1:00 PM, 22 Jan 2019 - , Starting point: Theatre Lab (Connolly S4)

Flotsam/Beached Women/Stranded

As part of Refugee Week at UCC, you are warmly invited to a site-based reading of selections from Itziar Pascual – Flotsam/Beached Women/Stranded

Starting point: Theatre Lab (which is Connolly S4) at 1pm Tuesday 22^nd Jan.

Play description:

This play is dedicated by its author, Itziar Pascual, “To the memory of all the women of the twentieth century who boarded ships towards oblivion; in particular, that of my mother and my grandmother”. It is, then, a play dedicated to recovering and reconstructing a domestic past, one that is missing from official versions of history, but that is nevertheless a part of the everyday exceptionality of wartime. The women in the title of her play (Varadas – meaning beached, washed up or stranded) have been flung into the water, forced out into a sea of uncertainty, far (away) from their homes and their families, and washed up on the distant sands of forgetting. The play is made up of ten different sequences, entitled “Exchanges”, “Passport”, “Goodbyes”, “Betrayals”, “Questions”, “Tears” (Sensitivity), “Crossing”, “Checkpoint”, “Forgetting”, “Remembering”, which come together to form a by turns dramatic and poetic mosaic about exodus, abandonment, and memory. Each sequence tells a story of women (A and B) whose lives have been blighted by war, flight and exile; they are fragments drawn from the memories of a diversity of women driven towards an uncertain fate, ensnared by the obstacles before them, or, at other times strong in the face of adversity; all of them affected by war. The titles of the dramatic sequences capture the progression of events characterised by their discontinuity and the abruptness of their dénouements, all of them possessing a common element, that of placing the experiences of women centre stage: women who have had to face the effects of official silence, abandonment, flight, exile, imprisonment, intolerance, fear: in a word, war.

This project has developed from a collaboration between students in the MA Theatre Performative Practices and MA Translations Studies.

Free - all welcome. Organised by Department of Theatre

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