The children they wished to forget

Oct 20, 2012 |

The Irish theatre company BrokenTalkers presents The Blue Boy, a stark depiction of a dark episode of Irish history

Image from The Blue Boy by Broken Talkers

Image from The Blue Boy by Broken Talkers

THERE’S a ghost that haunts Artane, a part of Dublin where Ireland’s largest industrial school used to be. Schoolchildren there tell stories about “the blue boy”, who once came to a bad end at the school.

Sadly, he wasn’t the only child who suffered there – and not the only one who died. The survivors carried away the baggage of their past – the physical and psychological injuries it inflicted – when they were finally able to put the school walls behind them. BrokenTalkers’ The Blue Boy tells their stories in a production combining text, sound, images and physical performance.

Gary Keegan, co-artistic director of BrokenTalkers – together with director Feidlim Cannon – has a particular interest in this story. His grandfather, an undertaker, had been called into the school on several occasions to measure the body of a child who had died for his coffin. Sometimes, Keegan’s mother told him, he noticed bruises on the child’s body.

The Ryan Report confirmed the abuse of countless children

When it was published in Ireland in 2009, the Ryan Report confirmed this story – and many others besides. Eleven years in the making, this report encompassed thousands of pages and confirmed the abuse of countless young children who, as social undesirables, were brought to these industrial schools and reformatories – which were the care and responsibility of the Catholic Church. This shed a particularly glaring light on the children’s suffering, rendering their torturers not only sadistic, but also hypocritical.

Keegan and Cannon decided to make this the focus of a theatre piece. They not only read the Ryan Report but also interviewed dozens of former students of these schools. They were so shocked by what they heard it sometimes moved them to tears.

“I conducted the first interview myself,” Keegan remembers. A former industrial school student had recounted, 30 years later, that she and her fellow inmates had the job of making rosary beads. “She talks about being so hungry that she would eat the beads just to stave off the hunger. She said it in such a matter-of-fact way. It completely tore me apart. So we had to edit that interview because you can hear me in it getting upset.”

She ate rosary beads to stave off the hunger

Keegan and Cannon combined this and other stories – including Keegan’s own – with physical theatre into a unique production. Sombre images from the last century form the backdrop for masked performers to illustrate the children’s misery and desperation. Wearing masks fractured into cubistic impressions of faces, they demonstrate the broken lives and souls of the children and indicate how their humanity was taken from them. “So much of what they had to do was work related,” says Keegan. “The environment was dehumanising. They all had a number as opposed to a name. They had to do a lot of marching. And when they weren’t marching or working, they were probably beaten.” The choreography and physicality of the work reflect this.

Keegan denies, however, the occasional parallel drawn between the schools and the concentration camps of the Third Reich. “This is something that happened in Ireland in a different context: a context of abuse of care and trust, and collusion between the State and the Church. The Irish context is something we’re very keen for people to understand, the relationship between the Church and the State. The State were complicit in what happened. And they paid for it as well.”

When the Ryan Report was published, there was a huge outcry in Ireland. People were not only horrified by the abuse but also by the incredible extent of it, and that it took place under the auspices of the Catholic Church with the knowledge and complicity of the State. The shame was overwhelming. Creating a piece about the situation that dealt with its horrors was no easy task. “Sometimes,” Keegan reveals, “as a joke in our e-mails, we’d put in the subject line to our colleagues who were part of the crew, ‘The show that Failte Ireland doesn’t want you to see’.”

We’re proud of the way we’ve represented history

Keegan is nevertheless proud to be able to show the piece to an expanding and now international audience. The show had its German premiere at the New Plays from Europe festival in Wiesbaden, and in a few days will be presented at the Stuttgarter Europa Theater Treffen. Next year the piece will go to the Festival de Liège in Belgium, with hopefully a few more performances in Germany. “I think, and Feidlim might agree, I’m not necessarily proud that this is an Irish story, but I’m proud of the way we’re presenting it,” explains Keegan. “We’re representing Irish culture and theatre well by choosing to present this story in this way. It’s sending a message to whoever sees or experiences it that Ireland is a creative place.”

The production wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago, Keegan believes. Today, “citizens are beginning to stand up more for truth”. And this is something else he’s proud of. “The story isn’t necessarily a positive one,” he admits,” but it leaves you with a sense there’s an opportunity to make things better, it’s not all lost. I think the show ends on a hopeful note.”

Perhaps then even the Blue Boy can rest in peace.

 

 

Stripping for Spencer, or making art in Munich

Jun 25, 2012 |

Photographer Spencer Tunick in the thick of his Ring image installation

Photographer Spencer Tunick in the thick of his Ring image installation

WHAT was I doing, standing shivering and stark naked – except for a shimmering layer of gold body paint – in the middle of Munich at 6am Saturday morning? No, it wasn’t the humiliating aftermath of a night on the tiles. The latest installation by photographic artist Spencer Tunick took place in front of Munich’s Nationaltheater – and I’m in there somewhere, trying to blend in. And, thanks to 1,699 fellow participants covered from head to toe in red and gold, I certainly did.

Photographer Tunick is known – or perhaps notorious – for his massive installations of nudes in urban and natural locations all over the world. Its potentially pervy element renders it an instant headline-grabber, but flaunters, voyeurs and anybody jiggling their relevant bits are categorically unwelcome – as the organisers make clear from the start. Not only to protect participants, but also because Tunick seeks “to continue the tradition of celebrating the nude and treat the true forms of real humans no differently than the classical, vitruvian ideal”, he explains.

The Bavarian State Opera commissioned Tunick to do a photographic installation inspired by their new production of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, directed by Andreas Kriegenburg. Including an event like this is an upgrade for the audience, says artistic director Nikolaus Bachler, because it calls on the Munich audience to take part.

Inviting the public to be performers as well as spectators is, Bachler adds, “not an uncomplicated logistical exercise”. This becomes obvious upon arrival at the installation’s meeting place at 3 in the morning on 23 June. From the end of the 500 metre queue of participants aged 18 to 80, you could see the floodlit Marstallplatz, where early arrivals had already assembled into the ad-hoc garrison to prepare. When you arrived, you got handed a small tub of body paint, red or gold, and directed into a compound according to colour. I got gold and shuffled forward to get a welcome cup of tea provided on the sidelines. Despite it being the beginning of summer, it was still only about 10 degrees, and I wasn’t much looking forward to peeling off my clothes.

But it could have been worse. A previous Tunick installation took place on the Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland, and in my crowd mingling, I came across someone who had taken part in it. What was that like? “Cold,” he says. But nudity was nothing new to him. As a naturist who often does things in the buff, he had once gone on a nude cycle through London with his mother-in-law. He showed me a picture.

Participants get into position for photographer Spencer Tunick's Ring installation

Participants get into position for photographer Spencer Tunick’s Ring installation

Then the games commenced. Tunick addressed the red group, telling them to “listen up” as they received precise instructions about how to apply their body paint and where they were going. He abruptly became fierce: no one who was intoxicated would be allowed to continue. He indicated into the crowd: “I’m serious!” he bellowed into his megaphone. “Das ist mein verdammter Ernst!” the translator roared into his. Several people were ejected.

As the encroaching dawn softened the darkness, the magic began. The opposite crowd suddenly went from a massive gathering of people to a throng of bare bodies squirming in the gloam. I blinked, and the opposite half of the square was filled with red devils, their teeth gleaming white, their eyes lurid, almost daemonic in the half-light. It was like being backstage at the theatre: you’re in a familiar world, and then you’re not, as if a wrapper had been peeled off the known universe and you’d entered an alternative reality.

On a signal from Tunick’s assistants, the red horde trooped, dancing and cheering, out of the square toward Odeonsplatz for the first photos. We yet-to-be-goldies applauded them on their way. A long wait, while the dawn whisked out the darkness, and then it was our turn.

We laughed and rubbed gold paint on one another

Again, the masses around me went from being an everyday crowd to a swarm of flesh rapidly disengaging from final bits of underwear. It was my turn. I stripped down to what god gave me, stirred my gold body paint with my finger and slapped a handful on my stomach.

The paint was cold and gloopy, but a heady sense of abandon filled the square. It felt like Glastonbury, like toddlers in crèche going wild with the finger paints. We laughed and joked and rubbed gold paint on one anothers’ backs. Within minutes, the square was filled with gold statues. It was like nothing else on earth.

Tunick had previously described these projects as “euphoric”, and the joy of taking part increased exponentially as the hours wore on. We weren’t just watching an event– we were the event. His work has inspired a wave of followers. A woman had come from Israel to take part, a message on Tunick’s Facebook page announced. His assistant Lauren Russell said there was an 80-year-old man who had been to all the installations, and had pictures of them at home on the walls. A shoot in Mexico City included 18,000 participants – and still they had to turn people away. “My recent installation in the Dead Sea of Israel is something I am particularly proud of,” Tunick confides. “Whoever thought there could be naked people en masse, making art in the Middle East?”

Streetcars passed, dinging their bells at us as we encircled the monument in front of the Nationaltheater. One driver stopped her streetcar in the middle of the track to take a picture with her smartphone; we cheered. Tunick yelled from atop a towering cherry picker, “There’s always a car! Get that car out of here!” and an assistant shooed a taxi away. The red mob joined us in ringing the statue and for a photo on the steps of the opera house. And then my gold paint paid off: I got to join a group of women for photos inside the Nationaltheater – on the marble staircase, and inside the sumptuous Königssaal. Something resembling a climbing frame at a playground had been set up in the middle, and we – gold statues with a pulse – draped ourselves around it to form a golden mountain.

The Bavarian State Opera will show a film of the making of the installation in July and exhibit the photographs in January, when they bring back the Ring for the Wagner bicentennial in 2013. Looking at these images that juxtapose the ordinary with the unexpected, the viewer gets jolted out of the sameness of everyday life. “Imagine the power of a live photographic image with thousands of real, human bodies,” says Tunick. The beauty and the buzz were well worth a few hours of braving the elements with your kit off.

Published in The Local on 25 June 2012: I stripped for Spencer: making art in Munich

 

About

Christine Madden is an Irish-German writer, editor and writing coach based in Berlin and southwest France. Her journalism has appeared in the Irish Times, the Irish Independent, The Local Germany, the Guardian and the magazine ExBerliner, and she has been broadcast on BBC radio.