The Absent Body? Performing Tradition

Abstract

In 1990, in ‘The Erotics of Irishness’ Cheryl Herr speculated on what she describes as Ireland’s ‘over-identity crisis’ and questions the perceptions of the body in Irish society:

One feature that almost no one mentions is the relationship between the Irish mind and any kind of Irish Body. The identity-obsession marks a social repression of the body on a grand scale. As I see it, the loss occurs on both individual and collective levels.

(Herr 1990: 6)

That such a loss occurs on both individual and collective levels affects the individual actor or theatre practitioner and Irish audiences. The repression of the body has been evidenced in the creation of meaning at all levels of the theatrical process in Ireland. The work of playwrights whose work (even unknowingly) subscribes to this repression of the body is more visible in the Irish theatre canon. Until recently practitioners who work to foreground the body in performance have had limited or sporadic success in this area of Irish theatre practice.⁵ Actors are constrained by a process that privileges language and has, for the most part, seen the actor as facilitating rather than materially creating meaning.

Even though we know how hideously bodies lie, we want to retain some faith in the authenticity of the body’s gestures.

(Phelan 1997: 31)