Storytelling and Performance Post-Good Friday Agreement

This chapter interrogates how, in the north of Ireland, performance practitioners intervened to “break the rules” of public space in Belfast to represent the reality of everyday life post-Good Friday Agreement. This chapter demonstrates the inter-connected relationship between society and performance form by tracing community-based storytelling through an analysis of The Wedding Community Play Project (1999) and Convictions (2001). Through a renegotiation of the socio-political audience-performance relationship, both The Wedding Community Play Project and Convictions rebel against homogeneity, seeking instead to develop a shared perspective of the heterogeneous experience of life in the north of Ireland. Both performances engage with public space to address the impact and multitudes of histories that these sites represent.