Zachary Lamdin

Panel Abstract: It has been 12 years since the Good Friday Agreement, which articulated the constitutional steps towards peace and was the catalyst for the decommissioning of arms by major paramilitary organizations in Northern Ireland. However, since 1998 the idea and reality of peace – as an absence of violence or a state of political equilibrium – has been continually challenged by elected politicians, dissident paramilitary factions and citizens who are dissatisfied with the re-articulation of the constitutional position of Northern Ireland. Despite this, and because of it, peace is not a given, it is a constantly negotiated and performed state. Additionally, unlike in other newly defined states, such as South Africa, there has been no formal political process of reconciliation between communities in Northern Ireland. Rather, the ‘post’ peace process period has been marked by absence and gaps in the acknowledgment of trauma in the memories of the Troubles. This absence places theatre artists in a particularly politicized position of producing art that negotiates, interrogates or even produces processes of reconciliation that do not figure in the political landscape. This panel will survey, investigate and critique theatre and performance practices which reveal the social and political realities of Northern Ireland in the early twenty first century – practices which question the assumption that The Troubles are over and that peace is a done deal rather than a continually performed act.

This panel will engage with the performative dimensions of the peace process and the theatrical responses to, and interventions into that process. The central focus of the issue is on the theatricality of the political and cultural processes of peace in Northern Ireland, and the ways in which theatre performance has encountered and interrogated these processes. Rather than offering distinct papers, the speakers will engage in a dialogue with each other, and the audience, about these concerns, touching on a range of relevant performance practices and contexts such as dark tourism, site and space, performances of reconciliation, the economics of cross-border performance, and responses to the Saville Enquiry (the Bloody Sunday Tribunal).