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     PERFORMANCE REVIEW
   
Jennifer Walshe, Ireland: A Dataset
    

National Concert Hall, Dublin, 26 September 2020, broadcast online (Imagining Ireland Livestream Series).

        

    Björn Heile
    


    Sound Stage Screen, Vol. 1, Issue 2 (Fall 2021), pp. 219–223, ISSN 2784-8949. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. © 2021 Björn Heile. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss16656.




    In a possibly (and pleasingly) apocryphal remark, the Irish novelist John
    McGahern is supposed to have said that “Ireland skipped the twentieth
    century—it went straight from the nineteenth into the twenty-first.” It is
    this tension between a mythologized past and a promising but uncertain
    future that forms the basis of Jennifer Walshe’s composition. In few other
    European countries, the premodern past encounters the postindustrial
    present, represented in this case by tech giants like Apple, Google, and
    Facebook who made Ireland their European base for tax reasons, quite so
    starkly; an experience Ireland shares with other postcolonial countries at
    the periphery of Western modernity. That, like so many Irish artists and
    intellectuals before her, Walshe is an emigrant and lives mainly in London
    and Stuttgart may have additionally sharpened her sensitivity for the
    contradictions peculiar to her birthplace (I am writing this as a German
    living in Scotland, so I can claim personal insight into the emigrant
    perspective, although I have no specific knowledge or understanding of
    Ireland).



    Five performers—the vocal ensemble Tonnta (Robbie Blake, Bláthnaid Conroy
    Murphy, Elizabeth Hilliard, Simon MacHale) and the saxophonist Nick
    Roth—complemented by a sparsely used pre-recorded tape—perform what Walshe
    describes as a “radiophonic play.” Generically, the result can best be
    described as “semi-staged” in a way that is familiar from experimental
    music theater from the 1960s onwards, and not all that different from
classical-modernist precursors such as Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire or Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat or    Renard (although there is no hint at a continuous narrative or
    dramatic roles in this case): all performers are miked individually and,
    with one short exception, remain rooted to their spot. Thus, the delivery
    is based on concert performance on one level; at the same time, however,
    the performers enact some of the generic characters, such as present-day
    American tourists or a gang of Irish criminals targeting the 1893 Chicago
    World’s Columbian Exposition, who make an appearance through vocal and
    gestural mimicry (“simple acting” in Michael Kirby’s classification of
    acting types).
    
        [1]
    
    Instead of scenery or props, a video screen completes the stage. All these
    elements are used economically: overall, this is a tight concentrated
    experience, rather than a sensory overload. Tonnta and Roth have to be
    congratulated on well-judged performances covering all nuances, from
    neutral through deadpan to full-on (well, almost full-on) panto delivery
    and back again, all the while executing the music with great precision and
    aplomb.



    Structurally, the work consists of sections focusing on aspects of Irish
    culture, history, and identity, alternating with interludes composed by
    artificial intelligence trained on (mostly) Irish musicians—such as Enya,
    Les Baxter (amusingly transliterated as Leaslaoi Mac A’Bhacstair, although
    Baxter was born in Detroit), The Dubliners, Riverdance—and on Sean-nós
    (highly ornamented, unaccompanied traditional Irish song). To what extent
    the interludes were really composed by AI, and how, remains unclear, but
    they are very effective parodies of their respective models, faintly
    reminiscent of Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs and Coro, or,
    in the more satirical numbers, Mauricio Kagel’s Kantrimiusik. In
    particular, the close harmony singing in the Les Baxter number and the
    clumsy pseudo-folk dancing in the Dubliners parody (the only occasion when
    the singers move their entire bodies and leave their spot) will stick in
    the audience’s minds. As funny as these sections undoubtedly are, the wider
    point is the digital simulation, reproduction, and manipulation of ideas of
    Irishness. Walshe undermines simplistic dualisms between “real” and “fake”
    or, for that matter, “honest” human craft and digital machine culture, by
    emphasizing the manufactured and manipulated nature of the models employed.
    It is worth pointing out that one of Baxter’s (or Mac A’Bhacstair’s) claims
    to fame is the invention of the genre of “exotica.” Even though the
    endpoint is Sean-nós (in digitally adulterated form), it would be naïve to
    assume that the idea is that “authenticity” can be accessed by peeling off
    the successive layers of representation one by one.



    What the AI interludes suggest about music, the other sections argue about
    wider culture, including visual culture, using variously spoken, recited,
    and sung language (apparently written by Walshe herself), and the video
    screen as media. All the sections share a focus on the creation and
    reproduction of images and myths of Ireland. The first part is a critical
    essay on Man of Aran, a 1934 “documentary” by Robert J. Flaherty
    on the premodern life on the Aran Islands that has later been revealed as
    almost wholly fabricated. The second is a parody of a TV show (or possibly
    YouTube video) on how to look Irish. After a disquisition on AI and
    datasets, particularly referencing John Hinde, an English photographer who
    specialized in nostalgic picture postcards of rural Ireland that
    aestheticized the reality of grinding poverty, we encounter North American
    tourists on their visit to the Fort of the Kings on the Hill of Tara,
    followed, after the AI-produced Les Baxter parody, by a “lecture on the
    picturesque,” which ranges from eighteenth-century landscape painting
    through nineteenth- and twentieth-century picture postcards to present-day
    tourist snaps on Instagram. The number on the 1893 Chicago World’s
    Columbian Exposition takes the form of a stylized comedy sketch routine
    involving a presumably fictional raid by the historical Valley Gang on the
    two rival exhibits representing Ireland—part of the self-representation of
    the British Empire—one featuring a Donegal village and the other Irish
    industry, with an incommensurate replica of Blarney Castle. One of the
    jokes concerns the gang’s needing to dress up to “look Irish” in the way
    depicted by the exhibition to blend in, complete with what must be the
    tallest hat ever to be conceived but almost certainly never worn. The final
    number is, perhaps unexpectedly, genuinely moving, narrating a car trip
    around Ireland, which allows an apparently dying child to see real-world
    sites he or she only knows from films representing fantasy places, such as
    Westeros (from the TV series Game of Thrones, largely shot in
Northern Ireland), Middle Earth (from the film series    Lord of the Rings, shot mostly in New Zealand, although the
    Hobbits’ “Shire” seems to evoke a leprechaun colony) and the planet Ahch-To
    (from Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens, shot on Skellig
    Michael, off the southern coast of Ireland). In the end, the child seems to
    miraculously recover. 



    As with many of the elements within this complex artwork, there are several
    possible interpretations of this ending. To me, the break from the ironic
    detachment and pervasive parody (whether gentle or malicious), predominant
    throughout the work, suggested a form of acceptance: for the child, it
    presumably doesn’t matter whether the images or the places they depict are
    real or not; they are just as beautiful.



    If androids dream of electric sheep, maybe Facebook’s Dublin-based servers
    simulate the Stone of Destiny on the nearby Hill of Tara in their downtime.
    And if, as the late historian Eric Hobsbawm has argued, national identity
    consists of “invented traditions,” Irish identity, Jennifer Walshe retorts,
    is a dataset of billions of images and sounds that are constantly being
    re-processed. Artificial intelligence is just the latest form of such
    re-representations. Yet, crucially, as also becomes clear in her work,
    these myths were mostly created by others about Ireland: the
    association of the picturesque with the Irish countryside is the work of
    British colonists who proceeded to refashion the very landscape in
    accordance with their ideas. The idealization of ancient, Celtic, rural
    Ireland, with all the trappings of Gaeltacht, mythology, and folk music,
    literally declared “beyond the pale” by the British (the Pale being the
    line that separated the lands under direct British control from the rest of
    Ireland during the Late Middle Ages), is unthinkable without the
    nationalist reaction against colonization—and, notably, against the
    American construction of Irishness (itself largely driven by the Irish
    diaspora intent on idealizing their origin). Again, Facebook etc. are only
    the latest stage of this particular form of domination. As the text states
    at one point: “datasets are never neutral.” Not that the Irish have
    consistently refused to be complicit in their own exoticization and
    mythologization. Over time, some began to see their own country through the
    eyes of others: Man of Aran is an excellent example. Not only is
    it no longer possible to distinguish between authentic or fake, but also
    between native and foreign—and perhaps it never was.



    Ireland: A Dataset 
    was premiered in late September 2020, broadcast online from an empty
    National Concert Hall as part of their Imagining Ireland
    Livestream Series. It was a rare highlight of new work for audiences
    deprived of live performances and subsisting mostly on a diet of canned art
    consumed through our screens. This too had to be viewed on a computer
    screen, but at least it was new and performed live. Frankly, almost
    anything would have made me happy at that moment. Yet the work proved rich
    and rewarding way beyond this particular context.



    It is created for live performance, not online viewing, but, due presumably
    to the aforementioned economy of means, it works very well on screen.
    Still, I would love to see the work live, when it is possible to shift
    one’s attention between the individual performers and between the stage
    action and the video screen according to one’s own—not the video
    director’s—preferences (although they did an excellent job). At the time,
    it seemed as if the COVID pandemic might be dying down, and there were
    hopes for a return to concert halls, theaters, and opera houses. These have
    been well and truly demolished by the second wave, although we are now
holding out for a new dawn brought about by vaccination. It is hoped that    Ireland: A Dataset will benefit from the promised revival and
    experience a second life in live performance, instead of remaining forever
    identified with that strange period that we like to think of as a temporary
    interruption of our cultural and artistic life although it may yet turn out
    to be a harbinger of coming realities.




    

    

    
        
            
                [1]
            
            Michael Kirby, “On Acting and Not-Acting,”            The Drama Review: TDR 16, no. 1 (1972): 6–8.
        

    

    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    




                

                

            

                

            

          
          
        
        
        
