An article in last September’s issue of GCN sparked a fuse that’s led to the formation of Ireland’s rst trans artist’s collective, which in turn has led to a major trans-led collaborative event at this year’s Dublin Fringe Festival. Trans Live Art Salon member, Robyn McQuaid-O’Dwyer talks about having a real impact on trans presence on the Irish stage.

Opinion

Self-representation – Trans art – Dublin Fringe

This time 12 months ago I wrote an article for GCN on the state of trans representation in Irish theatre. Mostly, I wrote about 2015, when there were more trans narratives on Irish stages in one year than there had been in the previous several decades. While this was a hugely positive step, I was concerned about the fact that it was mostly cis writers, directors, and performers delivering these first ever narratives of people like me to Irish audiences. As all LGBT+ readers of this can attest, while people who don’t have our experiences can tell interesting stories, they frequently have a tendency to focus on what is interesting for cis or for straight people, not for the community being represented.

It seemed to me also somewhat unfair that the big break that trans theatre got in Ireland came not from supporting mainstream debuts of any of our amazing trans artists, whose work can be seen yearly at the excellent and vital community-focused trans arts festival TRANS-FUSION and elsewhere, but instead came about from established cis writers. Trans artists’ talent was being excluded, while telling our stories without us present remained a pathway to media attention and more.

The idea for beginning to solve this problem came via a discussion with Lynnette Moran of Live Collision and lots of talking with trans artist friends. The Trans Live Art Salon began as a residency programme at Live Collision International Festival (LCIF), modelled offprogrammes like Fast Track to Dance and Next Stage at the Dublin Dance and Theatre Festivals. At those programmes local and international artists see the work at the festival, discuss the art as a group, and do workshops with the festival artists. Ours was to be exclusively available for trans, gender-nonconforming, or otherwise non-cis artists.

ACCESSIBILITY

There is a difference between treating everybody the same, and giving everybody what they need to be successful. While trans people are not forbidden from attending residencies like the ones we modelled from, the all-day programmes, high costs, and often assumptions of cisnormativity, implicitly block trans people from attending, particularly with the disproportionate effect of problems related to neurodiversity, mental health, and employment on trans people. From the start it has been clear that for the Trans Live Art Salon to succeed as a project, accessibility – more so than “inclusion” –needed to be a major priority. Creating structures that catered for the mental health needs of our residents and facilitators benefited even those who didn’t explicitly need them and benefited discussions had with festival artists also.

The residency has been probably the proudest I’ve ever been of a creative endeavour. And I’m even happier that it has transitioned into being a collective of artists, of which I am just one member. We now have a group of amazing artists from every discipline, some of whom had never engaged in art practice before or never would have thought of themselves as artists, and many of whom wouldn’t otherwise have had the means to attend performance festivals in Ireland.

I’m thankful as well that we have become a group of friends. While online spaces can be great for information exchange and connecting with trans and queer people in your area or worldwide, the intimacy, connection, closeness, and real friendship that comes from IRL interaction cannot be substituted by an online community.

IMPACT ON IRISH STAGES

I think we have also succeeded in having an impact on trans presence on Irish stages. The first residency at Live Collision International Festival was accompanied by screenings of live art by trans and other queer artists concerned with gender from the Live Art Development Agency’s archives. At the next LCIF, in addition to our second residency, Live Collision presented a show and workshop from British trans artist, Hester Chillingworth, TLAS ran a library of trans-authored books, and M. Murphy from the collective ran a daily blog featuring members of the collective and new residents.

And while there was no trans-authored or explicitly trans-concerning work at last year’s Dublin Fringe, this year sees Canadian trans artist, Ivan Coyote, bring “part anthem, part campfire story and part instructions for the dismantling of the gender stories we tell ourselves and each other,” Tomboy Survival Guide to no less than the Abbey’s Peacock stage, as well as the (cis) team of MOTUS’ “that cannot be contained within the borders of the body, skin colour, sexual organs, or boundaries of national identity” coming to Project Arts Centre in MDLSX. And of course, the Trans Live Art Salon will be creating our Fully-Automated Luxury Gender Oasis.

The Oasis will be an accessible space for chilling at Fringe and a festival hub for trans art at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios. There will be skill-sharing workshops each day, lectures, performance, poetry, and music from Irish and international trans artists at night, and in between a free space for relaxing, seeing our exhibition of trans visual art, reading from our library of trans books, playing games from trans game makers, drawing, crocheting, or just having some free tea and coffee.

Dublin has a serious lack of queer space, and the space that is there, mostly caters towards gay men, and rarely has accessibility in mind. While we don’t have the resources (yet) to solve that problem permanently, we want to present a vision of what it could look like. An oasis at the heart of Temple Bar, where trans people are foregrounded and accessibility is valued; where you can see world-class art, writing, and games from Irish and international trans artists and makers; where queer people can go to learn new skills for free, listen to amazing talks, poems, music, and more from trans artists, surrounded by people like them; where you can sit down in the city for free, without paying for a coffee to earn the right.

If you told me about a space like this last year, I’d have called it a fantasy, but from September 15 to 19 it will be very real.

Our hope is that this fantasy is not fleeting, but paves the way for more permanent queer space in Dublin, and more trans representation, recognition, and rights in Ireland and worldwide.

‘Fully Automated Luxury Gender Oasis’ runs at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (Studio 6) from September 15 to 19, www.fringefest.com

“ While those who don’t have our experiences can tell interesting stories, they frequently have a tendency to focus on what is interesting for cis or for straight people’.