalized outlook with the unique particularity of their locale. He writes, ‘This is a situation of aftermath that involves both the pressure to move on and the related repression of much that cannot fit within the dominant discourse of progress’ (2017: 200–1). The uneasiness of post-conflict-ness makes any efforts to paint the region as post-post-conflict even more precarious still. And yet, paradoxically, this movement to post-post-conflict-ness in thought and imagination is also in many ways necessary for the region, as it allows more space for acknowledging Northern Ireland’s growing diversity, as well as the many ways in which the region is unique that have nothing to do with the conflict at all. And this is precisely why the post-post-conflict designator is so ambiguous, for these very things that it promotes are easily co-opted for more simplistic purposes of top-down development or urban and regional boosterism: for example, Northern Ireland’s distinctive landscape features such as the Giant’s Causeway become a selling point for international tourism, even as they sit alongside ‘dark’ tourism that tells the story of the conflict (McDowell 2008). As such, the post-post-conflict imaginary can easily, uncarefully – but also unstraightforwardly – merge with its post-conflict opposite. This is evident in Adam’s statement about converting the Cathedral Quarter’s

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historic buildings into expensive housing for upper-middle-class urban residents: how do artists promote investment in an area that has been consistently – and, it appears, intentionally – driven into ruin, without promoting or becoming agents of gentrification? How do they take and develop the relatively new designation of ‘Cathedral Quarter’ for their own, without parroting the aims of the name’s originators? In this, art world members walk a fine line, one that they carefully mark out in their discourses and performances, of which the street art walking tour is one. Crucial to differentiating community-arts art world members’ post-post-conflict visions from the top-down development narratives of the state and its agents is the focus on locality and community – in other words, on bringing a community arts ethos to bear on ideas of what the Cathedral Quarter is and how it might be remade. Community arts organizations have consistently led the way in pushing back against the post-conflict development narrative. One of the first iterations of this protest movement came in 2004, in the form of the Let’s Get It Right campaign, ‘which aimed to push forward the sensitive and successful development of the area’, as opposed to the retail proposal of the time, which community arts advocates felt did not respond to the area’s particular identity and needs (Floyd et al. 2013: 48; see also Grounds and Murtagh 2015: 6–7). That the Let’s Get It Right campaign features prominently in CAP’s self-produced histories of itself (Floyd et al. 2013; CAP 2017) is telling, demonstrating the integral links between the community-arts art world and the spaces of the Cathedral Quarter. In the years immediately following the Let’s Get It Right campaign, CAP predecessor New Belfast Community Arts Initiative put forth a proposal to develop a community arts centre in the Assembly Rooms, citing the building’s historical significance as a place of meeting as well suited to community arts aims (Floyd et al. 2013: 54; CAP 2017). As current developer Castlebrooke Investments has made moves to begin building its ‘Tribeca’, the protest has re-emerged under the banner of voluntary organization Save the Cathedral Quarter, or ‘Save CQ’, founded in 2017 (Martire 2018: 282). In Save CQ, community arts groups and other organizations headquartered in the area have joined forces with academics, including architecture students in the ‘StreetSpace’ module at Queen’s University Belfast, to make a robust case for a more localized, mixed-use approach to (re)developing the area, one that accounts for its history and the needs of the individuals, businesses, and organizations already located there (Martire 2018, 2019). Adam shared his own interpretation of these aims in our interview, speaking specifically to the recent spate of plans for high-rise student housing in the city centre. He said, ‘Now I don’t – it’s not a NIMBY thing. I don’t want students – I’d rather have them spread out over the city. What we need is we need families and young professionals and elderly people living in the city centre as well. We don’t just need students living in the city centre’ (emphasis his). While there are no immediate plans to erect student

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housing in the Cathedral Quarter, the recent large-scale expansion of Ulster University’s Belfast campus on York Street (the north-western edge of the Cathedral Quarter, as marked out in Figure 4.1) has significantly altered the surrounding landscape and is certainly on art world members’ minds.5 Moreover, Adam’s statement speaks more broadly to concerns about housing provision and other uses of city centre space. Student housing is one form of ‘civic identikit of place’ development, and it often functionally serves to separate students from local communities by enclosing them in purpose-built high-rises, separate from other forms of urban living such as family homes. The concentration of students in urban areas, especially when segregated into ‘studentified’ spaces, is occurring globally and has been associated with ‘the displacement of permanent residents’ (Revington et al. 2020: 189). Save CQ words their vision similarly, condemning current developer plans as envisioning a uniform, upper-middle-class, and non-family-oriented workforce living in this space. ‘Housing and community’ is the first area of concern addressed in the Save CQ briefing document; a portion of this section speaks to the mismatch between developer aims and community and protest aims: The residential provision proposed for the tower at the corner of Rosemary Street, Bridge Street and North Street is ‘around 150 apartments’ – this prioritises private profit over local concerns. The housing is confined to 1 & 2 bed apartments, and is all private with no social or affordable housing provision made. This goes against good planning principles of mixed tenure housing. We want to see social housing integrated into the scheme as an integral part. Mixed tenure housing is important to creating balanced communities and shared spaces, as well as to alleviate the current housing crisis … From the information given in the planning application there is no provision for families, and no consideration of the health and wellbeing of older people that may wish to live here, as well as the need for play spaces for young people. (Save CQ 2017: 4)

Mixing ‘social, affordable and private housing’, the document contends, ‘ensure[s] that a balanced, diverse, and resilient community is created’ (ibid.). The post-post-conflict vision articulated both during the street art walking tour and by Save CQ is thus not only led predominantly by art world members, but is also strongly influenced by a particular community arts vision of urban life – one built of diverse communities rooted in place, and one that serves the needs of those communities. This vision was well articulated by a speaker at a Culture Night-organized event in May 2015, which was set up to facilitate formal and informal dialogues about the city; this particular event, one of five in a series, focused on the topic of art. The final speaker that day was an architect associated with the Forum for Alternative Belfast (see Sterrett, Hackett, and Hill 2011). He told those of us assembled that 40 per cent of a city’s economy is comprised of ‘mundane things’, everyday needs such as food and utilities. He said that Richard Florida’s

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(2002) popular ‘creative class’ theory means that ‘a lot of us feel trapped in that’ – that is, enslaved to the notion of building a creative city – while the ‘mundane’ 40 per cent have ‘no control over a city’s destiny’. For him, however, ‘It is mundane but it [the mundane] is the thing we need the most’. And this is what ultimately makes the post-post-conflict narrative. It is a narrative rooted in the unspectacular and the quotidian. Just as during the Troubles the ‘mundane things’ described by this architect continued to need to occur (though they were at times disrupted by the conflict), so the mundane needs of urban dwellers persist against the backdrop of state- and developer-led regeneration projects. A successful city, in this imaginary, is not necessarily one that attracts international tourists or an international mobile class, but rather one that meets the everyday, mundane needs of its residents and the communities in which they live.

Street Art in and as the Cracked Art World We round the corner into the top of North Street. Next up is a piece I recognize from having seen it online: a detailed image of a character from the television show Sons of Anarchy against a vibrant red background. In the middle of the man’s forehead, a bright red dot like a bullet wound. Where the rest of the lines are straight and crisp, the bullet wound is raw, leaking small drips of the red spray paint that inflicted it (Figure 4.5). Adam tells us that the artist behind this work, who goes by the name Visual Waste, is a stencil artist, meaning he uses stencils to lay out his images as opposed to freehand spray-painting. Adam explains that there is some tension in the street art world over whether stencil art truly counts. The painted-on bullet wound, he tells us, is ‘beef’ from other artists. A man in the group asks Adam what he means by ‘beef’, and together they come up with the word ‘umbrage’ as a suitable alternative. It appears that because of this, stencil pieces are more often targeted by taggers; we see a few other examples on the tour, including a piece that has been covered entirely by a massive tag. Adam tells us that Visual Waste really likes the bullet-wound addition to this work, as he thinks it adds ‘layers’ of story and meaning. He mentions that a few of the other, non-stencil pieces here on North Street were also tagged – he uses the term ‘defaced’ – and had to be painted over. Someone in the group asks how the street artists feel if their works are tagged, or if their pieces are replaced by others during subsequent Hit the North festivals. Adam replies that the artists don’t really mind, as their main currency is in the photographs of the projects, rather than the artworks themselves. He says that it is important to them that they photograph their work and share it on Instagram, but that he suspects most won’t care when their pieces are eventually destroyed or painted over. He adds that the people who really care are the local residents and others who see and interact with the images on an everyday basis, as opposed to the works’ creators.6 * * *

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Figure 4.5  Unnamed street artwork by Visual Waste depicting character Jax Teller from Sons of Anarchy, overlaid with a bullet wound from an anonymous tagger. North Street, Belfast, 28 February 2016. © Kayla Rush.

Urban brecciation, this uneven process of the layering of meanings and temporalities in city spaces, can be taken as a visual representation of the cracked art world. However, I maintain that it is much more than that: urban spaces are the cracked art world, or at least a very significant portion thereof. The contestations that take place on walls, the layering of images, the charred edges of historical buildings set ablaze and allowed to fall into disrepair – these are not a representation, but a manifestation; not a consubstantiation, but a transubstantiation. Cathedral Quarter stakeholders vie for visual, spatial, and physical dominance, just as they compete to exert their wills and narratives in the realms of ideology and policy. As a cracked art world, then, urban spaces are in constant states of being made, unmade, and remade. The Cathedral Quarter, and Belfast City Centre more generally, have long been in a period of unmaking. The Troubles were a key player in this: after all, few things unmake urban space more quickly than a bomb. There is also the general emptying out of the city that occurred during the conflict, especially in inner-city areas, as those who could fled for spaces perceived as safer (Sterrett, Hackett, and Hill 2011: 101). The further destruction of historic buildings, whether intentional or not, is yet another piece of the unmaking puzzle. The different forms of unmaking are each the results of different aims or goals; the cracks that appear in plaster

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or in windowpanes are the tangible manifestations of social cracks in the art world – between developers and the state (who, as noted, have tended to side together), artists and art world members, architects and advocates for built heritage, and those who run the small shops that continue to survive in this space (see Skoura 2019). The most obviously felt crack at the moment, though, is the deeply entrenched battle over how the Cathedral Quarter is to be remade. At this point in time, repair among the wildly different views seems deeply unlikely. On the one hand, there is the by-now standardized post-conflict vision of the state and its chosen public-private development corporations. This postconflict vision is itself a form of repair, inasmuch as it is an attempt to find non-divisive ways of dwelling in urban space – a ‘desire to paper over the social cracks’ (Baker 2020: 23). The issue that artists and other advocates have is with the type of repair: it is not a relational repair, nor one born of care, but rather a plastering over of a crack whose roots run much deeper – a band-aid on a seeping wound. And this form of post-conflict repair is particularly ripe for creating further cracks in its wake, as we can see in the protest responses from Save CQ and other organizations. Contra the post-conflict state narrative of Cathedral Quarter repair is the protest response led by artists, architects, and community arts organizations. In its discourses, this post-post-conflict imaginary positions itself as more relationally and locally positioned. In the visual cracked art world of urban spaces, this takes the form of unique, vibrant street artworks. This side also advocates for the retention of the historical urban landscape, one to which residents have long-standing attachments and in which they perceive significant value. Importantly, portions of the historical landscape implicate recent memories of repair: the North Street Arcade, for example, was re-enlivened through the locally invested care of artists and small business owners. And care is, I suggest, the distinctive marker between the two main sides in this visual cracked art world: on the one hand, disrepair and ruin, a disinterested waiting; on the other, efforts to beautify the space, even if only temporarily, through street art, lively performances, and other means. As in any cracked art world, some players are more powerful than others, are better able than others to exercise their will and bring their visions to fruition on the walls and streets and skylines of the Cathedral Quarter. Here the state is virtually all-powerful, with the ability to make and break policies and projects as perceived to be necessary; state power even places a check on development corporations, in the form of planning approvals and the limits imposed by ‘listed’ building status. Corporations also wield enormous power in this cracked art world, facilitated by deep pockets and the state’s permission. After state edict and policy, money is the most powerful resource in bending the visual cracked art world to one’s will, as large sums are needed to make any major changes to the cityscape. (Though notably, lack of funding has toppled several major planned development projects in

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Belfast, most recently when the Signature Living Group entered administration in April 2020, before its planned city centre George Best Hotel could even open; Mulgrew 2020). Within the art world, too, there are contestations and hierarchies of power, though these often go unremarked, at least within the art world’s public transcripts. Save CQ and its associated individuals and organizations exercise significant power in determining how the art world’s (and others’) protests will be presented to the public and to the state. Protest movements often undergo internal repair processes in the service of presenting a united front and a solidified message to other stakeholders (Rush 2022; see also Chapter 5). Funding and access thereto determine an individual’s or organization’s ability to impact the landscape, as do notoriety and goodwill. Adam Turkington has much more power to influence the spaces of the Cathedral Quarter through street art due to his proven success in leading festivals like Hit the North, including his long tenure as director of Belfast’s very successful Culture Night, as well as the partnership he has cultivated with Community Arts Partnership (also a powerful stakeholder) in this endeavour. Bringing internationally known street artists to Belfast to participate in Hit the North alongside local artists adds to this power by lending both the works and the festival context in which they are made further legitimacy from the recognized global street art scene. Local taggers and graffiti artists, meanwhile, contest the power of both community arts organizations and the state, exerting their own will on the cracked art world by tagging, altering, or painting over street artworks, or by leaving their marks on listed buildings that are not meant to be touched or altered. Finally, there are players in this art world that cannot be codified as ‘stakeholders’, though their influence is obvious: these are the economic and political forces that act upon urban space, such as globalization and neoliberalism. In the case of the Cathedral Quarter, it is easy to cast development corporations and public-private partnerships as the obvious agents of globalized neoliberalism, seeking to same-ify Belfast and its neighbourhoods through neoliberal logics and the civic identikit of place. This is, in fact, largely the story that is presented by opponents of retail-led development, and they are not incorrect in their assessment. However, globalization and neoliberalism also act upon, and are active within, the community-arts art world, shaping the ways in which art world members narrate and envision urban spaces. Community arts is not fundamentally anti-neoliberal, nor anti-globalization. In fact, community arts as an area of practice is largely the result of globalization, as ideas and practices have spread across the world. In the case presented in this chapter, at least, community arts has a rather uneasy love-hate or push-pull relationship with globalized neoliberalism. On the one hand, the post-post-conflict imaginary of the community-arts art world positions itself in direct opposition to top-down neoliberal development

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strategies, and to plans that fail to recognize the unique history and urban character of Belfast’s city centre spaces. On the other hand, though, the art world’s discourses acknowledge and respond to the forces of neoliberalism. Community arts discourses about Cathedral Quarter spaces pragmatically utilize the language of neoliberalism to make their case. For example, CAP’s ‘Letter of Objection’ to the proposed Castlebrooke redevelopment strategy draws on neoliberal logics to make its case, suggesting that an arts-focused strategy would be more economically successful and more attractive to international investors and tourists: ‘It [the Cathedral Quarter] has enormous potential to be the creative engine of Northern Ireland’s new economy, driving an arts and cultural renaissance, incubating independent businesses, and drawing in tourists who want an authentic urban experience’ (CAP 2017; cf. Alfaro-Hamayon 2015). Furthermore, in their postpost-conflict vision for Northern Ireland, artists desire entry into the global art market and its discourses, seeking to put Belfast on equal footing with other global cities recognized for their artistic contributions. Hit the North pairs local street artists with their peers of international repute, altering the cityscape in ways that are both locally distinctive and globalized: a street art scene to rival that of London or Berlin is both a local goal – something distinctive to Belfast – and a global one – Belfast becoming more like its international peers. This is, perhaps, an uneasy alliance, and it necessitates artists walking a very thin line, promoting investment but not gentrification, supporting internationalization and localization at the same time. While it may sit uncomfortably, this too is an act of repair – a complex and nuanced approach to bridging the cracks between art world needs and desires and the city’s economic needs, both of which have been exacerbated by austerity. It is, likewise, an act of care: care for the Cathedral Quarter, its unique history and built environment, and what it represents to the history of Northern Ireland’s community-arts art world; care as well for local communities and their needs, and for the quotidian urban spaces in which both artists and non-artists participate in the ‘mundane things’ of everyday life.

Notes 1. CAP later moved its offices to a different, more spacious location in the Cathedral Quarter. 2. Interestingly, both the language of relaxing restrictions – what Stephen Brown refers to as ‘the city’s hesitant return to “normality”’ (1985: 6) – and the dissonance between city leaders and local retailers, ‘the majority of [whom] preferred to see the retention of the existing system’ of gates and security barriers (ibid.) – echo by-now-familiar discussions around the easing of lockdown restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. 3. Derry/Londonderry has followed a similar trajectory, led since 2003 by ‘urban regeneration company’ Ilex (Hocking 2015: 31). See Hocking’s (2015) examination of the rebuilding and rebranding of former British military base Fort Ebrington for a thorough and rigorous account of one such process.

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4. It should be noted that Andron (2018) studied five different street art touring groups, whereas at that point in time Seedhead Arts offered the only street art walking tour in Belfast City Centre. Belfast’s street art scene is also significantly newer, and much less known internationally, than that of Shoreditch, the site of Andron’s research. 5. This campus is Ulster University’s main hub for visual arts and used to be called the Belfast School of Art. Many local art world members are alumni. 6. See Zebracki (2018) on the expanding role and importance of digital space for street artists, street art, and public art encounters.

5 Up the Hill

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Politicians, Protests, and Community Arts under Austerity

‘D’you think they put it on a hill to stop people from coming up here?’ I was standing outside the Parliament Buildings at Stormont, the imposing building where the Northern Ireland Assembly meets. I was one of the first to arrive and was chatting with new acquaintance Julie, an administrator for a Belfast-based community arts organization.1 It was a crisp autumn day in November 2015, and there weren’t many people about. Nearby, teachers, administrators, and students unloaded a Belfast Community Circus School van, setting up portable sound equipment and a small stage. Others began to distribute cardboard signs and stickers made specially for the event, with slogans like ‘Stop Arts Cuts’ and ‘Reverse Cuts to the Arts’. They unfurled a long red banner bearing the Circus School’s name. From our position, my interlocutor and I had a clear view of the vast, sprawling grounds of Stormont Estate, in which a number of government buildings are situated. From where we stood, the ground fell away sharply, commencing its mile-long descent to the estate gates below, beyond which the late-morning traffic and pink city buses processed along the Upper Newtownards Road. A lone climber summited the hill, her sour expression clashing sharply with the bright colours of her clown costume, complete with red nose and oversized shoes. ‘Sure, wasn’t I here eight years ago? Doing the exact same thing? Wearing the exact same thing?’ she asked no one in particular. The hill to Parliament Buildings is by no means insurmountable, but it is a challenging climb, useful for runners or cyclists looking to build their endurance. It is also deeply symbolic. It lifts the Assembly’s meeting place high up above the rest of the city, rendering it visible from miles away, seeming almost, at that distance, to be floating just above the trees that surround it, like something out of legend. The hill is also referenced to denote the remove that Northern Ireland residents feel from their elected representatives: at a Community Relations Council conference I attended several

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months prior at the Stormont Hotel, situated at the bottom of the hill and across the street from the Stormont Estate, delegates referred meaningfully to the opinions held and decisions made ‘up the hill’, as though it were something distant, something insurmountable, rather than sitting nearly on the conference doorstep. ‘D’you think they put it on a hill to stop people from coming up here?’ Julie asked me. I voiced my agreement; I had been thinking the same thing.

Arts Funding Cuts under Austerity Following the global financial crisis in 2008 and the subsequent adoption of austerity politics by the UK government, public arts funding in Northern Ireland has trended sharply downward. The Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI), the primary funder of artistic activity in the region, has had its budget slashed regularly (Figure 5.1), sparking anger and frustration among Northern Ireland’s artists. Two major cuts to the Arts Council budget occurred during my period of research, the first announced in late 2014 and the second in late 2015, though both concerned the 2015/16 fiscal year. The latter of these was unique among the funding cuts for several reasons, and thus I examine it at considerable length in this chapter (and elsewhere, in Rush 2022). First, it sparked a mass, in-person mobilization of arts sector workers, resulting in

Figure 5.1  Funding awarded annually by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from fiscal year 2010/11 to 2019/20. The upper line in the chart indicates funding grants from all sources, including the Exchequer, the Lottery, and funding sources designated as ‘Other’. The lower line indicates the portion funded by Exchequer monies. Information from ACNI (2021b), calculations performed and chart created by Kayla Rush.

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the Stormont protest that I have already begun to describe; thus, it presents an opportunity to examine in detail specific processes of breakdown and repair in the art world. (This is, to my knowledge, the only protest of this type and scale to have occurred post-2008, though art world members have also utilized a number of other protest tactics during this period, some of which are recounted briefly in this book’s conclusion.) Second, this was a mid-fiscal-year funding cut, affecting a budget that had already been promised to art world recipients, rather than one announced in advance, as has otherwise been the case with funding cuts. Third, this is the only austerity funding cut to date that has been successfully reversed upon protest from the art world. While the likelihood of an in-year budget cut had been telegraphed earlier in the year (Meredith 2015a), the official announcement of the mid-year cut on 7 October 2015 was the moment that sparked collective outrage within the art world. The cut of £870,000 represented 8 per cent of the Arts Council’s total budget, which had already been slashed by a substantial £1.38 million in January 2015. The ACNI absorbed £250,000 of the cut itself by trimming its operations expenses; this process included relocating the organization’s headquarters from the sprawling Victorian-era MacNeice House in South Belfast to a utilitarian office complex in Lisburn known as ‘The Sidings’ (ACNI 2015). The remaining £620,000 in cuts was passed on to the thirty-two ACNI-backed organizations with the highest levels of ‘core’ (i.e. operational) funding through the Arts Council’s Annual Funding Programme (AFP). This meant that these organizations were told midway through the fiscal year that their ACNI core grants would be 7 per cent smaller than initially stated in March, when annual funding grants are finalized (Meredith 2015a, 2015c). It was this cut to arts organizations, and in particular the sudden, middle-of-the-year nature of the cuts, that roused the anger of local artists and ultimately sparked the protest that I detail in this chapter. While it may seem that the focus has shifted away from community arts, as this funding cut and the protests that followed it engaged all of the Northern Ireland arts sector, it is important to place state funding for community arts within the broader context of public arts funding. Conflicts over funding, and the consistent cuts to public funding that have characterized the arts in Northern Ireland in the wake of the global financial crisis, have affected all genres and artforms within the wider art world. Nonetheless, this discussion is still very relevant to this book’s specific focus on community arts, for a number of reasons. First, the protests and protesters themselves did not differentiate between community arts and other forms of art within the context of the protests; this in itself can be seen as the artists’ first act of repair, as it allowed Northern Ireland’s artistic community to band together as a unified social movement, rather than as discrete groups bounded by artform. Second, what I refer to as the ‘arts anti-austerity movement’ in Northern Ireland (Rush 2022) has consistently been led by

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community artists. Artists who work either partially or exclusively within community arts have been very vocal in all steps of the protest process, and thus their interests and concerns have permeated much of the protest language and discourse. Third, and most importantly, the decrease in public funding was of great concern to nearly all of my research participants. Anxieties about and frustrations with public funding informed numerous conversations, both on and off the official research ‘record’. It is difficult to explain just how pervasive the funding conversation was during this period of time: austerity shaped the art world in ways that were (and still are) all-encompassing; even where it was not an explicit topic of conversation, it felt present. Thus, to truly represent the community-arts art world as I encountered it, it is vital to address ‘the F word’ (Floyd et al. 2013: 18). In this chapter, I examine the November 2015 protest as emblematic of crucial art world breakdowns over the question of funding. I present it as a site of active performances of both cracks in the art world and strategic repairs. I begin with a description of the protest, examining the language employed by both the protesters and the politicians who attended to show support. I describe the ways in which these rhetorics were deployed to call attention to the funding-related cracks in the art world and to position these actors on the ‘right’ side of these cracks. I then discuss the subsequent debate that occurred in the Assembly Chamber, taking this as an example of both the ways in which politicians perform themselves in public and of the ways in which cracks in the sociopolitical sphere deeply influence and impact upon those in the art world. Finally, I turn to an examination of the material culture of the protest, via an exhibition of protest signs organized at a Cathedral Quarter art gallery directly after the protest. I draw attention to additional rhetorics and framings that appeared in the exhibit, as well as to key ways in which the exhibition drew upon shared art world origin stories. I look at the ways in which this re-presentation served to both extend and reshape the protest through an artistic lens, and thus to further clarify and complicate the artists’ calls for change. It is important to note that in this case in particular, cracks in the art world are viscerally felt; the affective and embodied aspects of these cracks cannot be ignored. Thus this chapter prioritizes a sensory ethnographic reading of the protest events, paying close attention to the ways in which embodied performances shape and are shaped by the cracks in the art world.

‘Arts Matter’ We began to see people climbing the hill towards us, individually and in knots of twos and threes. Some brought children. Some brought dogs. Many carried brightly coloured signs, works of art in their own right: all were clearly homemade, and their makers had obviously expended considerable time and care in the making, a visible embodiment of their everyday labours within the art world.

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As our ranks began to swell outside the steps of Stormont, a man I recognized as having helped plan the protest began to hand out individual sheets of paper to those assembled. These sheets, printed on both sides, listed the talking points for the rally, along with the requests that a cluster of local arts leaders would be posing to the Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) and the Minister of Culture, Arts and Leisure following the protest. Someone else started handing out A4-sized signs on cardboard backing for those of us who, like me, had not brought our own. On these were printed black-and-white, all-caps statements like ‘SAVE THE ARTS’ and ‘REVERSE CUTS TO THE ARTS’. These signs bore the ‘Arts Matter NI’ logo and hashtag, the symbols of the collective organization that leads the arts anti-austerity movement in Northern Ireland. Several protesters from the Circus School tried to balance their signs on their noses; one particularly ambitious young man tried to balance a second sign perpendicularly atop the first. A roll of fire-engine-red stickers reading ‘Stop Arts Cuts’ was being passed around. Julie, a sticker already affixed to her blouse, walked over to me and, in a friendly gesture, stuck one onto my sweatshirt near my shoulder. Journalists and photographers began to show up as well, large video cameras hoisted on shoulders, bulbous microphones in hand. A young boy of about 8 scampered about hamming it up for the cameras, pulling faces and hoisting his very tall protest sign – carefully hand-lettered and reading ‘I love the arts, and you should too’ – high over his head. Standing in front of me, two men were engaged in conversation. One gestured to the imposing Parliament Buildings before us and asked his fellow, his voice dripping with caustic sarcasm, ‘Who designed the art on their building? Oh right, it was artists, wasn’t it? Who designed the whole fucking building? Oh right, it was artists, wasn’t it?’ This tone of conversation was not uncommon at the day’s protest: there was a palpable sense of dissatisfaction in the air, a collective feeling that something wasn’t right, that the entire sector had been betrayed by its elected representatives. It is in cases like this one that the jagged contours of the cracked art world become clearest. Strong feelings like anger, disaffection, frustration, or even despair, whether felt within our own bodies as researchers or expressed by our participants, can point us towards some of the more strongly felt disjunctures or breakdowns within art worlds. In the case of the Northern Ireland art world, debates around funding comprised the most obvious, and the most deeply felt, crack. It was the topic most discussed by my research participants, and the subject that made them the angriest. This palpable anger was juxtaposed with the playful, almost carnivalesque atmosphere that also pervaded the protests, as circus performers juggled and capered, and as friends and acquaintances chatted and compared colourful protest signs. This juxtaposition of strong affects – anger side by side with fun – emphasizes the simultaneous nature of breakdown and repair in cracked

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art worlds. The caustic anger of the commenter standing in front of me, an anger shared by many of his peers, highlights the devastating effects of the chasm that is felt to exist between artists and politicians, while the playful antics of the jugglers and the friendly catching up among friends points to the caring nature of repair. While it may at first glance seem odd for the two affects to coexist so closely in one space, the fact of the matter is that they always exist together in this cracked art world; the rally at Stormont was simply the lightning rod around which these affects coalesced, and which, somewhat atypically, brought them all together in one moment and place. By this time, several hundred people had gathered. A small group of drummers struck up a peppy dance beat, and a troupe from the Circus School cleared a space in the middle of the crowd, where several jugglers tossed bowling pins back and forth – a ‘Carnival against the Cuts’, as I would later find out this portion of the event was called. The rest of the protesters, myself included, milled about, making small talk and catching up with friends and acquaintances. By this point, I had been conducting research and meeting with community arts stakeholders for over a year, so I found that I encountered quite a few people whom I already knew. I chatted with one friend about her recent job change – to a smaller community arts organization – and complimented another on her new hair colour – a dramatic hot pink. I ran into a fellow researcher from my university who was also working on community arts, and we chatted about fieldwork and community theatre. Unsurprisingly for Northern Ireland, where the arts scene is relatively small and closely interconnected, we found that we had several research contacts and friends in common. These interactions point to the status of arts funding protesters not simply as a collection of concerned individuals, but as a social movement. Sociologists Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani name three key characteristics of social movements, all of which are in evidence in this scene: social movements ‘are involved in conflictual relations with clearly identified opponents; are linked by dense informal networks; [and] share a distinct collective identity’ (2006: 20; see also Rush 2022 ). That the protesters shared a collective identity was clear from their presence at the protest: most identify as artists, but more than that, all are clearly interested in the arts and concerned that the government provide a certain level of funding to arts projects and organizations in Northern Ireland. They reinforce this collective identity by using localized hashtags like #ArtsMatterNI, both on social media posts and on their physical protest signs, and by echoing shared phrases and talking points, such as those enumerated on the sheets being passed around. As della Porta and Diani point out, collective identities in social movements emerge when individuals see links between their own and others’ experiences, leading them to ‘regard themselves as inextricably linked to other actors’ (ibid.: 21). These linkages, in turn, create the ‘dense informal networks’ that also characterize social movements. Actors in the particular social movement mobilized at Stormont that day create these

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links through their attendance and co-presence at art world events. They also frequently socialize with one another outside of their work commitments. I will return to the third characteristic of social movements shortly. After half an hour or so of these conversations and performances, our attention was drawn to a small platform and a set of loudspeakers. Two individuals, both well-known and well-respected members of the local art world, gave impassioned speeches, calling for the return of the funds cut from the ACNI budget, along with broader systemic changes to the ways in which public funding for the arts is allocated in Northern Ireland. First, writer Glenn Patterson addressed the protesters, describing the contemporary arts scene as ‘a sector characterized by low pay, a sector in which jobs are now on the line’. He spoke about the current state of arts funding, likening Northern Ireland’s Ministries, in particular the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure, to ‘fiefdoms’. Of the current Minister of Culture, Arts and Leisure, Carál Ní Chuilín, Patterson commented, But the Minister has, over the last couple of years, found money in the budget for a particular funding programme that has no application form, no dedicated web page, no email address, and which in the current financial year, had allocated its two hundred thousand pounds a full five months before the closing date for applications. (CAP 2015c)

This perceived political favouritism of certain arts programmes over others was a common criticism of Ní Chuilín’s tenure as Culture Minister, as described in Chapter 1 of this book. The second speaker was Kabosh Theatre Company’s Paula McFetridge, a theatre-maker and well-known member of the local community arts scene. She ended her speech with a call for those in government – those inside Stormont – to work together with those gathered outside Stormont that day. She said, We wanna work with government, to ensure future generations do not lose out. We wanna work with government to develop a plan for arts investment going forward. We do not want to live in a cultural desert. We believe that every citizen has the right to access to the arts. If they [she gestures behind her, towards the Parliament Buildings] work with us, we can make this happen. (CAP 2015d; emphasis hers)

As the two artists spoke, I could see various MLAs and Stormont staff poking their heads out of the building’s doors or standing at the top of the steps, though whether to observe the rally or simply to get a breath of fresh air was unclear. A few tourists wound their way up the steps and into the Parliament Buildings during this time as well, taking pictures of both us and the building. I found myself wondering what they must have thought of this spectacle. Finally, Basil McCrea, a former Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MLA turned independent and founder of the short-lived NI21 party, stood to address

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the crowd, greeted by enthusiastic cheers from those gathered. He told us, ‘We’re going to do a number of things this afternoon. One of them is there are questions to the Minister for Culture, Arts and Leisure. And I happen to have one of the questions. So I will be asking her, has she read your open letter’ (CAP 2015a; emphasis his). On this last sentence, he held a copy of this letter aloft. McCrea closed by highlighting the presence of numerous MLAs at the rally, calling a roll of the parties represented at the protest: McCrea: I can tell you that you have been surrounded by a lot of party members here. [he gestures behind him] Independents, Green Party, the DUP, Sinn Féin, SDLP, the Alliance Party. Have I missed anybody? Woman in the crowd: NI21! [McCrea’s own party] McCrea: Oh yes, NI21’s here, yes! … [laughter from the crowd] They’re all here. (Ibid.)

The three speeches point us back towards della Porta and Diani’s third characteristic of social movements – what they call ‘conflictual collective action’, that is, being ‘involved in conflictual relations with clearly identified opponents’ (2006: 20–21). The protesters at Stormont that day made it clear that they had identified just such ‘opponents’: politicians generally – that is, those seen as enacting austerity, and as being removed from the interests and concerns of their art world constituents – and Carál Ní Chuilín specifically, as the politician seen to be responsible for this particular round of funding cuts. Protesters employed both physical and rhetorical devices to perform these conflictual relations. Rhetorically, Patterson and McFetridge described the recent funding cut as the result of a government and a Minister that distributed funds unfairly, and that withheld or redirected those funds seemingly on a whim. Both speakers’ language indicated that they saw government, and in particular the Culture Minister, as their ‘targe[t]’, their ‘clearly identified opponent’ in this matter (della Porta and Diani 2006: 20–21). Notably, while these cuts were enacted within the context of austerity, and while Ní Chuilín consistently presented arts funding cuts as the result of Westminster-dictated austerity with which she and her party did not agree, the protesters and the speakers strategically painted the cut as a mismanagement of existing funds, rather than as a result of shrinking funds due to austerity-based economic policies. Outside of the protest, art world members did speak of austerity, but they noted that the arts had received disproportionate funding reductions when compared to other areas within DCAL’s remit, such as sport. McCrea’s response, in turn, rhetorically positioned him and other members of the Assembly in attendance on the side of the protesters, allied against the Culture Minister and her funding cuts. Thus, while the artists with whom I spoke often referred to ‘politicians’ collectively as a group who did not understand the importance of their labours, individual politicians could cross the art world divide by actively positioning themselves

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on the side of protesters. This did not, however, work for all politicians; for example, while former Culture Minister Nelson McCausland presented himself as Carál Ní Chuilín’s enemy and as an opponent of the funding cuts she oversaw (described in detail in the next section of this chapter), his rhetorical attempts to align himself with the protest did nothing to endear him to the art world (see also Chapter 1). The protesters also oriented themselves against their opponent physically, by addressing the architecture of the Parliament Buildings and thus the Assembly that meets therein. By arraying themselves to face the region’s physical seat of political power, the protesters reinforced their verbal statements that their calls for change were directed at government and politicians in Northern Ireland. Emanuela Guano describes the ways in which physical positioning in space bolsters protesters’ rhetorical claims in her account of a protest in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. She writes that the plaza is ‘the site where Argentina’s most powerful institutions become a sensory experience’, and that by protesting there protesters create a sensory and embodied ‘counterspectacle’ that disrupts the hegemonic spectacle of the Argentinian President and Congress (2002: 313–15). She continues, The Casa Rosada [the ‘seat of the house of the government’] they could see behind the stage provided the referent for the protesters’ resignification of dominant meanings and their attempt to convert the state’s monologue into a dialogue. At the same time, however, the [protesters] had set up the stage in such a way as to give the Casa Rosada a full view of the magnitude of the protest. (Ibid.: 316)

We can see similar performative forces at work in the case of the Stormont rally, with the Parliament Buildings serving as the ‘referent’ for the social movement’s ‘opponent’, in the form of the Culture Minister specifically and the funding policies of the regional government more generally. At the same time, McCrea’s speech and the presence of other MLAs ostensibly supportive of the protesters’ aims mean that this was not a simple disruption of hegemonic narratives of power, but rather something more complicated, as power-holders who are part of the hegemonic ‘spectacle’ consciously and publicly aligned themselves with and took part in the ‘counterspectacle’. This particular alliance of the hegemonic and counterhegemonic (both of which categories are already porous) is politically advantageous for both groups. MLAs can use their support for the protesters to bolster existing political alliances and oppositions – particularly for those already opposed to Ní Chuilín personally, or to Sinn Féin generally – or to gain favour with their constituents. For the protesters, meanwhile, their alliance with McCrea and other MLAs granted them access to the halls of power and forced the Culture Minister to face her critics through legal means, as discussed in the next section of this chapter. Participants’ ‘embodied presence’ (Werbner, Webb, and Spellman-Poots 2014: 9) at the protest also presents a moral argument about policymaking in Northern Ireland. Conflicting perspectives within the cracked art

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world – or within the cracked policy world, for that matter – frequently have a moral dimension, often manifesting as conflicting moral or value arguments (Nielsen 2011). The protesters’ embodied presence in political space, both physical and discursive, is a moral argument for including everyday citizens in processes of governance and policymaking (Zinn 2011: 238). By making themselves visible, the protesters performed a claim to inclusion in policy decisions that affect them, specifically in this case decisions about public arts funding. The performance of presence, and its dialectical interplay with its opposite, absence, was in fact one of the key factors of this protest’s aesthetics and arguments. The protesters’ visible presence in the political seat of power as artists is key to this performance, as it calls attention to the ways in which their artistic outputs change space. In Northern Ireland, government representatives and civil servants frequently call upon artists to change certain types of space deemed undesirable – typically due to postindustrial dereliction or the presence of sectarian symbols – and transform them into more desirable spaces, usually taken to mean spaces that will be seen as more appealing to international tourists or international investors (Hocking 2015; cf. Neill 2006; Shirlow 2006; see also Chapter 4 of this volume). Furthermore, through their embodied presence in political space, these protesters visually contrasted their presence – and metonymically, their labour, their personal investment in the topic at hand, and their passion for the arts in Northern Ireland – with the Culture Minister’s absence, and thus, symbolically, with her perceived lack of interest in or care for the arts. At the same time that they performed their own presence, they simultaneously performed and called attention to Ní Chuilín’s absence – her physical absence from the protest, yes, but more importantly her perceived metaphorical absence, in terms of the lack of care for, interest in, or dialogue with the local art world that they took the funding cut to imply. Politicians involved in the protest, meanwhile, used their own physical presence to signal their support for the protesters’ claims. Basil McCrea, for example, posted a video of the protest on YouTube nine days later, titled ‘Why the Arts Matter’ (McCrea 2015). The video’s title highlights his alignment with the protesters’ aims by intentionally evoking the name and associated hashtag of the campaign group organizing the protest, Arts Matter NI. McCrea’s video depicts him walking among the protesters and speaking with them; it shows him being present with them, physically and verbally – the latter as he addresses Carál Ní Chuilín face to face and asks her to meet with the protesters; asks her in turn to be present with them, both physically, by meeting and speaking with them, and discursively, by reading and responding to their open letter. The performances at this protest rally emphasize the breakdowns around policy in the cracked art world, with protesters explicitly calling attention to those breakdowns and their lived effects. When, in the course of my fieldwork, I mentioned my emerging notion of the cracked art world to my research participants, they usually responded positively, commenting that it

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reflected how the arts funding situation in Northern Ireland currently feels to them. A key aspect of this particular cracked art world – and indeed, I would argue, its most salient feature – is a felt disconnect from politicians and policymakers, especially around issues of funding. I recognize that I am using words about ‘feeling’ quite a lot here, and this is an important point: while we can speak more or less ‘objectively’ about a cracked art world – which is to say, we can point out where it exists by looking at differing goals among various stakeholders – the perspective of the cracked art world becomes most relevant and important when it highlights felt, lived tensions among art world members, as it does so effectively in the case of arts funding in Northern Ireland. Christine Garlough describes a similar affective response to government budget cuts in Wisconsin in 2011, writing, ‘Many protesters expressed a sense of disassociation and disenfranchisement in response to the sweeping cuts in the proposed budget, the stripping of collective bargaining rights, the unwillingness to negotiate, and the speed at which these changes were being pushed through the legislature’ (2011: 341). She describes the Wisconsin protests as exhibiting ‘a sense of “uncanniness”’, adding, ‘Uncanniness is the feeling aroused when familiar experiences in familiar situations threaten meaningful frameworks’ (ibid.). This language of threat resonates strongly with the experiences of my research participants. Community arts practices, coupled with the belief that such practices can and do effect transformative change in society, constitute ‘meaningful frameworks’ in which artists and employees of arts organizations work, and with which they express the value of their labour. When these clash with other, opposed frameworks such as austerity politics and neoliberal economic logics, there is a significant sense of disconnection, particularly when coupled with an imbalance of power. Describing the art world as cracked or broken helps to communicate this sense of disjuncture and the emotions that accompany it. A cracked item is generally perceived to be not how it ought. A cracked mirror or dish is usually the product of an accident of some kind; this is generally not how the item was intended to be used, and the crack or cracks can interfere with the item’s intended usage, as when a cracked mirror obscures the viewer’s sight of their reflection. Feeling disconnected from politicians is one of the major features of political life more generally in Northern Ireland, as revealed in my interviews and casual discussions with research participants (cf. Crewe 2015: 51–55). I would argue that this is also true in my home country, the United States, though there the disconnects play out in very different ways. In Northern Ireland, colloquial references to Stormont, and thus the Assembly, as being ‘up the hill’ viscerally reference the steep walk to the Parliament Buildings, and in so doing underscore the felt distance between people and policymakers. Simultaneously, though, we might also view the rally as an act of repair, as by gathering together for a common aim, the protesters deemphasized existing intra-art-world conflicts in order to address a perceived

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common enemy. This is ultimately a political choice: they repair, temporarily, the cracks on smaller scales in order to draw attention to the much larger breakdown on the regional and national level. Art world members are conscious of the acts of repair involved in crafting a successful protest: while they may question agreed-upon protest tactics privately or after a protest is completed, they work diligently to ensure a united front within the protest itself (Rush 2022). Their continued involvement in the social movement, which waxes and wanes over time and in response to political shifts and recent funding decisions, comprises an ongoing act of repair. While it does not remove the smaller-scale conflicts – some of which, such as competition over resources, are imposed by more powerful outside stakeholders – it maintains the social movement, and thus allows interested members to keep campaigning collectively for desired policy changes. At the same time, the protesters maintain or repair certain advantageous relationships with sympathetic politicians, with the shared goal of addressing a particular breakdown in the cracked art world. While each actor within these relationships has, of course, their own goals or reasons for these alliances – cracks within cracks – they perform strategic acts of repair in order to work together for a common aim.

‘A Brass Neck’ Following the rally, a small group of the protesters entered the Parliament Buildings. These representatives had enlisted the help of supportive MLAs to pose a question to the Culture Minister in the Assembly itself, a context in which she would be required to respond to their concerns. Several art world members also briefly met with her personally in order to present her with their concerns and their open letter. While I was not among this group and thus cannot give an eyewitness ethnographic account of what followed, it is worth reconstructing this debate from the official report and transcript of the day’s Assembly proceedings (NI Assembly 2015). I do so here because this interaction provides further insight into the shape of the cracked art world, and the ways in which it plays out within the halls of power, in performances among politicians. Inside the vast Parliament Buildings, past the entrance hall with its marbled floors, expansive ceilings, and gold-plated chandelier ‘on loan’ from the Queen (Belfast News Letter 2011), sits the Assembly Chamber, where the legislators of Northern Ireland’s devolved Assembly meet. According to the Assembly’s educational website for school students, the original ‘adversarial’ format of the Assembly Chamber ‘has been replaced by a U-shaped layout inspired by a European “coalition-style” layout’ – a new seating format for a new Northern Ireland (NI Assembly Education Service 2017). Visitors who tour the building, I am told, are informed that the Assembly Chamber’s wood panelling is made of ‘the same burr walnut more commonly used to make dashboards of Rolls Royce cars’ – a lavish

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post-ceasefire refurbishment that ‘immediately exhausted the entire English stockpile of the luxurious wood, which was expected to last seven years’ (Belfast News Letter 2011). The afternoon session in the Assembly Chamber on 3 November commenced with an opportunity to present questions to the Minister of Culture, Arts and Leisure (NI Assembly 2015: 26). During this time, Basil McCrea and another MLA, Fearghal McKinney of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), posed questions about the recent ACNI budget cuts. Ní Chuilín’s response to the two men described ‘inescapable pressures’ on her Department, ‘directly resulting from cuts to our block grant by the British Government’ (ibid.: 28–29).2 In her answer, the Minister painted the budget cuts as unavoidable, the result of Westminster-led austerity politics, blaming them on the policies of the UK’s ruling Conservative Party (also referred to as the ‘Tory Party’ or the ‘Tories’) rather than depicting them as a choice she could make. Both of the politicians posing questions to Ní Chuilín referenced the artists’ protest that had just occurred outside, calling upon both the physicality and the affects of the rally. McKinney called attention to the feelings of anger and betrayal that the protesters had expressed, saying, The Minister will be aware of the spirited protest outside the Assembly today. That spirit perhaps belies the deep anger that is felt by those protesters, many of whom are in the Chamber this afternoon. They … are alarmed and disturbed at the in-year cuts, resulting as they have in loss of employment, insecurity and the taking away from vital programmes that are instrumental in the community. (NI Assembly 2015: 29)

McCrea, in turn, made good on his promise to the protesters to draw the Minister’s attention to their open letter: Minister, you will be aware that there are hundreds of people outside who want to talk to you about the arts … Would it be possible for you to meet those representatives of the arts after Question Time? They promise that it will not be in any way contentious. They do not want it to be a political football, but they would like to present you with their open letter to explain their situation. Of course, you could then explain the situation to them directly. (Ibid.)

Ní Chuilín thanked McCrea by his first name and replied that, while she had a meeting scheduled ‘[s]traight after Question Time’, she would ‘take five minutes to take the letter and hear what people have to say’. She concluded, ‘I thank the Member for the tone with which he raised the issue’ (ibid.). These interactions follow the unspoken rules of political ritual, obeying certain norms of address and discussion (cf. Crewe 2005: 37–38, 187; 2015: 155–56) – a type of official good dialogue, not wholly unlike the good dialogue discussed in Chapter 3 of this book. The Culture Minister’s reference to MLA McCrea’s ‘tone’ is particularly important, as it points to a mutual performance of courtesy rather than combativeness. McCrea’s latter

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statement to the Minister also foregrounds this politeness, where he states that the protesters ‘promise that it will not be in any way contentious’ and ‘do not want it to be a political football’. By saying this, he is guaranteeing to the Minister that the protesters will follow certain behavioural norms of politeness and deference. Equally, and perhaps more importantly, he is guaranteeing that behaviours deemed ‘contentious’ will not be performed in their meeting. In so doing, he sets the tone for the interaction, and likely renders the prospect of such a meeting more agreeable to the Minister. Politicians do not always perform such polite norms towards one another, however. This was evident in the exchange that followed Ní Chuilín’s response to McCrea, initiated by DUP MLA (and her predecessor as Minister of Culture, Arts and Leisure) Nelson McCausland: McCausland: How can the Minister justify imposing in-year cuts on funding that has been committed to arts organisations and then siphon off the money to projects with no open application process and no transparency? Is that good practice? Ní Chuilín: You have a brass neck, given your history around Red Sky and others.3 You have an absolute brass neck. First of all – [the Deputy Speaker, MLA Roy Beggs, calls for order] Ní Chuilín: First of all, on transparency, I did not meet anybody in rooms and conjure up dirty deals. The whole process was done in an open and transparent way, with a business case. It was not siphoning off. All other ALBs [arm’s-length bodies] received a reduction as a result of Tory cuts, but you have a complete brass neck. I am glad to see that you are taking a reddener. Beggs: I ask everyone to refer their questions and answers through the Speaker’s Chair, please. (NI Assembly 2015: 29–30)

McCausland was consistently quite vocal in his public criticisms of Ní Chuilín’s policies, and particularly of the mid-year ACNI budget cut (e.g. Belfast Telegraph 2015; McCausland 2015b; Rutherford 2015). However, despite the striking similarities of McCausland’s criticisms to those put forth by speaker Glenn Patterson at the protest mere hours before, members of the art world did not rally behind his confrontation of the Culture Minister in the way they did behind Basil McCrea’s. It is notable that despite his senior status and his high-ranking role on the DCAL Committee, McCausland was not the politician asked to speak at the protest rally. As discussed in Chapter 1, McCausland was equally disliked during his tenure as Culture Minister, and artists felt strongly that both McCausland and Ní Chuilín were engaged in a point-scoring ‘Orange-versus-Green’ battle, one that was detrimental to the collective aims of many others within the art world. In their exchange in the Assembly Chamber, the two Culture Ministers, former and current, performed their roles as politicians in a very specific way. From the transcript, it is difficult to discern body language and mannerisms, so we cannot see who instigates the antagonistic interaction, nor does it really matter. What we can observe is the sharp contrast in tone between their exchange and Ní Chuilín’s interactions with McCrea and

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McKinney. By interacting combatively, the two politicians perform a particular type of agonistic dialogue, a style of interaction that does not arise out of nowhere, but is rather situated within their parties’ prior interactions, which in turn are rooted in centuries of antagonism and conflict. Following Bakhtin, Jennifer Curtis describes this type of dialogue as ‘double-voiced discourse’, or ‘another’s speech in another’s language’ (Bakhtin 1981: 324, quoted in Curtis 2013: 145). For Curtis and Bakhtin, individual speakers – that is, individual participants in rhetorical exchanges – participate in and draw on broader historical and social discourses. Understanding discourse in this way, Curtis tells us, ‘directs explicit attention to how voices are socially produced and socially productive – and foregrounds the social and historical origins and consequences of discourse’ (2013: 145). My research participants recognized and articulated the historically situated, ‘double-voiced’ nature of Ní Chuilín’s and McCausland’s discourses when they spoke of ‘Orange-versus-Green’ politics and the ways that they have affected the art world. By calling attention to the Ministers’ approaches to funding allocations and priorities, and by refuting them as not reflective (in their opinion, at least) of the lived daily realities of Northern Ireland, the protesters called attention to the shape of the cracked art world and used their lived experiences within it to argue their case. The Orange-versusGreen narrative, and the way in which it has been used in funding, presents Northern Ireland and its art world as merely bifurcated, as stuck in a war between two opposing viewpoints. This is, of course, politically expedient for representatives of the two major opposing parties, Sinn Féin and the DUP, as this bifurcation mirrors much of their own rhetoric and doublevoiced discourse. However, this was not the reality for my research participants: rather, they experienced the breaks in the cracked art world much like a shattered mirror, with a multitude of cracks running in all different directions. Even as they repaired their own, intra-art-world breakdowns, they drew attention to the many different voices and perspectives involved in the arts and the ways in which their own views and experiences did not, and will not, fall into line with the hegemonic, two-community narrative. Rather, they performed a different view of politics in Northern Ireland, one in which the most dire breakdowns occur not between different communities, but between politicians and the people they represent.

‘Signs of Collective Protest’ As the protest wrapped up outside the Parliament Buildings, one of the rally organizers mounted the speakers’ platform and announced that they would be collecting the protest signs for an exhibition at the city centre gallery PS2, which would open on Thursday night, during this month’s Late Night Art. The speaker indicated a spot near the podium where participants could leave their signs if they wished them to be included in the exhibit. The crowd of protesters began to disperse, knots of people making their way

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back down the hill, in larger groups this time. Nearly everyone left their signs behind. A group from the Circus School began to load these into their van, preparing to transport them to the gallery. Late Night Art is a monthly art world event in Belfast during which the city’s independent galleries stay open late to allow viewers to visit them all and socialize. Many galleries plan exhibition openings to coincide with Late Night Art, as these nights tend to draw the biggest and most enthusiastic crowds, and a number serve drinks and snacks to patrons on these evenings. Because most of the galleries involved are concentrated in the city centre, Late Night Art makes it easy to take in many of the exhibitions at once, and I found it very common to run into a large number of friends and acquaintances while attending. Over the next week, these signs were displayed at the small shop-front gallery on Donegall Street, under the exhibition title Signs of Collective Protest: Resilience and Political Actions against Arts Funding Cuts (Figure 5.2). Exhibit fliers from PS2 emphasized the signs’ political nature, their role in the ongoing protest movement, and their connection to the artists’ modes of embodied presence at the rally, reading, ‘This was a colourful and spectacular rally, framed by delegates of all political parties and in front of the building where political power resides … The symbolic act in front of Parliament building [sic] is part of an ongoing campaign of lobbying and advocacy for increased investment in the arts’. Arts Matter NI’s

Figure 5.2  Protest signs on display in Signs of Collective Protest, PS2 gallery, Belfast, 10 November 2015. © Kayla Rush.

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‘Open Letter to the Minister’, which had been mentioned at the protest and presented to the Culture Minister that same day, was printed in full on the reverse side of the fliers. According to the PS2 representative overseeing the exhibit space when I visited on a weekday afternoon, the exhibition had been very well attended on its opening night. By opening during Late Night Art and printing the protest’s political message on the same type of exhibit fliers commonly found in other local galleries, Signs of Collective Protest was intentionally fitted into existing art world structures and calendars, and thus ensured that art world members who had not attended the protest would still have a chance to interact with its material culture and its political aims. Several of the protest signs alluded to the economic benefits of the arts – ‘Arts Means Jobs’, ‘Cuts Cost Jobs’ – while others referenced the role of the art world, and in particular of government funding for community arts, in the Northern Ireland peace process – ‘Cuts Cost Peace’. More referenced items from popular culture, such as the sign that read ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Art’, a pun on the pop song ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’, and another reading ‘Are You Not Entertained?’ (Figure 5.3), a line from the film Gladiator. Still others were more local in their references: representatives of Community Arts Partnership, for example, held signs reading ‘Stand Up for the Arts Right Now’ (Figure 5.4), a phrase coined by CAP CEO Conor

Figure 5.3  Protest signs on display in Signs of Collective Protest, PS2 gallery, Belfast, 10 November 2015. © Kayla Rush.

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Figure 5.4  Protest signs on display in Signs of Collective Protest, PS2 gallery, Belfast, 10 November 2015. © Kayla Rush.

Shields (2015) in response to this particular funding cut, and a play on ‘Stand Up for the Ulster Men’, a song sung by supporters of Ulster Rugby. What can be seen in the exhibition at PS2 is a process of framing and reframing in which the boundaries between ‘art’ and ‘protest’ become quite blurry, with the utilitarian material culture of the protest re-presented as ‘art’. Maruška Svašek tells us that art objects exist within performative contexts, and that it is within these contexts that they take on meaning, and indeed become ‘art’. She calls this ‘aestheticisation’, ‘the process by which people interpret particular sensorial experiences as valuable and worthwhile’ (2007: 9). For Svašek, an object’s status as ‘art’ is not defined by an institution or a static view of what art might be, but rather comes into being within the relationships among individuals; in other words, art becomes art within the webs of relationships that make up an art world. In the case of the protest signs exhibited at PS2, relocating the signs to an art gallery aestheticized them in a particular way, reframing them as art objects, the equivalent of other art objects similarly exhibited in this and other galleries. Displaying them in this manner emphasized their status as art and claimed for the signs a particular aesthetic and cultural significance, while still retaining their political meaning. This latter was accomplished by accompanying the exhibition with written information about the protest, including the protesters’ open letter to the Culture Minister. The gallery

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exhibition also played a practical role in expanding the protest beyond the temporal and spatial limits that framed the initial event, in much the same way that media coverage of the protest extended its reach as well (cf. Guano 2002: 317–19). Reframing the signs in this way also called attention to the artists’ labour, as it positioned these art objects in the same type of space in which their artistic outputs would typically be displayed: a gallery. The question of labour is critical to understanding arts funding protests, as the art world in Northern Ireland, as elsewhere, is characterized by precarious working conditions, low pay, and underemployment, conditions that had been exacerbated by recent funding cuts and which research participants felt would only worsen if the current funding trajectory were continued (Beirne, Jennings, and Knight 2017; Jennings, Beirne, and Knight 2017). The question of labour was explicitly addressed by the sign reading ‘Cuts Cost Jobs’ and referenced in the sign reading ‘Are You Not Entertained?’ The latter, by making explicit reference to the film Gladiator, argues that art is not unlike gladiatorial combat, in which the worker’s labour is cheaply exploited for the entertainment of others, in a hierarchical and ultimately bloody system that favours the wealthy and forces the less wealthy to fight (in this case, for what funding is left post-cuts) in order to get by. The theme of embodied presence is also evident in the displayed signs. Some, such as ‘Stand Up for the Arts Right Now’, directly reference the role of embodied presence in social movements, encouraging art world members to ‘stand up’ – that is, be present – in protest, both literally and metaphorically. The replete references to ‘cuts’, in turn, suggest a visceral absence, as the word indicates a removal of something previously present. Other signs engaged these themes less directly. Take, for example, the sign reading, ‘Art Gallery Closed Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday, Admission £17.50’ (Figure 5.5), which makes the case that an absence of funding leads to an absence of artistic services. The reference to an exorbitantly high (for Northern Ireland) admission fee also points to the increased burden on arts consumers and participants when public funding is reduced, which in turn alters who is able to access or be present in art world spaces. In the protest at Stormont, the protesters and the art objects they brought along with them called attention to the realities and consequences of absence by practicing and presenting embodied presence. Paula Serafini writes of artists’ anti-austerity protest tactics that call upon this relationship between absence and presence in much the same way. She examines a protest held by the campaign group Arts Against Cuts at the art museum Tate Britain, in which the protesters brought art materials into the museum and held an ‘improvised life drawing class’ within that space. Serafini describes this as ‘a performance action looking to make a point: if the funding for art schools is cut, we will take over the museum for lessons’ (2014: 333). While I certainly agree that performative protest actions involving embodied presence and visual, embodied labour are indeed

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Figure 5.5  Protest signs on display in Signs of Collective Protest, PS2 gallery, Belfast, 10 November 2015. © Kayla Rush.

‘looking to make a point’, I am inclined to disagree with Serafini’s analysis of the protesters’ meaning. Moving life drawing classes permanently from the physical spaces of art schools to those of the Tate does little to address the grievances of the art world; it simply associates art education with a different government-funded, hierarchical, powerful, hegemonic space. Rather, what Arts Against Cuts’ protest did, I suggest, was call upon embodied presence to make visible the artists’ labour, connecting it to its end results – namely, pieces deemed ‘good’ enough to be displayed in a major international art museum. This is, at its heart, the same argument made by the protest signs displayed at PS2, utilizing embodied presence to call attention to absence and its consequences: if you want this, you need to fund that; if you cut this, you will lose that. Framing these protest signs within the gallery space of PS2 also drew attention to another kind of presence: that within the urban spaces of the Cathedral Quarter. As discussed in Chapter 4, the Cathedral Quarter is central to the community-arts art world and the narratives that art world members tell about themselves and their work. The status of the Cathedral Quarter is precarious, and this precarity of artistic spaces is closely linked in art world discourses to the precarity of artistic labour. Community arts organizations based in the Cathedral Quarter were key leaders in planning and carrying out the rally, and preparatory events such as the large-scale

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meeting where the protest was planned (see Rush 2022) and protest signmaking meet-ups were held in Cathedral Quarter locations. In her analysis of the role of shop windows in Milan, Cristina Moretti argues that glass windows and the visual reflections they create serve to blur the boundaries between inside and outside, between street and retail space: ‘shops and streets mirror, “borrow,” and embellish each other, playing with the very boundaries between public and private’ (2015: 40–42). Through the use of reflections, the shop windows seemingly transport onlookers, or ‘window shoppers’, into their luxury interiors (ibid.: 43–44). When employed strategically, street-level windows are porous boundaries with the ability to pull together interior and exterior elements in order to create an affective response in the viewer. While I did not realize it at the time I took them, my own photos of the gallery and the exhibit show the historical buildings of the Cathedral Quarter reflected in the front window of PS2 and visible from within the exhibition space (Figures 5.6 and 5.7). Following Moretti’s argument, the windows and the ways in which they frame urban space serve to bring the architectural spaces of the Cathedral Quarter, so important to the development and narratives of (community) arts practice in the city, directly into the heart of the exhibit. This visual, spatial play reminds the viewer of

Figure 5.6  Cathedral Quarter architecture reflected in the window of PS2, where Signs of Collective Protest is on display. Belfast, 10 November 2015. © Kayla Rush.

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Figure 5.7  Cathedral Quarter architecture visible from the interior of PS2, where Signs of Collective Protest is on display. Belfast, 10 November 2015. © Kayla Rush.

the interconnectedness of the two elements, the Cathedral Quarter and arts funding protests – both the most recent protest, from which the signs had been gathered, and the longer legacy of protests that had secured increased funding for the arts in the past (see Chapter 1). This link to prior (and future) protests is indicated by the exhibition flier, which calls the 3 November 2015 protest and the signs exhibited ‘part of an ongoing campaign of lobbying and advocacy for increased investment in the arts’. Thus, these ‘signs of collective protest’ were intimately linked to the broader history of government arts funding in Northern Ireland and to the art world’s historical narratives. They were situated within a social movement promoting increased public funding for the arts and opposing funding cuts brought about by austerity politics. The exhibition of these signs at a Cathedral Quarter art gallery harnessed a particular and familiar visuality to reframe the material culture of the protest and to link the aims and claims of the protesters to a broader narrative about the role of arts practices in urban space and in the cracked art world. This single, simple, and relatively brief exhibition managed to draw together and magnify many of the vital themes and concerns that circulated within the community-arts art world during this period of time.

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An Unsatisfactory Conclusion On 19 November 2015, sixteen days after the protest at Stormont, Minister Carál Ní Chuilín announced the reinstatement of the majority of the in-year cut to the Arts Council budget. The amount returned comprised the £620,000 that had been taken from organizational core grants, to be returned to the thirty-two arts organizations whose budgets had been slashed (Meredith 2015b). The response of the art world was pleased but hesitant: Arts Matter NI opined in a Facebook post, ‘The arts are still underfunded and we all have much work to do to safeguard a future. But this is very good news’. However, the victory was short-lived, as public arts funding was slashed again the following year; this funding has continued to decrease in the years since.

Notes 1. ‘Julie’ is a pseudonym. All persons who spoke publicly during the protest have been mentioned by name, as through documentation freely available online (much of which is cited in this chapter) their participation and official statements are matters of public record. All research participants mentioned with whom I spoke informally during the event have been anonymized. 2. The ‘Block Grant’ is the funding ‘that the [Northern Ireland] Executive receives from the UK Government’, which comprises approximately 94 per cent of the Executive’s annual budget (NI Assembly 2016: 3–4). 3. ‘Red Sky’ refers to a political scandal in which McCausland was involved during his tenure as Social Development Minister (his post-DCAL role, to which he was appointed in 2011). The issue revolved around contracts between Belfast maintenance firm Red Sky and the Northern Ireland Housing Executive (see BBC News 2011; Gordon 2015).

Conclusion

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Whither Community Arts in Northern Ireland?

Since I concluded this research half a decade ago, several major social and political events have affected and continued to reshape the Northern Ireland community-arts art world. As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the future for community arts in Northern Ireland is far more uncertain than it was five years ago. In this final chapter, I will discuss three major events whose effects on the art world are still deeply uncertain, and still being decided. I will describe some of the questions raised by Brexit, the collapse (and eventual return) of the devolved power-sharing government, and the COVID-19 pandemic, noting that many questions about each of these still remain unanswered.

Brexit Knowns and Unknowns On 23 June 2016, citizens of the United Kingdom voted in favour of exiting the European Union. The ‘Leave’ vote won by a very slight majority (51.89 per cent). Northern Ireland, meanwhile, voted slightly in favour of the UK remaining within the EU (55.8 per cent), creating a particularly thorny situation where a majority of those living near the UK’s only land border with the EU, a population already deeply socially divided, were against the measure, if only by a small margin (McCann and Hainsworth 2017: 335). Northern Ireland and the terms set out in the Good Friday Agreement have consistently been points of contention in the years of protracted negotiations that followed the ‘Brexit’ referendum, with significant implications regarding economics, the Irish border, and the ongoing success of the peace process (Doyle and Connolly 2017). Members of the community-arts art world in Northern Ireland tended to favour the ‘Remain’ vote at a much higher rate than the general population. For example, at an event I attended in April 2016, a bus tour organized by a Belfast artists’ collective, the organizers held an impromptu poll, which found that 98 per cent of respondents

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on the bus, or fifty-four out of fifty-five total attendees, wished to remain in the EU. This experience echoes UK-wide findings that those working in the arts and cultural industries were more likely to support the ‘Remain’ vote (McAndrew, O’Brien, and Taylor 2020). I shared this anecdote from my fieldwork with a colleague who researches with working-class Protestant/ Unionist/Loyalist marching bands, and he replied that the same thing had occurred among his research participants, but with the opposite result: on my colleague’s bus, all but one band member had voted that they wished to leave the EU. The Brexit referendum, then, underscores cracks between the art world and other social and political worlds in Northern Ireland. The Brexit negotiations have raised a number of questions regarding the future of the arts sector, including community arts. The answers to some of these questions are only now coming into focus, while others still remain unanswered. In perhaps the only academic article to have been authored to date investigating Brexit’s impacts on art worlds, P.W. Baur (2019) writes that what he calls the ‘secondary art market’ – that is, trade in art objects directly between artists and consumers – is closely tied to tourism. He suggests that a Brexit-related decline in tourist travel to the United Kingdom would be accompanied by a related drop in incomes for artists who sell their work in this manner. This is particularly concerning for the community-arts art world. For my research participants who maintain individual artistic practices in addition to their community arts work (of whom there are many), the secondary art market is the primary means by which they sell their outputs, either through small, independent local galleries – as opposed to the large dealerships and institutions that dominate what Baur calls the ‘primary art market’ – or directly during arts and crafts fairs, festivals, and similar events. At present, it appears that tourists will still be able to enter Northern Ireland through the Republic of Ireland, which has a thriving tourist sector (or rather, had one prior to the pandemic), and so it is possible that the Northern Ireland tourism sector will experience less disruption than the rest of the UK. Nevertheless, differences in tourist visa rules between North and South could deter some tourism to the region, as could additional checks and restrictions on inexpensive flights between Belfast and British airports, or on ferry routes between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. As Brexit was finalized in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, with its accompanying significant travel restrictions – including cross-border travel restrictions on the Irish border, though these are notoriously difficult to enforce – effects on the tourism sector, and any knock-on effects on art sales and income, remain to be seen and will likely not become clear for some time. A more concrete indicator of what might lie ahead can be found in the revelation – quite late in the negotiation process – that UK musicians will no longer have a clear, uniform route to touring in other European countries without visas, creating an onerous and potentially costly bureaucratic hurdle to building musical careers and forging international artistic

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networks (Glynn 2020; Bakare 2021). Members of Northern Ireland’s art world were (and are) angry about this decision, and they were further angered when it was reported that the UK government had rejected an option for short-term visa-free travel for musicians and then lied about it, blaming the decision on the EU instead (Merrick 2021). This decision suggests that artists working in other forms could face similar barriers to international networking and collaboration, a prospect of which members of the art world are keenly aware, and one they do not welcome. While Northern Ireland’s community arts practices are themselves quite localized, individual artists and arts organizations do travel and network with their international peers, and some developed their practices while living outside the UK. Brexit therefore stands to disrupt current collaborative practices and opportunities. It also raises questions about artistic collaborations across the Irish Sea; the Musicians’ Union has questioned whether musicians travelling between Northern Ireland and Great Britain will be required to obtain customs permits for their instruments under the Northern Ireland Protocol (Bakare 2021). If this is the case, it will substantially disrupt important art world networks, as Northern Ireland artists also share important links with their peers in England, Scotland, and Wales. While the terms of the new regulations are still taking shape, it appears that Northern Ireland’s artists will be hit hardest by Brexit rules, and they could end up isolated from their peers as a result. Furthermore, the question of whether European Union peace and reconciliation funding will continue to flow into the region was cause for significant anxiety among community artists following the Brexit vote. Since 1998, the EU has been a major funder of arts programmes in Northern Ireland via the Special European Union Programmes Body (SEUPB), which was set up by the Good Friday Agreement and funds a wide variety of projects in both Northern Ireland and the border counties of the Republic. The SEUPB’s successive waves of PEACE funding have provided substantial monetary support for the arts within their peacebuilding remit (Jennings 2009: 104–5), and thus a potential absence of EU funding will be sorely felt by the community-arts art world. Fortunately, the future of PEACE funding has been agreed upon through 2027, under the new ‘PEACE Plus’ programme, which will disperse approximately €600 million, or £511 million, over the course of the next six years (J. Campbell 2020). In this new, and presumably final, round of PEACE, the bulk of the responsibility for funding the programme has shifted from the European Union to the UK government. Whereas PEACE IV, which ran from 2014 to 2020, received 85 per cent of its funds from the European Regional Development Fund and 15 per cent in ‘match-funding’ from the UK and Irish governments and the Northern Ireland Executive (Kołodziejski 2020), only 20 per cent of PEACE Plus is funded by the EU, with approximately 58.7 per cent from the UK government, and the remainder from the Irish government (NIO and Bradley 2019; J. Campbell 2020). This significant shift in responsibility

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for PEACE Plus follows what will presumably be a larger trend towards the UK government assuming funding responsibilities that had previously been performed by the EU. While the commitment to PEACE Plus after Brexit is certainly a positive decision for community arts organizations, I am sure that my research participants will be feeling anxious and uncertain as to whether targeted peace and reconciliation funds on this scale will be available after 2027, particularly if austerity continues to be the economic approach of choice in the UK. Finally, the post-Brexit increase in racist and anti-immigrant rhetorics and assaults points to the continued importance of the intercultural community arts work already occurring in Northern Ireland. It should be noted that xenophobia and racism were prevalent prior to the referendum; in the decade following the Good Friday Agreement, long before Brexit took shape, Belfast was branded the ‘race-hate capital of Europe’ (McVeigh and Rolston 2007: 11). However, the Brexit vote has clarified and magnified the widespread nature of these sentiments in Northern Ireland and throughout the UK (Burnett 2017; Harvey et al. 2018; Rzepnikowska 2019). The uptick in racist attacks further suggests that artists and participants engaged in such projects could face increased harassment or violence. In January 2021, the headquarters of the Belfast Multi-Cultural Association, a prominent community organization serving the city’s minority ethnic and migrant communities, was set on fire (BBC News 2021). This was not the first racially motivated hate crime directed at the Association, as workers’ cars had previously been vandalized while parked there, and it significantly delayed the organization’s plans to open a community centre (ibid.). The arson also interfered with the Multi-Cultural Association’s COVID-19 relief work, as at the time of the fire the centre was serving as a food bank, ‘with volunteers distributing packages to vulnerable people during the Covid-19 pandemic’ (RTÉ 2021). Racial and ethnic tensions in the wake of the Brexit referendum underscore the necessity of viewing Northern Ireland as more complex than a society made up of two communities, and of paying attention to the experiences of migrants and minority ethnic residents, while also recognizing that their experiences are shaped by and within the context of the region’s distinct ethnopolitical landscape (McVeigh and Rolston 2007; Vieten and Murphy 2019). They also highlight both the increased importance of and the increased risk to community arts work focused on immigrant and minority ethnic groups, cultural understanding, and intercultural exchanges.

Lessons from Three Years without a Government In January 2017, Northern Ireland’s devolved government collapsed upon the resignation of long-serving Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin. (McGuinness was very ill at the time, and he died several weeks later.) McGuinness’s resignation came in response to the perceived

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mishandling of the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI, often colloquially referred to as ‘Cash for Ash’) by DUP leader and Northern Ireland First Minister Arlene Foster (Muinzer 2017). While RHI was the immediate political trigger, commentators have pointed to numerous other factors, including Brexit, that were also at play in the breakdown and the fraught negotiations to restore the Executive and the Assembly (e.g. Archick 2019). While the consociational power-sharing arrangement set up by the Good Friday Agreement has always been tenuous and fraught, as I have discussed throughout this book with regard to cultural policy, by 2017 Northern Ireland had achieved more than a decade of uninterrupted devolved rule. In the years leading up to the collapse, ‘Though the devolved institutions experienced regular crises of public confidence and periodic crises of incapacity, there was little public expectation that they would be brought down’ (Gormley-Heenan and Aughey 2017: 506). The devolved government was finally restored in January 2020, three years after its initial dissolution, via the New Decade, New Approach agreement (Haughey 2020). The three years in between existed in a sort of political limbo ‘between devolution and direct rule’, with Westminster maintaining a limited role and only intervening for functions deemed essential (Heenan and Birrell 2018).1 Deirdre Heenan and Derek Birrell describe the significant effects of the prolonged ‘political vacuum’ for policies that affect everyday life and well-being: The absence of an assembly and an executive has meant that major policy changes in health and education are at a standstill. There are a number of policies on hold within the Department of Health, as it is claimed that they require ministerial approval … The political impasse means that any ideas of radical change or transformation are mothballed and the Department of Health is focused largely on keeping the system ticking over, with any changes marginal and at a glacial pace. (Ibid.: 309)

This three-year period demonstrated the deep imbalance of power within the cracked art world, for while the UK government at large did not (for the most part) actively involve itself in policymaking, the Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland did draft and pass yearly budgets in order to fund the necessary ongoing roles of the state (ibid.: 307). In the ongoing context of UK austerity politics this meant that the arts continued to experience budget cuts (as depicted in Figure 5.1). Art world members looking to protest the new cuts found themselves with no one willing to hear their appeal. With further Arts Council budget cuts on the horizon, in January 2018 Arts Matter NI once again held a sectoral meeting to organize a protest, though this time attendance was limited to organizations receiving ‘core’ funding from the Annual Funding Programme. This group ‘called for meetings with the incoming secretary of state and former culture secretary Karen Bradley, as well as politicians and civil servants’ (Quinn 2018). However, the 2018/19 ACNI cuts were finalized as planned in April 2018 (Meredith

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2018), with Bradley still not having met with any of the art world members calling for engagement. The protest group made another push in May of that same year, carrying banners and a statement signed by numerous supporters from annually funded organizations to the Department for Communities (DfC) offices in Belfast City Centre. This protest used the hashtag #WorthLess to highlight Northern Ireland’s smaller per capita arts spending when compared to England, Scotland, Wales, and the Republic of Ireland and call for ‘parity of investment’ across all five regions (the UK plus the Republic of Ireland) (Arts Matter NI 2018). The #WorthLess document specifically named and made requests of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, the Head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, and the Permanent Secretary of the DfC; it also included more general calls to ‘our politicians’, ‘all colleagues in the arts’, and ‘the public’ (ibid.: 4); however, the three officials specifically named – the only ones at that moment who potentially had the power to halt or reverse austerity cuts to the ACNI budget – did not meaningfully engage with the protest movement. With no sitting Minister for Communities, representatives who marched together to the DfC offices could only present their concerns to civil servants, whose role during the period without a devolved government was ambiguous (Heenan and Birrell 2018: 307), and who thus had very little (if any) power to affect public arts funding. Additionally, no new policymaking within the arts has occurred since the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure was absorbed into the Department for Communities: when I searched the DfC website in 2021 while writing this final portion of the book, I found that the earlier of the department’s two ‘most recent publications’ in the arts dated from March 2017, while the ‘most recent consultatio[n]’ was half a decade old – a DCAL-era proposed arts strategy for which stakeholder consultations had been held in late 2015 and early 2016 (DfC n.d.).2 The proposed strategy, which was described by a DCAL civil servant as then-Culture Minister Carál Ní Chuilín’s ‘legacy document’, was intended to be far-reaching and long-term, outlining a tenyear plan that would be in place until 2026; however, at what was meant to be the halfway point in the strategy’s implementation, nothing further has been done. The strategy itself was extremely contentious and received very negative feedback from the art world, especially among community artists. However, many community-arts art world members communicated to me that an ambitious strategy on this scale would be welcome, were it better informed by input from, and more closely aligned with the views and values of, arts workers; in fact, calls for just such a strategy formed a core part of the #WorthLess campaign (Arts Matter NI 2018). It seems, however, that no such policy or strategy document will be forthcoming any time soon. While the restoration of the government is certainly a movement in the right direction, and while the measures written into the New Decade, New Approach agreement are intended to render future collapses of this sort less likely, the three years in political limbo have revealed some hard

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truths about the inexorable march of austerity and the deep imbalance of power between policymakers and arts makers. By narrowing the social movement’s focus to organizations in receipt of AFP funds, moreover, Arts Matter NI has revealed further cracks in the art world, between larger organizations with operational budgets sponsored or part-sponsored by the ACNI and smaller organizations, freelancers, and others without access to AFP funding. This seeming closing of ranks is likely perceived as necessary for those involved, particularly as the AFP has been a main target for austerity cuts, but it is also likely to prevent social movement leaders from energizing a larger base, thus deepening art world cracks that had been repaired temporarily for the purposes of the protest recounted in Chapter 5. Particularly given the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 on freelance arts workers, whether this crack deepens further or whether it is mended in solidarity will be an interesting and important question for the immediate future of the art world. It is far too early to make predictions about the future of Northern Ireland’s devolved government, particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic reached Europe in earnest so soon after the re-formation of the government and has thus consumed most political time and debates since. However, an early analysis of the December 2019 general election (on the basis of which the new government was formed) suggests a political move towards the ‘centre ground’, away from the polarized positions of Sinn Féin and the DUP, and an increased importance for and presence of ‘non-aligned’ voters – that is, those who identify as neither unionist nor nationalist (Hayward 2020). It is likely that the losses of Assembly seats suffered by the two main parties, as well as the marked gains by middle-ground and nonaligned parties, speak to the frustration of the moment, when voters had been without a sitting government for nearly three years; thus, it is possible that these changes may be temporary signs of their specific moment in time rather than indicators of permanent change. Nevertheless, it is also possible that Northern Ireland’s non-aligned voting population will continue to grow, with the potential to shift the ways in which Northern Ireland politics are conceived and enacted by politicians. Given the tendency of art world members to cluster in this middle ground at a higher rate than the general population, I suspect that my research participants will be watching the political future of the region quite closely, in the hope that this might herald a subtle shift towards a more post-post-conflict imagining of Northern Ireland. However, even if the ‘rise of the centre ground’ (ibid.) constitutes a longer-term arc in Northern Ireland politics, it is not immediately clear what this will mean for arts funding and the art world, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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COVID-19 and the Northern Ireland Art World COVID-19 poses both the most troubling and the least answerable set of questions, given that at the time of writing it is still ongoing. Its impacts upon arts and artists are still playing out, making it very difficult to speculate as to how it might shape the future of the community-arts art world. The pandemic has devastated art worlds all over the globe due to limits on mobility and in-person events. Community-arts art worlds are no different, given their emphasis on face-to-face relationality. A number of community arts organizations in Northern Ireland have continued to provide limited programming online, especially in the form of arts tutorials for young children unable to attend school during the region’s successive lockdowns. However, these are but a fraction of the programmes that the art world would typically offer, and both individual artists and arts organizations are suffering. A survey conducted by the ACNI early in the pandemic, in late March and early April 2020, found both a significant loss of income and a widespread concern regarding the negative effects that suddenly halting in-person work would have on individuals engaged in community arts programmes (ACNI 2020b). Among the reports’ conclusions were the lines, ‘Evidence demonstrates a severe and immediate economic impact on artists’, and, ‘This places at greater risk vulnerable groups in society including older people with dementia and young people with poor mental health and wellbeing. It has also compromised the ability of some artists, working in inter and intra community contexts, to build relationships with participants through their creativity, potentially compromising important peace building work’ (ibid.: 1). Several rounds of emergency funding have so far been made available to individual artists and arts workers through the ACNI, including the £500,000 Artists Emergency Programme (ACNI 2020a), which was rapidly oversubscribed (Meredith 2020), and the £1.1 million Individuals Emergency Resilience Programme, whose budget was quickly more than tripled to £3.8 million due to extremely high demand (McDaid 2020). Other funds of note include a £29 million emergency scheme from the Northern Ireland Executive for programmes across the ‘culture, language, arts and heritage sectors’ (DfC 2020a), and a £1.57 billion ‘rescue package’ from the UK government for the arts sector, of which £33 million was earmarked for distribution by Northern Ireland’s devolved government (M. Brown 2020). A combination of funds for individuals and funding for institutions has been a common response to crisis within art worlds throughout Europe, so in terms of types of funding available Northern Ireland has been similar to other states, though perhaps a bit slower to act (Betzler et al. 2020). Anecdotally, though, my former research participants have reported that they have seen little of this money, and some have publicly questioned whether and how the £33 million from the UK government has been (or will be) disbursed. Self-employed freelance artists, already the

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most economically precarious within a field notoriously built on precarious employment, have especially reported struggling to access state-funded unemployment assistance while unable to work during the pandemic (cf. Tsioulakis and FitzGibbon 2020). Beyond immediate and urgent relief to community arts workers, there are, to my mind, two sets of questions facing the art world as we look ahead to an undefined but much-wished-for period after the pandemic. The first of these is how the shape of the community-arts art world itself will change. Will the same organizations remain, or will some be forced to shut their doors? Will community artists retain any of the digital methods and changes made out of necessity during the pandemic, or will these be left behind as insufficient lockdown relics? The second set of questions revolves around funding: what will the public funding landscape for community arts look like in a post-pandemic world? As the longer-term economic effects of the pandemic begin to reveal themselves, this question will become all the more urgent. The one constant throughout all of these changes has been austerity. As the Conservative Party, which was in power and responsible for implementing austerity politics following the 2008 global financial crisis, is at present still the ruling party in the UK, it is very likely that austerity will remain the go-to response to economic recession, particularly once the immediate urgency of the pandemic is over. Barring a large-scale change of heart, mind, and policy among Tory politicians, it seems likely that austerity will remain the dominant economic choice for the near future; if this is the case, state funding for community arts in Northern Ireland is in greater danger than ever before. Austerity has had devastating physical, mental, and emotional effects on Northern Ireland’s artists; half a decade ago, my research participants were already telling me that they felt burnt out (Rush 2020a). The combination of austerity’s effects and those of COVID-19 will likely be quite grim for artists and arts workers. I am certain that this potentially very bleak future is already in the minds of many of my research participants and friends in the art world. And yet. I do not take this to be a death knell for community arts in Northern Ireland. While this is not a future that I welcome, and while its development will most certainly be painful, whatever it looks like, the cracked art world is flexible and will re-emerge; that is one of its strengths. It will likely be smaller. It will likely have a greater online presence than before. Art world members will certainly find ways to address the long-term effects of the pandemic on individuals and their local communities. They will hopefully find ways to utilize alternate funding sources to continue their work and their advocacy. But in one form or another, community arts will continue to be made, and will continue to imagine possible ways of living and being in twenty-first-century Northern Ireland.

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Notes 1. A crucial exception was the set of regulations passed in late 2019 which legalized same-sex marriage and abortion in Northern Ireland, bringing its laws into line with those in England, Scotland, and Wales after many years of disparity (Aiken and Bloomer 2019; McCormick and Stewart 2020). 2. This strategy consultation, which occurred during my fieldwork period and provided fascinating insights into the conflict of values in the cracked art world, is unfortunately outside the scope of this book.

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• Index

174 Trust, 70–71 4 Corners Festival, 28, 60–61, 65, 68–71, 73, 75, 79, 81–82, 83n4 Abbey Theatre, 78 abortion. See ‘Northern Ireland, legislation on abortion’ access, participation, authorship, ownership (definition of community arts), 21, 29–31, 36, 90 Acting Up, 42–47, 50–53, 55–57, 58n3 Action Cancer, 44 actor-network theory, 6 affect, 12–13, 91, 115–17, 122, 124 Allen, Marion, 49 Alliance Party, 19, 34, 119 animation socio-culturel, 18 Annual Funding Programme. See Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Annual Funding Programme Armagh, 67 Arts Against Cuts, 130–31 Arts and Older People Programme. See Arts Council of Northern

Ireland, Arts and Older People Programme arts anti-austerity movement in Northern Ireland, 16, 114–24, 127–30, 133, 139–41 Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 10, 16, 21, 23–24, 30–31, 36, 45, 55, 113–14, 118, 124–25, 134, 139, 141–42 Annual Funding Programme, 114, 139–41 Arts and Older People Programme, 30–31, 45, 55 Building Peace through the Arts: Re-Imaging Communities programme (see Re-Imaging) arts funding, 9, 11–13, 22, 37, 55–58, 130–31 Northern Ireland, 10, 12–13, 15–16, 23–24, 26, 30–31, 34–37, 42, 54–58, 109, 113–22, 130, 133–34, 137, 139–43 Arts Matter NI, 116–17, 121, 127–28, 134, 139–41 art worlds, 5–10, 14, 17 Assembly Rooms, Belfast, 98, 104 austerity, 4, 12–13, 15–16, 24, 55,

Index 167

110, 113–15, 119, 122, 124, 133, 138–41, 143 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 126 Bangor, 58n3 Battle of the Somme. See Somme, Battle of the Becker, Howard S., 6, 10, 12–14. See also art worlds Beggs, Roy, 125 Belfast, 1, 4, 23–24, 26–27, 35, 42–46, 50–51, 58n3, 58n7, 60, 62, 65, 67–69, 79–82, 84–89, 91–100, 103, 107–10, 114, 127, 138, 140 Belfast Arts Lab, 95 Belfast City Council, 16, 23, 86, 100 Belfast City Hall, 97 Belfast Community Circus School, 112, 116–17, 127 Belfast Exposed, 96 Belfast Multi-Cultural Association, 138 Belfast Telegraph, 35 Belvoir Players Studio, 43–46, 51, 57, 70 Big Lottery Fund, 42 Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 8. See also cultural fields, habitus, possibles Bradley, Karen, 139–40 brecciation, 87, 91, 93, 107 Brecht, Bertolt, 66, 82n3 Brexit referendum vote, 4, 19, 135–39 Brinner, Benjamin, 6 broken world thinking, 14–15 B Specials, 62 Building Peace through the Arts: Re-Imaging Communities. See Re-Imaging Campton, David Andrew, 70 care. See repair as care

Castlebrooke Investments, 97, 100–1, 104, 110 CastleCourt Shopping Centre, 100 Cathedral Quarter, 85–89, 92–98, 100–5, 107–10, 115, 131–33 Chest Heart and Stroke, 58n3 Christianity evangelical, 80, 82n2, 83n9 in Northern Ireland, 20, 45–46, 60–61, 65, 68–71, 76–77, 80, 82, 94 Clonard Monastery, 65, 69 co-creation, 87, 90–93 Coleraine, 78 community arts, 3, 5–8, 12–13, 17, 47, 63, 66, 87–88, 90–92, 100–1, 104–5, 109–10 definition, 18–20, 28–31, 36, 44–45, 104 history, 21–23 history in Northern Ireland, 20–37, 95–96, 133 history in Wales, 37n2 intercultural, 28, 32, 138 projects with older adults, 32, 42–44, 47, 53, 55–58, 142 projects with young people, 7, 20, 31, 51, 142 Community Arts Forum, 26, 28–30. See also Community Arts Partnership Community Arts Partnership, 22, 26, 30, 84, 90, 96, 104, 109–10, 110n1, 128–29 community cultural development, 18 Community Relations Council, 23, 37n3, 64, 67, 69, 79, 112 Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, 22 Conservative Party, 124–25, 143 Contemporary Christianity, 60, 62–64, 70–73, 79, 82n2, 83n4 Conway Mill, 96 cosmopolitanism, 65–66, 79, 83n4

168 Index

COVID-19 pandemic, 38n5, 110n2, 135–36, 138, 141–43 Artists Emergency Programme, 142 Individuals Emergency Resilience Programme, 142 cracked art world, 10–17, 36–37, 54–58, 79–80, 87, 106–10, 114–17, 120–23, 126, 133, 136, 139, 141, 143, 144n2 creación colectiva, 18 Crehan, Kate, 21 cultural fields, 6 Culture Night Belfast, 84, 87, 90, 105, 109 Cultural Traditions Group. See Community Relations Council Cupar Way, 95 Decade of Centenaries, 59–60, 65, 70, 73, 78–79 Democratic Unionist Party, 34–35, 73–74, 119, 125–26, 141 Department for Communities. See Northern Ireland, Department for Communities Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure. See Northern Ireland, Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure Derry/Londonderry, 23, 32, 110n3 devolution. See Northern Ireland, collapse of power-sharing dialogue in peacebuilding, 66–76, 79–80, 82, 83n8, 124 Donegall Street, 69, 85, 95–99, 127 Downpatrick, 61, 82n1 Drogheda, 32 Duke of York (pub), 84, 88 Duncairn Centre for Culture and Arts, 60, 70–71, 77, 81 Easter Proclamation. See Proclamation of 1916

Easter Rising, 59–65, 72, 80 EMBRACE, 82–83n4 Enniskillen, 60 entanglement, 9, 11 European Regional Development Fund, 137 evangelical Christianity. See Christianity, evangelical Evangelical Contribution on Northern Ireland. See Contemporary Christianity Extramural Activity, 94 Féile an Phobail, 35 Festival of Fools, 84 Finaghy Methodist Church, 43–44 Fitzroy/Clonard Fellowship, 65–66, 69 Fitzroy Presbyterian Church, 60–61, 66–69, 82n2 Florida, Richard, 105–6 Forum for Alternative Belfast, 105–6 Foster, Arlene, 73, 83n6, 139 funding, arts. See arts funding Gell, Alfred, 7–8, 17n1 gender in community arts programmes for older people, 45 and peacebuilding, 74 women in Northern Ireland politics, 73–74 George Best Hotel, 109 Girdwood Hub, 81–82 Givan, Paul, 35–36, 38n5 Gladiator, 128, 130 Goffman, Erving, 10 Goggin, Valerie, 48–49, 51–53, 56 good dialogue. See dialogue in peacebuilding Good Friday Agreement, 5, 21, 25, 27–28, 34, 101, 135, 137–39 Grand Opera House, 46

Index 169

Grant, David, 23 Grant, Meriel, 43–44, 51 Green Party, 19, 119 habitus, 8 Halfway House. See Philip Orr, Halfway House Hargey, Deirdre, 37–38n5 Hayes, Joan, 51 Hayes, John, 43, 51, 57 Heaney, Seamus, 77 Hit the North festival, 85, 89–90, 106, 109–10 Hollywood Arts Centre, 30, 60 Hyndman, Marilyn, 95 Ilex, 110n3 Ingold, Tim, 6 Instagram, 106 intercultural community arts. See community arts, intercultural International Wall, 95 Irish language, 13, 35 Irish traditional music, 13 Jackson, Steven, 14–16. See also broken world thinking Johnston, Doreen, 51 Joyce, James, 10 Kaleidoscope, 42–44, 54–55, 57 Kiefert, Janet, 48–49, 52–53 Labour Party, 19, 23 Laganside Corporation, 100 Larne, 60, 66 Late Night Art, 126–28 Lederach, John Paul, 66–67 Líofa, 35, 38n5 Lisburn, 114 Loft Collective, 102 Long, Naomi, 34 Lurgan, 60 Lynch, Martin, 23, 28 Lyric Theatre, 46, 78

Magill, Fr Martin, 68–73, 81–82 marching bands in Northern Ireland, 13, 35–36, 69, 136 marriage equality. See Northern Ireland, legislation on same-sex marriage McCartney, Nicola Heritage, 83n8 McCausland, Nelson, 35, 120, 125–26, 134n3 McCrea, Basil, 118–21, 124–25 McFetridge, Paula, 118–19 McGovern, Hazel, 49–50 McGuinness, Frank, 78 Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme, 78–79 McGuinness, Martin, 73–74, 138–39 McKinney, Fearghal, 124–26 Melchett, Lord, Northern Ireland Minister for Education, 23 Metropolitan Arts Centre (The MAC), 85 migration. See Northern Ireland, migration Moriarty, Gerri, 29 MTO, 93–94 Musicians’ Union, 137 National Endowment for the Arts, 12, 22 National Health Service, 55–56 Neighbourhood Open Workshops, 28 New Belfast Community Arts Initiative , 26, 104. See also Community Arts Partnership New Decade, New Approach agreement, 139–40 New Lodge Arts, 3, 7, 15 Newell, Rev. Ken, 69 Newry, 30, 43 New University of Ulster. See Ulster University

170 Index

NI21, 118–19 Ní Chuilíin, Carál, 16, 35, 118–21, 124–26, 134, 140 Northern Ireland Assembly, 16, 35, 112, 115, 119–20, 122–24, 141 collapse of power-sharing, 4–5, 34, 37n5, 76, 79, 83n6, 135, 138–41 Department for Communities, 34–37, 38n5, 140 Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure, 34–36, 37n1, 118–19, 124–25, 140 Department of Education, 23 Department of Finance, 99 Department of Health, 139 legislation on abortion, 19, 144n1 legislation on same-sex marriage, 19, 144n1 migration, 4–5, 32, 69, 138 segregation, 4, 24–28, 68–69, 81, 94–95, 101, 103 Northern Ireland Protocol, 137 Northern Visions/NVTV, 95–96 North Street, 85, 97–98, 102, 105–7 North Street Arcade, 96–99, 102, 108 Odyssey Arena, 100 Omagh, 60 O’Neill, Michelle, 73, 83n6 Orange Order, 35 Orr, Philip, 60–61, 64, 70–71, 77–80, 82, 82n3 Dresden, 70 Halfway House, 60–68, 70–75, 77–78, 80 Stormont House Rules!, 60, 63–64, 70–78, 80 Osborne, Peter, 67 palimpsest, 91 parades. See marching bands in Northern Ireland

Parliament Buildings. See Stormont Estate Patterson, Glenn, 118–19, 125 peacebuilding in Northern Ireland, 61, 64–71, 73–77, 79–82, 142 PEACE funding programmes, 137–38 peace walls. See Northern Ireland, segregation Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires, 120 possibles, 8–9 post-conflict imaginary, 21, 27–37, 59, 87, 91, 93, 96, 99–104, 108 post-post-conflict imaginary, 21, 31–37, 59, 87, 91, 93, 102–6, 108–10, 141 power-sharing. See Northern Ireland, collapse of power-sharing processual approach to art, 8, 13–14, 90–91 Proclamation of 1916, 65, 72, 80 protest, 10, 16, 26, 36, 104–5, 108–9, 130–31. See also arts anti-austerity movement in Northern Ireland PS2, 96–97, 126–29, 131–33 public art definition, 88–89 racist hate crimes, 138 Redhead Thread, 90 Red Sky, 125, 134n3 Re-Imaging, 31, 88–89 Renewable Heat Incentive, 139 repair as care, 15–16, 57, 108, 110, 117 in cracked art worlds , 14–17, 28, 36–37, 57, 74–76, 79–80, 108–10, 114–15, 122–23, 126 restored behaviour, 61, 77–78, 80, 82 Reynolds, Fr Gerry, 69 rhizomes, 6

Index 171

Robinson, Peter, 73 Rooney, Kerry, 42–45, 49, 54–56 The Coach Party , 43, 45, 49, 57 The W.I. Inspector Calls , 43–45, 49–50, 53, 57 Rural Communities Network, 30 Samaritans, 44 same-sex marriage. See Northern Ireland, legislation on same-sex marriage Save the Cathedral Quarter, 104–5, 108–9 Schechner, Richard, 46–47, 51, 61, 77–78. See also restored behaviour, transportation and transformation Seedhead Arts, 85, 111n4 Serafini, Paula, 130–31 Shields, Conor, 128–29 Short Strand, 27 Signature Living Group, 109 Signs of Collective Protest: Resilience and Political Actions against Arts Funding Cuts, 126–33 Sinn Féin, 34–35, 37n5, 73–74, 119–20, 126, 138, 141 Social Democratic and Labour Party, 119, 124 social imaginary, 27, 37n4 social media, 35–36, 117, 121, 134 social movements, 114, 117–20. See also arts anti-austerity movement in Northern Ireland Somme, Battle of the, 59, 61–65, 78–80 South Bank Playhouse, 52 Special European Union Programmes Body, 137 St Andrews Agreement, 101 St Anne’s Cathedral, 85 St Bride’s Church Hall, 44

Stockman, Rev. Steve, 68–69, 71 Stormont Estate, 10, 112–20, 122–24, 127 Stormont House Rules!. See Philip Orr, Stormont House Rules! Stormont House Agreement, 72, 80 St Patrick’s Church, 69, 95 street art definition, 85, 87–90 Tate Britain, 130–31 Tiger’s Bay, 26 Titanic Quarter, 100 tourism, 84, 95, 99, 101, 103, 106, 110, 136 Townsend, Sue , 44 Womberang, 44–45, 48–54, 58n7 transportation and transformation, 46–54, 58n5, 63 Tribeca, 100–1, 104. See also Castlebrooke Investments Troubles, the, 4–5, 13, 16, 20–21, 23–25, 28, 32–33, 46, 61, 64, 69, 77, 88, 94–97, 99–101, 106–7 Turkington, Adam, 84–85, 87–90, 93–94, 96–98, 101–6, 109 Ulster Architectural Heritage, 98 Ulster Covenant, 65 Ulster-Scots language and heritage, 13, 35 Ulster Special Constabulary. See B Specials Ulster Unionist Party, 118 Ulster University, 78, 105, 111n5 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, 29 University of the Third Age, 44–47, 50, 52, 55, 57, 58n2 Victoria Square, 96, 100 Visual Waste, 106–7

172 Index

Waterfront Hall, 100 Waterworks Park, 1–3, 6, 10–11 Wedding Community Play, The, 26–28, 83n8 Wisconsin, 122

women politicians. See gender, women in Northern Ireland politics Youth Initiatives, 20