Abstract
RIOT (2016–2019) was thisispopbaby’s response to the centenary celebrations of the struggle for the independence of Ireland. It’s cabaret form featured artists from various disciplines, such as drag, dance, acrobatics, and performance poetry, attracting new audiences to its non-theatre spaces. It contested the politics of neoliberalism that contemporary Ireland had embraced, seeking instead to reinstate gender and sexuality markers of identities that had been erased by Ireland’s neoliberal project of socioeconomics that turned its citizens primarily into good consuming subjects. Of particular focus is the representation of Irish masculinities and how they might work to challenge patriarchy and act instead, in their feminist construction, to mirror similar political shifts in Irish politics with calls for the contestation of neoliberalism and aspiration for social justice.
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Notes
- 1.
https://microsites.museum.ie/1916objectstories/ObjectDetail/proclamtion-irish. Accessed 16 Sept. 2018.
- 2.
The thirty-fourth amendment of the Constitution (Marriage Equality) Act 2015, to permit marriage to be contracted by two persons without distinction as to their sex.
- 3.
The life of the show was extended into 2019 as the opening production of the Dublin Dance Festival in Vicar Street (six performances, 1–4 May).
- 4.
http://thisispopbaby.com/ Accessed 26 July 2018.
- 5.
In addition the company’s repertoire has featured activist Tara Flynn’s Not a Funny Word (2017), a personal account of travelling out of Ireland for an abortion that played at various venues in the run-up to the Referendum to Repeal the 8th Amendment. In 2018 the company presented I Am Tonie Walsh a self-portrait by the gay club impresario about his activism for queer rights and social justice. And in 2019 the company presented another self-penned comic drama, Sure Look It, Fuck It by Clare Dunne about returning to Ireland’s gig economy to be priced out of living.
- 6.
First produced by Fishamble theatre company’s ‘Show in a Bag’ series at Dublin Fringe Festival.
- 7.
This incident occurred on 24 November 2014. For a description of the incident, see https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/if-there-were-two-men-in-that-car-that-would-never-have-happened-joan-burton-says-jobstown-wont-deter-her-from-running-again-36446929.html Accessed 9 Sept. 2018.
- 8.
- 9.
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 107, emphasis in original.
- 10.
Panti lip-synched to Maggie Smith’s performance in the 1969 film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and to Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest (1981).
- 11.
Interestingly, John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger only received its Irish première at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 2018, at a time when gender, class and power were subjects dominating the media, not only in terms of constitutional referenda, but also at the height of Irish theatre’s #MeToo exposures.
- 12.
Irish word for women.
- 13.
On the 2018 tour to New York and Toronto Emmet Kirwan was replaced by actress Kate Stanley Brennan. While the change responded to critics of a man telling a woman’s story, masculinity’s ‘will to change’ was no longer present.
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Singleton, B. (2022). Riotous Assembly: Performing Gender and Social Justice in thisispopbaby’s RIOT. In: Halferty, J.P., Leeney, C. (eds) Analysing Gender in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85574-1_16
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