Playwright Kaite O’Reilly at UCC

28 Feb 2014

As part of Disability Awareness Week, UCC hosted playwright and disability activist Kaite O’Reilly, winner of various awards including the Ted Hughes award for new poetry.

Author of, amongst other things, In Water I’m Weightless, a commission for the Cultural Olympiad for the London Olympics, and featuring six deaf and disabled actors, Kaite’s work places the cultural representation of disability into the hands of people with disabilities who determine how, why and where they are represented.

The three-day event last weekend began with a two-day writer’s workshop at the Theatre Development Centre in the Triskel Arts Centre, followed by a rehearsed reading of Kaite’s new work Cosy directed by Phillip Zarilli and performed by a cast that included UCC staff and students, as well as some local veteran actors. It culminated in two lectures on ‘Representing Impairment in Drama & Theatre’, and on ‘Disability Arts and Culture’ to mark UCC’s Disability Awareness Week.

The event was organised by Art Works, a College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences based initiative founded by Drs. Bernadette Cronin (Drama and Theatre) and Rachel MagShamhráin (German) designed to bring students, staff and the wider Cork public into contact with practitioners from the broad field of the creative industries and to showcase the broad applicability of arts degrees in a myriad of professional settings.