Naja Kennedy is a Master’s student in Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Galway. Her current research explores lived bodies in performance, especially as it pertains to feminist representation in Irish theatre history. Prior to this degree, Naja studied Theatre Studies and English Literature at South East Technological University, Waterford, where she developed this interest in physical theatre and feminist resistance through the body.

This paper positions Irish dance theatre since the 1930s as a place of nationalist feminist resistance to both British colonialism and conservative notions of post-colonial Ireland itself. Following the work of Cathy Leeney and Melissa Sihra, it moreover questions the male-centric practice of canonisation of work in Irish theatre history.

Stepping into conversation with relevant contemporary scholarship on feminist theatre and dance theatre, it explores the intersection of such work between 1920 and 1940. Namely, the work of practitioners such as Mary Devenport O’Neill whose ballet poem Bluebeard (1933) serves as a case study investigating the rich history of dance theatre that was created as decolonial but also feminist acts of resistance by subverting the patriarchal supremacy of the word.

It goes on to examine the possibilities of the dance genre and the expressivity of the body in driving political change and communicating lived experience. One might assume that dance theatre could powerfully assert an Irish Identity in postcolonial Ireland. However, when the Irish identity needs to feel precisely defined against colonial notions of Irishness, the perpetual refiguring and fluidity that the body provides rather poses a threat. A cultural analysis of Irish society, further, reveals a historical mistrust of the female body rooted in the post-colonial response of Irish theatre makers and scholars of the conservative free state ultimately leading to the body‘s restriction in practice and subsequent sidelining of critical discourse on embodied theatre work made by women.

Archival research recovers the contribution of women who created and participated in the Irish nationalist revival but have been banished to the footnotes. This paper builds on the recent work of Emer O’Toole, Ciara L. Murhy and others to uncover marginalised voices in the canon of Irish theatre through a “decolonial lens” that must also mean an intersectional feminist lens.