Sarah Pierce, Performance | Gag: a performance for three actors
Garden Galleries, IMMA
Intermittent scenarios will be performed throughout the exhibition space of El Lissitzky: The Artist and the State using gesture and voice. These scenarios are based on the Irish Cultural Revival during the late 19th and early 20th century. This is an intermittent, roving performance throughout the building. The performance starts at 2.15pm and runs approximately 40 minutes:
Saturday 3rd October – Final Performance
Sarah Pierce’s work in El Lissitzky: The Artist and the State consists of an installation and a series of short performances throughout September. Both the installation and performance relate to themes within the development of tableaux performance as a political tool used by artists Alice Milligan and Maud Gonne.
The title of Pierce’s work, Gag, refers to the historic outlawing of the Gaelic language, a loss of speech, censorship, and the silence of the tableaux. Pierce has responded to the use of Celtic mythology within the tableaux as a way to seek a ‘new’ language in theatre that would resonate politically throughout the country. It is a strategy that on the surface counters the language of revolution seen in the works of their European and Russian counterparts – and this contrast informs Gag.
The starting point for the installation is an archive of debris which has direct reference to both the immediate past and the ‘historical’ present. In the lead-up to the exhibition, the unused scraps and remnants from the de-installation of the previous exhibition and the current exhibition were amassed in the gallery and kept. This material presence conveys the reality of taking apart, building and presenting that runs through the ideas of revolution and nation-building — and here Pierce views the exhibition as a compressed allegory for what it means to move from one ‘time’ to another.
During September, actors will use the installation to make performances involving devised exercises, directed by Pierce.
Director:
Sarah Pierce
Actors:
Doireann Coady
Shane Byrne
Dee Burke
Translator:
Colm Mac Athlaoich