Home-made in Belfast: domesticity as creative practice in Northern Irish art and performance

Abstract

Domestic performance practices tend to be shaped by or to explicitly address feminist politics. In staging the very labour of homemaking as material of creative endeavour they expand, as this article explores, what counts as women’s writing. This article, a collaboration between a curator, Ciara Hickey, and theatre scholar, Trish McTighe, surveys a selection of domestic performances that have taken place in Belfast over the last several decades. By domestic performance, we mean aesthetic events or theatrical performances that are staged in a domestic setting, usually a private home. Taking three examples of this sort of work, Hickey’s domestic curation work up to 2012, The Wedding Community Play (1999), and Big Telly Theatre Company’s The House (2021), we engage with the nature of private space in a post-conflict society as well as the status of female creativity in that context.