Corporaal - Frisian Humanities

◐ Alderik Blom | ◓ Marguérite Corporaal | ◑ Peter Gilles | ◒ Caterina Sugranyes

Marguérite Corporaal

Radboud University, Nijmegen

Biography

Marguérite Corporaal grew up in Franeker (Frjentsjer), and is Full Professor of Irish Literature in Transnational Contexts at Radboud University, the Netherlands. She was the principal investigator of Relocated Remembrance: The Great Famine in Irish (Diaspora) Fiction, 1847–1921, for which she obtained a Starting Grant for Consolidators from the European Research Council (2010–15).

Corporaal was awarded an NWO- VICI grant for her project Redefining the Region (2019-24) which explores the transnational dimensions of local colour during the long nineteenth century. Furthermore, Corporaal is the PI of Heritages of Hunger, which is funded as part of the Dutch research council NWO’s NWA programme (2019-24). From 2016-2019 she led the Gate Theatre Research Network, funded by NWO, and in collaboration with Charles University Prague and the University of Galway, Ireland.

Among Corporaal’s recent international publications are her monograph Relocated Memories of the Great Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1847–70 (Syracuse University Press, 2017); A Stage of Emancipation: Change and Progress at the Dublin Gate Theatre (co-edited, Liverpool UP, 2021); Famines and the Making of Heritage (co-edited, Routledge 2024); The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture (co-edited, Liverpool UP, 2018); Travelling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century (co- edited, Palgrave, 2017).

Abstract

The Frisian Tryater and the Dublin Gate: Cosmopolitan Theatres, Minority Languages and Identity Construction

The Dublin Gate Theatre, founded in 1928, has been acknowledged as a cosmopolitan theatre that simultaneously helped to construct and cement Irish identities, as well as promote the use of Irish. Scholarship by, amongst others, Ruud van den Beuken, David Clare and Nicola Morris has demonstrated that from the start the Gate engaged with international poetics, repertoire and dramaturgy and targeted international audiences.[1] Theatres elsewhere in Europe play(ed) similar roles in combining international repertoire with plays which staged national or regional pasts or issues. One such theatre which, like the Gate, furthermore invested in emancipating marginal identities and promoting a minority language is the Frisian Tryater.

Officially established in 1965 in Leeuwarden— cultural capital of Europe in 2018— Tryater has played a prominent role in shaping regional identities through engagements with international repertoire as well as in providing a platform to plays in the Frisian language, following the so-called “kneppelfreed” campaign (1951) which stimulated Frisian as a cultural language.[2]

The history of this Frisian theatre group goes back to the foundation of the Fryske Toanielstifting in 1965, which acquired the name Tryater in 1969. Tryater became highly successful in the 1970s under the leadership of Pyt van der Zee, and in 1985, when Thom van der Goot was artistic director, the theatre attained national recognition. Before the outbreak of COVID-19, Tryater would stage over 500 performances per year, in Frisian and other languages, at its main venue in Leeuwarden, local venues and schools in Friesland as well as abroad.[3]

This keynote will discuss Tryater in comparison to the Dublin Gate Theatre in three respects: their language politics, their adaptations of international plays, and their staging of marginalised identities. Since their early histories, the Gate and Tryater have shared a concern with the promotion of indigenous languages which was moreover combined with a cosmopolitan outlook. Both theatres would bring translations of internationally renowned drama into an indigenous, minority language to the stage. Just like Tryater, which from the onset gave a stage to new, local playwrights, the Gate significantly furthered the careers of a hitherto unknown generation of dramatists such as Denis Johnston, Davis Sears, Robert Collis and Mary Manning. Furthermore, both in the past and present, The Gate and Tryater have produced original plays which subvert issues of identity formation in contexts of globalisation. Examples are Nancy Harris’s The Red Shoes (2018) and Hummus & Haring’s community art project Eritreatown (2018).

[1] See Ruud van den Beuken, Avant-Garde Nationalism at the Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928-1940 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2020); and David Clare & Nicola Morris, “The Transnational Roots of Key Figures from the Early Years of the Gate Theatre, Dublin”. In Ondrej Pilny, Ruud van den Beuken & Ian R.Walsh, eds, Cultural Convergence: The Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928-1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2021), 75-106.

[2] See Ph. H. Breuker et al., Zolang de wind van de wolken waait: Geschiedenis van de Friese Literatuur (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2006), 139-40.

[3] https://tryater.nl/over-tryater/geschiedenis/, last consulted 15 January 2021. See also Tatiana Pratley et al, eds,50: Tryater 50 Jier (Leeuwarden: De Moanne, 2014).