drama

New Year at Thoor Ballylee

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Remembering the time of WB Yeats’s death eighty-four years ago, when according to WH Auden he ‘disappeared in the dead of winter’, this year sees WB Yeats’s 158th birthday, and the 100th anniversary of his Nobel Prize for Literature from 1923. At Thoor Ballylee we look back and look forward: we reflect on the past year’s happenings, and anticipate the exciting new season.

The clear out of the exhibitions and fittings in the tower and cottage has long been complete and flood barriers are in place until the spring. Many coats of paint were applied to the downstairs area; rich velvet curtains replaced rotten door & jambs (with the help of Anderson contractors); the audio-visual presentation is newly updated ready for the new year. Through this frosty winter the tower waits in welcome, as for so many years, for pilgrims and visitors from around the world.

2022 Season

Following an enforced two-year closure, we were delighted to back in business to in-person, on-site visitors. The past twelve months for Thoor Ballylee brought lots of hard work and many challenges, but it was our pleasure to welcome back three thousand visitors during the 2022 season, all eager to explore the home of WB Yeats and attend the many organised events.

This year’s season opening began with a warm welcome back as we hosted afternoon tea at Thoor Ballylee. This was followed by an evening concert with Ciaran Cannon & guests, all in aid of the Gort Welcomes Ukraine Fund.

The season also featured:

Two performances of Yeats Joyce and Nora by our local Wild Swan Theatre Company;

an evening with Soprano Helen Hancock;

the annual Poet’s Picnic for WB Yeats, attended by our generous benefactor, Joe Hassett;

…and a special performance of Nora by The Curlew Theatre Company, to mark Bloomsday 100 years of James Joyce’s Ulysses, with musical interlude by Nicola and Karina Cahill.

All week long during Heritage Week as ever the local community took the chance to engage, and the Studio @ Thoor Ballylee was the venue for a book launch on the History of the GAA by Steve Dolan.

For Culture Night Jo Beth Young and guests treated us to an enchanting evening of stories and song with her Shadow Navigation Show.

The long-awaited in-person return of the Yeats Lady Gregory Autumn Gathering brought many Augusta Gregory and Yeats enthusiasts, including many Gregory family members, to Thoor, which hosted day two of the Gathering.

The return of The Songbirds brought our visitor events for 2022 to a close.

But that was not all. Thoor Ballylee was represented at the inaugural Gort Community Fair.

The Society was chosen as a delegate in the EU’s Cultural Heritage in Action Programme and was included on the list of Best Practice Sites in Europe.

Mary Hanley’s sons paid a visit and donated a precious and valuable collection of books to the tower.

And schools and education groups returned to the tower to learn about its history and heritage.

We hosted a civil wedding ceremony for a lovely Texan couple and a several wedding parties chose Thoor and its surroundings for wedding day photos.

And his was a year for documentaries! – starring Miriam Margolyes, Julia Bradbury, and our own Ronnie O’Gorman and Rena McAllen. Highlighting the natural world and cultural impact of Thoor Ballylee, RTE, Channel 4, Bat Conservation Ireland, and a German TV crew came to film in the tower beside the stream at Ballylee.

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to our generous benefactors for their continued support. This year with their help we were able to acquire an original Elizabeth Corbett Yeats picture from 1934.

Our thanks go to our army of volunteers and craftworkers and professional contractors helping us at Thoor Ballylee.

Most of all, our appreciation goes to the fantastic group of volunteers (ten of whom joined our team this year) who threw open the doors and shutters, lit the fire and the candles and welcomed in the many guests, pre-booked tours, schoolchildren, and other groups and individual visitors, seven days a week over a period of six months. We thank Pat O Looney, Paul O Donnell, Tonii Kelly, Pauline Kennelly, John Morgan, Aidan Eames, Anne Leahy, Gerry Conneely, Dido, Ruth Lynch Delassus, Gerry Wynne, and more! The call for a Meitheal for the spring clean was responded to with much enthusiasm.

To our reliable car park team Gus and JJ who guaranteed our safety during events, thank you, and for lighting our way to the tower – so spectacularly – thank you JJ Finn.

To our mainstays – the hardworking Nichola Baverstock and Anthony Coppinger – Míle Buíochas.

All requests re maintenance were speedily addressed by local partners: shutters were replaced and painted, presses, windows & doors repaired, a new boiler installed, leaking toilet fixed and a grand new bridge erected in the picnic park.

Thanks go to Eugene Murphy, work on renovating and reinstating the mill wheel continues. The project has caught the interest of former Minister and TD Frank Fahey and other locals, and as a result, a fundraising drive has been set in motion to fund the restoration of the mill wheel.

Let us not forget the tremendous support of Failte Ireland and our many donors and friends.

We have completed another successful and inspiring year at Thoor Ballylee. Whether flood waters arrive or not, we look forward to a wonderful new year in 2023.

Míle Buíochas do cách. Meanwhile if you’d like to contribute however modestly to all the cultural and community work that we do and to the upkeep of this unique building and surrounds please visit our donate page.

Our first visitors of 2023 came all the way from Tennessee! We hope to see you too during this coming season.

Wild Swans in Coming Home

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Culture Night leaving you hungry for more? Come and join us this weekend at Thoor Ballylee for an exciting al fresco play performance.

The Wild Swan Theatre Company presents:

Coming Homee

by Niall Finnegan

4pm Sunday 19 September

The Mill, Thoor Ballylee

Free Admission

In this short play written by the Wild Swan Theatre Company’s own Niall Finnegan, a chance meeting in the Burren revives both happy and sad memories for two old friends and leads to a lively conclusion…

Performed by Justin McDermott, Max Lee, Judith Gantley and Rose Finnegan.

The play is performed in the beautiful surrounds of the Yeats family’s C14th Norman Tower, Thoor Ballylee. Park in our free car park, walk up the stream, and find us by the mill.

This is an open air venue. If you wish (as well as a jumper!) do bring your own seat.

By the stream at Thoor Ballylee, Galway H91 D8F2

Yeats dance play comes to Galway

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The year is 1916. A young man arrives to the hills of County Clare by night. He is on the run, looking for refuge after his part in the Eastern Rising in Dublin. After some time trying to find his way on the mountain side, two strange figures emerge from the dark, and offer him guidance. It soon turns out that they are not ordinary people, but the ghosts of that infamous twelfth century couple, Dermot and Dervorgilla, who have been held responsible for the first invasion of Ireland by foreign armies. They need the young man’s help.

With Thoor Ballylee is now closed for the winter season (though visitors to exterior and grounds are welcome), Yeats enthusiasts must find their fun elsewhere.

Thankfully, with this dramatic staging, DancePlayers returns to Galway with another astonishing production of a rarely seen Yeats play. Their highly acclaimed performance of The Only Jealousy of Emer was a highpoint in Thoor Ballylee’s 2018 season and the Galway Theatre Festival. With original music, movement, and staging, this new imagining of Yeats’s play about violence and history promises to be even better. Set in the Burren, as the ghosts circle Corcomroe Abbey, Co. Clare, near Thoor Ballylee, The Dreaming of the Bones is in this production coming home to the west.

DancePlayers presents

The Dreaming of the Bones

By W. B. Yeats

Thurs-Sat 7-9 November at 8pm 

Sunday 10 November at 1pm with performer Q&A

O’Donoghue Theatre, NUI Galway

Running Time: 40 mins without interval

Tickets: €5 Concession / €10 Standard

Booking and more information:

https://the-dreaming-of-the-bones.eventbrite.ie/
https://www.facebook.com/DancePlayersCompany/

The Dreaming of the Bones is a one-act dance piece by W. B. Yeats. Written in 1918, it is one of the earliest plays by an Irish writer for physical theatre, with dance, masks and music. With its topical subject and completion only two years after the Rising, it was deemed too problematic for the public stage for more than a decade, hence no attempt was made to produce it until its belated premiere in the Abbey Theatre in 1931. Since then, it has become one of Yeats’s most frequently played dance dramas both in Ireland and abroad. Inspired by the Japanese Noh theatre tradition, Yeats wrote this piece for an empty stage, where movement, gesture, masks, spatial relations and dance all contribute to act of storytelling.

After their acclaimed debut at the Galway Theatre Festival with The Only Jealousy of Emer in 2018, DancePlayers Company returns with a new staging of The Dreaming of the Bones in an attempt to exhibit the qualities of dance plays to the full, thus showing the availability of Yeats’s play texts for contemporary audiences. The play will be staged with movement and live music, composed exclusively for the performance.

View the on site Burren video promo here

Listings Information

The Dreaming of the Bones

Venue: O’Donoghue Theatre, NUI Galway
Dates: 7 – 10 November 2019

Time: 8pm on Thursday 7th, Friday 8th and Saturday 9th  November 2019, 1pm on Sunday 10th with open Question and Answer session from the director and performers.

Running Time: 40 mins without interval

Tickets: €5 Concession / €10 Standard

Booking and more information:

https://the-dreaming-of-the-bones.eventbrite.ie/
https://www.facebook.com/DancePlayersCompany/

Credits

Directed by              Melinda Szuts
Music                           Akos Lustyik
Choreography        Jeremie Cyr-Cooke

Lighting design         Sarah Timmins
Stage manager           Aisling Fitzsimons
Masks and design       Yvette Picque

Gergely Kuklis            violin
Nicola Geddes            cello
Gilles Dupouy             harp

Cast: Aimee Banks, Kashi Cepeda, Jeremie Cyr-Cooke, Conor Gormley, John Rice, Una Valaine

Melinda Szuts is a Galway-based director and researcher at the O’Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance at NUIG. Melinda has been involved in many theatre productions both in Ireland and her home country, Hungary in previous years. Her theatre credits include many Yeats productions, both as actor and as director.

DancePlayers is an ensemble newly founded in Galway in 2018. It is a group of professional theatre makers and musicians who produce collaborative pieces for physical theatre. Their production of Yeats’s The Only Jealousy of Emer had a successful series of performances at Galway Theatre Festival and in Yeats’s tower, Thoor Ballylee in Gort, Co. Galway

Lady Gregory Yeats Autumn Gathering

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THE LADY GREGORY–YEATS AUTUMN GATHERING

Friday 27- Sunday 29 September 2019

Join the Lady Gregory-Yeats Autumn Gathering and discover more about our rich literary heritage in Galway, especially at Coole Park and Thoor Ballylee.

This year the Lady Gregory-Yeats Autumn Gathering features a playwriting workshop with Marina Carr and Melissa Sihra and includes exclusive talks from guest speakers, drama, film from the archives, and plenty of chat and socialising.

Playwright Marina Carr in rehearsal

To mark the 25th anniversary of the annual Lady Gregory-Yeats Autumn Gathering at Coole Park and Thoor Ballylee, playwright Marina Carr and academic Melissa Sihra, conduct a playwriting workshop at Thoor Ballylee. Join one of Ireland’s greatest living dramatists for this unique opportunity. This workshop will take place in The Studio at Thoor Ballylee on Friday 27 September from 2pm to 5pm. To join this exclusive event email monaleen@msn.com – playwrights are invited to submit a one-page monologue in advance and places are limited.

Further highlights include:

Book launch: Marina Carr: Pastures of the Unknown, by Melissa Sihra
Cutting of the Gort Barm Brack by Lady Gregory’s great, great grandson, Robin Murray Brown
Women, Anxiety and Resistance in Fairy Legends Collected by Lady Gregory with Lucy McDiarmid
Patronage and Friendship: Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats with Nicholas Grene
The Making of a Drama: Lady Gregory 1908-1910 with Anthony Roche
Other Women Pioneers at the Abbey with Lelia Doolan
Augusta in America: Lady Gregory finds a new audience, new voice and fresh sphere of influence in the New World with Cecily O’Neill
Lady G: screening of Carolyn Swift’s one-woman Abbey Theatre performance, with Barry Houlihan

and

‘Lady Gregory’s Ingredients’ short drama play which takes place at Thoor Ballylee, Yeats’s castle home.

Plus entertainment and candlelit dinner amidst the woodland of Coole Park!

Please see www.autumngathering.com for more details.

Culture Night at Thoor: The Pot of Broth

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The Pot of Broth

A short play by W. B. Yeats and Augusta Gregory is our featured event for Culture Night at Thoor Ballylee.

The Pot of Broth was premiered in Dublin in 1902 at the Irish National Theatre even before it became the Abbey Theatre. Yeats called it a ‘little farce’, but it pioneered the use of local dialect speech foreshadowing the later comedies of Gregory and J.M. Synge – and some of the comic relief of Yeats’s tragedies. This taut and tightly-worked piece is directed by Anthony Hall and presented by a local theatre group in its first ever performance at Thoor Ballylee, alongside a short talk about the early Abbey Theatre and some real pots of delicious home-cooked broth for the audience.

Drop in for Culture Night Friday 20th September for any of two performances at 7.15pm and 8.15pm – stay and enjoy our exhibitions, climb the tower in the setting sun, and consume our hospitable home-made broth!

 

Sanctuary Event at Thoor Ballylee

Writers and artists invite public to discover for themselves at interactive exhibit at Thoor Ballylee

A collective of eight poets, writers and visual artists from County Galwaypresent their original works on the theme of sanctuary at a one-day exhibit on Sunday, September 15th, 2019 from noon at the Studio at Thoor Ballylee, outside Gort. The event, The Roots of Your Refuge, will be free and open to the public, and offered rain or shine. Light refreshments will be served.

Conceived by poet, educator, and psychotherapist Aoife Reilly, the exhibition is the culmination of a five-month exploration of what sanctuary means in the natural and modern worlds. It consists of readings of poetry and prose, interactive exhibits, writing exercises, guided meditations, and artworks displayed in the Studio and surrounding woods. Each element was created specifically for this event.

Works will be arranged along a trail, with contributions from each artist and writer presented over the course of the afternoon. Visitors are invited to enjoy the part indoor, part outdoor event in this peaceful wooded setting where they can take in words and images, contribute their own, and tap into what sanctuary means to them.

“This has been a rare opportunity to delve deeply into the age-old need for sanctuary, and set our imaginations free in a beloved natural environment,” said artist Aisling O’Leary, one of the project’s contributors. “For many people, sanctuary is an internal place, but one we arrive at most easily by tapping into nature.”

The grounds and medieval tower house at Thoor Ballylee were a place of sanctuary and inspiration for the poet W.B. Yeats, Nobel laureate for Literature, who spent summers there with his family before and during the Irish Civil War. The curated site attracts visitors from around the world for its serenity and rich history, offering them a place to explore what poet Reilly calls “the sanctity of green/ when you’re shaken to the bone.”

In Memory of Sam McCready

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Sam McCready, the actor, director, writer, painter, and teacher, a great friend to WB Yeats and to all lovers of Yeats around the world, has died.

Sam was a vibrant figure, and introduced generations to Yeats’s plays through performances at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo. He repeatedly paid tribute to Mary O’Malley, founder of the Lyric Theatre Belfast where McCready got his break in the acting world in the late 1950s, and who pioneered productions of Yeats’s plays. Many have been paying tribute to him in his turn for his inspiring work in theatre and performance.

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland remembered him as a ‘legend […] revered internationally and remembered locally with unusual warmth and affection’.

The Lyric Theatre Belfast released a statement calling him ‘a titan of Ulster theatre’, and no wonder: for the Lyric he played numerous roles, including Captain Boyle in Juno and the Paycock, King Richard in Richard the Third and Christy Mahon in a musical version of The Playboy of the Western World called A Heart’s A Wonder. He founded the Lyric Drama Studio for younger actors and directed Martin Lynch’s The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty, becoming trustee and Artistic Director of the theatre

Most recently in April 2018 he performed his own adaptation of No Surrender, based on the memoir of a Belfast childhood by Robert Harbinson. His own memoirs of early years at the theatre are available under the title Baptism of Fire from Lagan Press.

McCready’s career took him from Belfast to Bangor in North Wales to off-Broadway productions in New York and to the University of Maryland, where he became Professor of Theatre and is remembered as ‘an extraordinary mentor, teacher, actor, director, and friend to generations of students and to so many people in the UMBC community’.

As an outspoken proponent of the arts McCready insisted on their value as community projects but also on high standards – and practiced what he preached. As he said, ‘one of the things that America has taught me is that people should go out and work for themselves. […] I have to bring that audience in. I don’t want anyone to get money for nothing and I don’t want the taxpayer to be handing out money for nothing. But at the same time the arts must be subsidised. Those in the arts must use that subsidy to do quality work and not see it as an opportunity to do mediocre stuff.’

At the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo McCready was a regular yearly contributor as speaker and director. With his wife Joan he taught inspiring acting and speaking classes and directed each year a production of one of Yeats’s plays: rarely seen theatrical wonders about whose performance he campaigned passionately.

He wrote, performed, and toured one-man plays on the life of Percy French, and The Great Yeats!, about WB Yeats’s father the artist John Butler Yeats. He was known throughout the world as a fine speaker of WB Yeats’s verse, and chose to speak the final lines from Yeats’s play The Resurrection at the closing of the Lyric studio in Derryvolgie Avenue.

Edmund Dulac, ‘The Nightingale’

In one of his last posts Sam recited lines from Keats’s ‘Ode To A Nightingale’: ‘Thou wast not born for death immortal bird / No hungry generations tread thee down’.

Keats’s lines (which continue ‘The voice I hear this passing night was heard / In ancient days by emperor and clown’) were a vital trigger for Yeats’s own meditations on music, death, and immortality, especially when he imagines himself transported among the goldsmiths of ancient Constantinople, posthumously singing to a (sometimes indifferent) royal audience.

Here follows Yeats’s poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, in fond memory of Sam McCready.

I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Highlights of 2018

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The curtain has come down on another successful season at Thoor Ballylee.
Around 4,400 appreciative visitors came to Thoor Ballylee during from April to October 2018.

Many also came to our programme of special events.

The Songbirds with their wonderful harmony and lyrics proved to be a popular public closing event, performing to a full house. This year the season was extended to facilitate the Architecture at the Edge festival 2018. Many first-time visitors from the locality and afar, took advantage of our open house day to visit the home of W.B. Yeats, and even began with an hour of Architectural Yoga conducted by Sarah from the Gallery Café. With his eastern and esoteric interests W.B.Y. might well have approved.

Other successful events held during the year include two Talks for Leaving Certificate students courtesy of Denis Creavan, and a riveting production of The Only Jealousy of Emer by Galway based DancePlayers, including members of NUI Galway’s Drama department.

As a special treat for W.B.Y’s birthday we enjoyed a Sunday afternoon of medieval music in the medieval tower, with the talented & delightful Coole Music troupe, dressed in medieval costume. We even had a birthday cake. A second celebration of the birthday featured wine and amazing food, provided by the very talented Anna and featured poetry reading by the mill. Thanks again to Anna O Donnell and to Brendan Murphy, for their demonstration of Lady Gregory’s brack cake and stories from the Abbey. This was our nod to Heritage Week.

For Culture Night, the composer and sound artist Francis Heery brought poetry to Thoor Ballylee and an immersive sound installation in his presentation of A Vision.  Supported by the Arts Council, this, one of the main events in County Galway, was unquestionably a memorable night, quite out of the ordinary for lots of reasons. Francis even proposed to his fiancée on the battlements just before the show & she said ‘yes’. It all happens at Thoor Ballylee! Indeed two local wedding parties chose Thoor Ballylee and its beautiful, tranquil, surrounds for their wedding photographs. We were joined also by the Professor Roy Foster, distinguished historian and biographer of W.B. Yeats, prior to his lecture on Thoor Ballylee for the Galway International Arts Festival first thought talks.

The Galway Film Fleadh came on tour in a special event to Thoor Ballylee. Three films from the archives of the Irish Film Institute about Yeats and Lady Gregory, Coole Park and one of Gregory’s plays from the Abbey Theatre were screened in our spectacular audiovisual room in July.

Lovers of the art of spinning and weaving enjoyed an afternoon trying their hands at the spinning wheel, thanks to the Irish Spinners and Weavers Guild from Clare and Galway. Our appreciation goes also to Coole Music Junior Quartet who entertained spinners and visitors alike. Kate and Ruth our local intrepid Headford Bat Rangers put together an interpretive piece on Thoor Ballylee and the Lesser Horseshoe bats which nest in the tower. We had any number of visitor groups throughout the summer from locals like Gort ICA to the Yeats International Summer School, and many individual and family visitors from all around the world. The final day of the Yeats and Lady Gregory Autumn Gathering brought September to a close with a lecture and a film about the life and loves of Lady Gregory. That was also the day that W.B.Y.’s candlesticks, handsome brass altar pieces came home to Thoor Ballylee, proudly standing by the hearth after ninety years away. Our heartfelt thanks go to our wonderful benefactors.

None of this would be possible without a great number of helpers, volunteers, artists, gardeners, skilled craftspeople, and a host of supporters from here and abroad. Our esteem and appreciation goes to our dedicated staff, led by the wonderful Rena McAllen: Nichola, Frank, Gary, and Krzysztof. And to our knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and most generous volunteers: Phil, Pat O L., Rose, Tonii, Karen, Pat F., Rosemary, Anna C. Dominic. A special thank you also to intern Gerry who generously offered to cover every Saturday up until now. Thanks to JJ for manning the car park and lighting our way in the dark during events.

This is the fantastic team that has kept the home of W. B. Yeats open to the public for all six months of the summer, for seven days a week during the height of the season and for eight hours (and more) a day.

Our visitor book records the appreciation, delight, and gratitude of the thousands of people who came and experienced the atmosphere and spirit of Thoor Ballylee. They enjoyed discussing the Yeats family over a cup of tea with staff, viewed our exhibitions and AV presentation, climbed the winding stair, lingered in the many original rooms, admired the spectacular 360 degree view, read poetry, sang, played music, or took selfies on the battlements (and not one fell off).

Thanks in particular to Failte Ireland for continued help with maintenance and repairs. Work has already begun on the conversion of the garage into a studio for artists in residence so we look forward to exciting times at Thoor Ballylee.

Most of all our thanks and appreciation to our wonderful friends and benefactors, whose generosity and financial support enables us to keep the spirit of Yeats and his extraordinarily talented family alive.

Go fada buan sibh.

Bloomsday & Birthday updates

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Happy Bloomsday, and happy birthday to WB Yeats, who earlier this week was 153 years young!

The message might be slightly late, but not nearly as late as the new ship from Irish Ferries, the WB Yeats, still immersed in deep revisions at a shipyard in Germany.

This is a rich time of cultural activity in the west of Ireland and Thoor Ballylee. Contemporary Irish writing here is evidently in rude health. Mayo novelist Mike McCormack, currently director of NUI Galway’s BA with Creative Writing in the Department of English, has won the prestigious 2018 International Dublin Literary Award for Solar Bones. This is just the latest recognition for his fifth novel  which has won a series of awards and plaudits since its publication by Tramp Press.

Mike McCormack with the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award

Probably Mayo’s finest ever writer the novelist and memoirist George Moore was also celebrated this week. The Ninth International George Moore Conference, George Moore: Transnational And Cosmopolitan Networks On The Page And Canvas, hosted by Dr Mark Corcoran and Dr Muireann O’Cinneide took place in the Moore Institute at NUI Galway over the last two days with the generous aid of the School of Humanities’s Research Support Scheme.

George Moore by John Butler Yeats

This coincides with the release of the biopic of George Moore’s friend Hugh Lane, nephew of Lady Augusta Gregory and Ireland’s greatest art dealer, whose exhibitions of Irish art and collections of old master and impressionist enrich the country to this day. Citizen Lane, directed by Thaddeus OSullivan and starring Tom Vaughan-Lawlor and Gemma-Leah Devereux is on general release, with a screening at Galway’s brand-new Palas Cinema on Sunday 17 June at 6pm. WB Yeats, Augusta Gregory, and George Moore all make an appearance on screen in this docudrama, which is also graced by expert talking heads Caitriona Crowe and Roy Foster.

In the coming weeks film comes directly to Thoor Ballylee. On Thursday 12 July at 3pm the Galway Film Fleadh holds a special screening of short films at Thoor Ballylee. It promises to be a special atmosphere and a unique experience to watch period short films associated with Augusta Gregory and the cultural revival she initiated in a old stone cottage attached to a fourteenth-century stone tower.

Thoor Ballylee itself is celebrated in this summer’s Galway International Arts Festival. The acclaimed biographer of WB Yeats for Oxford University Press, Professor Roy Foster, speaks on Sunday 22 July at 1pm about Yeats’s tower at the Aula Maxima in NUI Galway. Ezra Pound was notably sceptical about what he called ‘Ballyphallus, Yeats’s phallic symbol on the bogs’. Nevertheless Foster explores the central importance of the tower to Yeats’s life and work, and in a talk entitled ‘When All Is Ruin Once Again’ affirms Thoor Ballylee as his favourite dwelling.

Thanks to our volunteers, friends, and supporters, Yeats’s tower is far from in ruins. Thoor Ballylee recently hosted a special performance by Coole Music in honour of Yeats’s birthday, and a spectacular production of Yeats’s play The Only Jealousy of Emer by Galway theatre group DancePlayers.

Eithne Inguba (Orla Turbridy) comforts the hero Cuchulain (Oisin Porter) as his wife Emer (Catherine Denning) and musicians look on

The tower is also open throughout the summer for visits from all comers. Our exhibitions are open and a warm welcome is promised. Do come and join us!

The Only Jealousy of Emer: tickets selling fast!

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This new production of WB Yeats’s play of The Only Jealousy of Emer is a world premiere: the first ever fully staged theatre production of Yeats’s play taking place in his own tower. Fresh from a highly acclaimed run at the Galway Theatre Festival this production has been entirely re-imagined for this historic space. As a site-specific movement piece in a resonant venue numbers are limited so get in fast!

DancePlayers presents

The Only Jealousy of Emer

By WB Yeats

8pm Sat 26 and Sun 27 May 2018

Thoor Ballylee, Yeats’s Tower, Gort, Galway

Tickets: €14/12 Concession

Booking:  Places are limited. Booking required by phone 091 631 436 (weekdays 10am to 2pm, weekends 11am to 5pm) or by email to yeatsthoorballyleesociety@gmail.com

The performance begins outdoors so we highly recommend outdoor shoes and appropriate comfortable clothing. Seating is available but only for some scenes.

The great hero Cuchulain is on his deathbed. His body was washed up by the shore after a long and senseless fight with the sea. There are three women around him: his wife, Emer, his lover, Eithne Inguba, and Fand, an evil creature of the Sidhe. His fate is in their hands. Yeats’s poetic dance-drama focuses exclusively on the feelings and motivations of the female characters, and portrays the emotional turmoil that Emer has to suffer when she has to face her own jealousy to save her husband’s life.

DancePlayers is a new ensemble founded in Galway in 2018. It is a group of professional theatre makers and musicians who produce collaborative pieces for physical theatre.

This production aims at exploiting the qualities of the dance play to the full to show the availability of Yeats’s play texts for contemporary audiences within and outside Ireland. It thus features original masks, costumes, live music, dance, design, as well as newly imagined acting, speaking, and movement. Because of the unique arrangements of the venue, the audience move with the performers during the show and seating is only available for certain important scenes. The performance begins outdoors so we highly recommend outdoor shoes and appropriate comfortable clothing.

Funded by The Galway City Council, NUI Galway, The Embassy of Hungary in Dublin and the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society.

Running time: 50 mins without interval.

As featured in the London Times, Galway Bay FM, and many other media outlets – this production promises to be theatre event of the season!

Jeremie Cyr-Cooke (Ghost of Cuchulain) and Orlaith Ni Chearra (Fand/Woman of the Sidhe) work on choreography

 

 

 

 

 

The Only Jealousy of Emer: Yeats play at Thoor Ballylee

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Yeats’s tower this spring hosts the theatre event of the season, as WB Yeats’s play The Only Jealousy of Emer receives its Thoor Ballylee premiere in a spectacular production by Galway-based theatre group DancePlayers.

Fresh from a highly-acclaimed run at Galway Theatre Festival, this new production, featuring resonant music, dance, acting, and design is re-imagined especially for  Yeats’s tower. As a moving site-specific piece in a historic venue numbers are limited so get in fast!

DancePlayers presents

The Only Jealousy of Emer

By WB Yeats

8pm Sat 26 and Sun 27 May 2018

Thoor Ballylee, Yeats’s Tower, Gort, Galway

Tickets: €14/12 Concession

Booking:  Places are limited. Booking required by phone 091 631 436 (weekdays 10am to 2pm, weekends 11am to 5pm) or by email to yeatsthoorballyleesociety@gmail.com

The performance begins outdoors so we highly recommend outdoor shoes and appropriate comfortable clothing. Seating is available but only for some scenes.

The great hero Cuchulain is on his deathbed. His body was washed up by the shore after a long and senseless fight with the sea. There are three women around him: his wife, Emer, his lover, Eithne Inguba, and Fand, an evil creature of the Sidhe. His fate is in their hands. Yeats’s poetic dance-drama focuses exclusively on the feelings and motivations of the female characters, and portrays the emotional turmoil that Emer has to suffer when she has to face her own jealousy to save her husband’s life.

The Only Jealousy of Emer is a one-act dance piece by W.B. Yeats. Written in 1918, it is one of the earliest plays by an Irish writer for physical theatre, with dance, masks and music. Inspired by the Japanese Noh theatre tradition, Yeats wrote this piece for an empty stage, where movement, gesture, posture, masks, spatial relations and dance all contribute to act of storytelling. Physicality speaks it its own language in these plays, so the performers’ task is to elevate this form of expression to the standard of Yeats’s verse and create a piece of total theatre.

This production is an attempt to prove that Yeats’s Noh-inspired dance plays have every right to be presented in front of a heterogeneous audience, in any part of the world, even 100 years after their composition. The notion that these pieces are only accessible for scholars and those “select few” that have an interest in oriental theatre, poetry or Irish mythology is widespread, and is rooted in the absence of professional Yeats productions on the world’s stages. This production aims at exploiting the qualities of the dance play to the full to show the availability of Yeats’s play texts for contemporary audiences within and outside Ireland. It thus features original masks, costumes, live music, dance, design, as well as newly imagined acting, speaking, and movement.

The show is a world premiere: the first ever fully staged theatre production of Yeats’s play The Only Jealousy of Emer taking place in his own tower. Fresh from a highly acclaimed run at the Galway Theatre Festival this production has been entirely re-imagined for this historic space.

Cast and crew after rehearsals at Thoor Ballylee

Because of the unique arrangements of the venue, the audience move with the performers during the show and seating is only available for certain important scenes. The performance begins outdoors so we highly recommend outdoor shoes and appropriate comfortable clothing.

Running time: 50 mins without interval.

DancePlayers is a new ensemble founded in Galway in 2018. It is a group of professional theatre makers and musicians who produce collaborative pieces for physical theatre.

Funded by The Galway City Council, NUI Galway, The Embassy of Hungary in Dublin and the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society.