The Sixteen Nations
Celebrating Female Creativity
Inspired by Molly Bloom, the most famous female character created by James Joyce, the inaugural YES Festival will celebrate the diverse creativity of European and Irish female artists in a vibrant and varied programme of events, workshops and residencies to take place in Derry and Donegal in the north-west of Ireland June 13-16,2024.
Local theatres, galleries, music venues, pubs and outdoor spaces across Derry and Donegal will host over 30 celebrated and emerging individual female artists representing Photography, Music, Documentary Film, DJs, Visual and Textile Art, Dance, Circus and Song in a festive cultural and spectacle filled weekend indoor and outdoor across the city of Derry and landscape of Donegal.
The European section of the YES programme seeks to encourage audiences and communities to connect with Derry~Donegal’s ULYSSES European Odyssey designated theme, The Future: A Female Vision Increasing local access to European creativity and artistic expression, alongside showcasing the contribution female artists make in highlighting social change as a core aim of the four day event.
The cities of Oulu, Vilnius, Marseille, Cluj and Copenhagen, Lisbon, Eleusis, Leeuwarden, Berlin, Dublin, Trieste, Lugo, Athens, Budapest and Istanbul have partnered with the creative producers at ARTS OVER BORDERS to identify female artists who embody the festival’s theme, The Future: A Female Vision.
Curators: Shauna Kelpie & Jonathan Burgess
No Ordinary Woman
Five NOW talks & discussions consider women’s relationship with power in contemporary society, the role of media today, and a possible way forward in a world beset by crises and threats.
No. 1: In Women & Leadership, a panel discuss the qualities that women bring to leadership in the contemporary world.
No. 2: In Women & Power, Baroness Shami Chakrabarti and Caoilfhionn Gallagher discuss with chairperson Susan McKay women’s relationship to power in the contemporary world and what needs to change to give voice to those who currently feel voiceless?
No. 3: In Women & Climate Justice Mary Robinson talks with Louise Cullen of her deep involvement for years in the struggle to secure global justice for those people vulnerable to the impacts of climate change who are usually forgotten.
No. 4: In Women & Resistance, Bernadette McAliskey, Dr Ailbne Smyth, Flor MacCarthy discuss with Aoife Moore how women utilise activism and soft power in the fight for justice and human rights.
No. 5: In Women & Media, reporters Orla Guerin, Marion McKeone, Jude Webber and Miriam O’Callaghan consider the particular challenges they face in covering global news stories.
RoUTE
RETURN OF ULYSSES TRAIL EXHIBITION
ULYSSES European Odyssey 2022-2024 (www.ulysseseurope.eu) is the most ambitious – largest and longest – celebratory response in 100 years to James Joyce’s epic novel, Ulysses, since its publication in 1922. Conceived in 2019 by Arts Over Borders Ireland’s Artistic Directors Seán Doran and Liam Browne (DoranBrowne), the project received funding of €1.7m from the European Commission’s Creative Europe Fund in 2022 and has coursed its way through 15 European cities since September 2022 – Athens, Budapest, Trieste, Marseille, Vilnius, Paris, Berlin, Lugo, Copenhagen, Istanbul, Cluj, Zürich, Leeuwarden, Eleusis, Oulu and Lisbon early June 2024 – to finally return to Ireland, Dublin (ROI) and Derry~Donegal (NI/ROI).
James Joyce’s epic novel has undergone a transformational zig-zagging journey across Europe through a range of highly innovative artistic responses from European museums, festivals and theatres of 15 city public events, 18 new writer commissions, 30 emerging artist residencies and 309 questions from communities across the length and breadth of Europe on 18 socio-political themes. Now all of this collectively is finally being returned to Ireland in June 2024: June 7-9 with What is Home? Festival at the Museum of Literature Ireland alongside the Dublin Grand Arts & Society Symposium (GASS) in the Long Room Trinity College Dublin (June 11-13) and as a grand finale with the YES Festival in Derry~Donegal June 13-16.
YES Curators with DoranBrowne & 18 UEO City Partners
SIRENSCIRCUS
WORLD PREMIERE
100+ musicians and participants from Derry~Londonderry and Donegal
‘Douce gave vent to a splendid yell, a full yell of full woman, delight, joy’. (Ep. X! Sirens, Ulysses)
SIRENSCIRCUS will begin on Molly Bloomsday as the stroke of 16.00 rings on Derry’s Guildhall clock (the time set in Ulysses) and come to halt at 19.00 with the episode’s last word Pprrpffrrppfff amplified across Ebrington Square. In between, visitors can wander through at their own will to experience all the sounds, music and instruments mentioned in Ulysses’ Episode XI, Sirens – a sonic wash and soundscape of horse whinnies and steel horseshoes clip-clops on the cobbles of a horse and trap, harp, horn, tympani, pipe, fifes and war drums, seahorns, cellos, double bass, trombone, dulcimer, pianos, corks poppling from bottles, batons tap tapping, china rattling on trays, shoes creek, bells ting, chords crash, giggles peal, coins ringing, trilling laughter, a choir of burps, hiccups, yawns, mumbles, sighs, pantings, ballad songs (The Lass of Aughrim, The Croppy Boy) and the blues. 8 actors will read sections of the episode in fugue style through microphones. Everything will be amidst a blazes of of colours (also mentioned throughout the Sirens episode) of bronze and gold, pearl grey, blue bloom and ocean green.
The YES Festival’s SIRENSCIRCUS will bring together over 100 musicians, singers, actors, participants and sounds that will be realised for the first time ever in a one-off world premiere of all the sounds and music written by Joyce in the Ulysses Sirens episode. Joyce spoke later of his wish to write the episode in the form of music, an 8-piece fugue even.
Original idea DoranBrowne (Seán Doran and Liam Browne) | Cross Border Project Curator – Margaret Kelly | Associate Artist – Laura Kuhn | ‘There’s music everywhere’ (Ep. XI Sirens, Ulysses)
The Molly Films
The Molly Films are eight newly commissioned short films (10-20mins) by YES with eight actors each performing a reading of one of the eight sections (long sentences) from the final Episode XVIII (Penelope) of James Joyce’s Ulysses. More familiarly known as Molly’s Soliloquy the 50 odd page episode is solely the words of Molly Bloom (wife of Leopold Bloom, the novel’s protagonist) as she lies in bed in the early hours of the morning reminiscing on her life.
Joyce chose to close his epic novel with the female voice and her stream of consciousness soliloquy that has no punctuation over the 50 pages. The YES Festival has similarly chosen to close its inaugural Molly Bloomsday with the World Premiere of a number of the short films in succession in the YES Festival Hub in Derry~Londonderry. Then at the Joyce-anointed hour of c.03.00 on Monday, June 17th, Molly Bloomsday will officially finish with an online broadcast timed to finish just before dawn in Derry~Londonderry c.04.48.
Original idea – DoranBrowne (Seán Doran & Liam Browne) | Actors: Fiona Shaw – Dame Harriet Walter – Siobhan McSweeney – Eve Hewson – Adjoa Andoh (confirmed so far) | Producer – ARTS OVER BORDERS
The Molly Bed
To celebrate the character of Molly Bloom and her climactic soliloquy in the last episode (XVIII) of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, Arts Over Borders has commissioned the Derry artist and set designer Tracey Lindsay to create an imaginative Gulliver- size bed as an 8 day public art installation within the city’s former British Army fort, Ebrington Barracks. In Ulysses Episode XIII (Penelope), Molly utters her soliloquy in a stream of consciousness whilst lying in bed at around 03.00 June 17, 1904, just before dawn. We also learn in the episode that Molly was born in Gibraltar, brought up in a military family (father in the Dublin Royal Fusiliers) and she loved the sound of marching military bands. Ebrington Square today is Derry’s plaza answer to St. Petersburg’s Square – an equally majestic place of calm, surrounded by elegant buildings that offers a pleasant place to stroll and have special views across the Peace Bridge to the historic walled city.
8 is the symbolic number Joyce gave to Molly. She was born on September 8, and her soliloquy is eight very long sentences. The installation is available for viewing for 8 days only.
An original idea by DoranBrowne (Seán Doran and Liam Browne) | Bed Design – Tracey Lindsay | Commissioned and Produced by ARTS OVER BORDERS
Yes Festival – Closing Concert
IMELDA MAY: In Conversation and Performance
In a special finale to the inaugural YES, Imelda May discusses her songwriting and her debut poetry collection, A Lick and A Promise, and performs an acoustic set of some of her favourite songs.