Happy New Year to our patrons! And to Joyceans everywhere!
Bloomsday in Melbourne begins to prepare the next Bloomsday the minute the last one ends, and sometimes even before that. There's a lot going on until we reach our 20th Bloomsday on 16 June.
This communication provides information about
the four events planned for January-June 2013, a year which promises to be our
best yet. We invite you to participate
in all of them.
1.
Penetrating the ‘Impenetrable’: A Course for
Beginning Readers of Ulysses, 17 Feb. 2013, 10am – 5pm at the
Celtic Club. Places still available. This one-day intensive course is being
repeated at the request of patrons. There may be a follow-up advanced course,
if called for. See curriculum, below.
2. A
Moved Reading of Bernard Farrell’s subversive comedy about encounter groups, I do
not like thee, Dr Fell, directed by Renee Huish at the Celtic Club on Friday 22nd and
Saturday 23rd March at 7.30pm and Sunday 24th March at
2.30pm. See description below and flyer.
3.
A launch-and-remember
party at P. J. O’Brien’s, Thursday 7.30pm, 18 April 2013 to celebrate 20
years of Bloomsdays and to launch Bloomsday 2013 with our director and actors
past and present. Details to be advised by email and on website by the end of
February.
4.
Our main event for the year, Bloomsday, on 16 June, marks our 20th
successive celebration of Bloomsday. It will be an extended programme run over
four days from 13-16 June. We will be collaborating with fortyfivedownstairs,
the bijou, arts-focussed independent theatre in Flinders Lane. Details on email/website from end of March.
In
addition, we include material relating to
the Australia Business Arts Foundation (ABAF). You will be pleased to hear
that we have again secured tax-deductibility status with this
Australian-government-auspiced organisation.
For more details see the flyer and the description of the play below.
IN MORE DETAIL........
1. Course: Penetrating the ‘Impenetrable’:
A Beginner’s Guide to reading Ulysses.
When? 10am-5pm,
17 Feb. 2013
Where? 2nd
floor, Celtic Club, Latrobe and Queen Streets, Melbourne.
Cost? $60 ($40 for students, health-card holders)
To Book: Phone
Bob on 0398982900, or http://www.trybooking.com/BVLB
Classes will be restricted to 20 students and
a waiting list will be kept. If demand warrants, a second class may be formed.
The course will be delivered by Associate
Professor Frances Devlin-Glass (Ph.D., ANU), who has been the Director of
Bloomsday since its inception in 1994, and who has taught Joyce at tertiary and
other levels since 1980. She is a member of the College of Distinguished Deakin
Educators, and the recipient of national and university teaching grants and awards.
Curriculum
This is an intensive course for perplexed
beginning readers. James Joyce’s Ulysses
has an undeserved reputation for being impossibly difficult to read. Having
said that, it is demanding, and is better done with a guide in the first
instance. This course aims to demystify
the novel, make it less formidable and intimidating, and to create enjoyment of
its riches, in particular its subversive but wise comedy. The style of the
course is a mix of lectures and discussion, and participants are encouraged to
bring their own copies of Joyce, preferably an annotated edition (the Penguin
Student’s edition, or the Oxford University Press editions are both excellent,
or alternatively, if you are using an unannotated edition, you might consider
purchasing Gifford and Seidman’s Ulysses
Annotated, cheaply available from good bookstores and Amazon).
In More Detail.....
The curriculum will focus on the simpler chapters of Ulysses and has the following main
components:
·
Session 1, 10am -1pm: The Architecture
of a ‘baggy monster’
·
Joyce’s principles of
organisation. Having a sense of how minutely and interestingly organised the
novel is a key strategy for understanding. Various ways of analysing its
structure, some authorised by Joyce, will be undertaken.
·
Session 2, 2-3.30pm: Getting up
to speed on narrative techniques in Ulysses
– how the novel teaches you to read it.
·
Learn about free indirect
discourse
·
Varieties of stream of
consciousness technique
Starting
with Bloom, and culminating in Molly’s great soliloquy. All sessions will be a
good introduction to Bloomsday 2013 which ranges widely over Joyce’s works, but
especially Ulysses.
·
Session 3, 4-5 pm: The Comedy of
Joyce
Practising reading the user-friendly
chapters Calypso 4, Hades 6, Penelope
18. Having pre-read these three chapters will make the course more profitable
for students. At 5pm, the Bar calls.
2.
About our Autumn Fundraiser: I Do Not Like Thee, Dr Fell
I Do Not Like Thee, Dr Fell, a
play by contemporary Irish playwright Bernard Farrell, has a star-studded cast,
and includes many of the actors from last year’s smash hit Big Maggie. It will be directed by Renée Huish, who has brought us The Christian Brother and Big Maggie, and frequently been a
Bloomsday Player.
Dr Fell premièred at the Abbey Theatre
Dublin in 1979, and enjoyed overnight success, which was repeated around the
world. The action centres on a group therapy session in a Dublin attic where
all participants are encouraged to ‘relax, relate and communicate’.
Hang ups and neuroses abound in the group.
There is Joe (Silas James), a likeable character, in spite of his efforts to
completely derail the group, and Suzie (Rose Marfleet), the group therapist,
who does her best to keep it all on track. The urbane Roger (Liam Gillespie),
an aficionado of group therapy, kicks off proceedings with many twists and
turns before the end. Husband and wife team, Peter (Mike Gillis) and Maureen
(Edwina Rushe), have come along to inject some zest into their marriage, with outcomes
of which neither would ever have dreamt. The last to arrive is Rita (Deirdre
Gillespie), who has ably switched from the role of Big Maggie last year to a
demure, confused widow, who regales all present with tales of her husband and
their twelve, or is it thirteen cats, named after the twelve Apostles.
The voice of sanity comes from the group
attendant Paddy (Gerry Halliday). Paddy wisely does not participate in the
sessions, opting to go home instead to his wife and children. But by play’s end
we discover that real life presents its own challenges to Paddy.
This lampooning of therapy groups which were
a big hit in the late 60s and 70s is guaranteed to give you an evening or
afternoon of pure escapist fun.
Renée Huish will be assisted by Roisin Murphy.
Performances will be at the Celtic Club at
7.30pm on Friday, 22nd and Saturday 23rd March, with a
matinee performance at 2.30pm on Sunday 24th March.
Performed
under licence by kind permission of Rosica Colin Ltd.
3 A Party to Launch Bloomsday 2013
P. J. O’Brien’s (genuinely) Irish pub
on Southbank is in 2013 continuing its support of Bloomsday by hosting the
launch of our extended 2013 season. Buy a pint, and enjoy P.J’s legendary
hospitality (remember the Tatty Tenors Concert in August 2012), and meet the
Bloomsday Players performing in 2013, and the incoming Theatre Director, Wayne
Pearn, award-winning director and founding manager of Hoy Polloy. Entrance cost
is $15 and includes food (but not drinks). Thursday 18 April 2013 at 7.30pm. Booking details to be announced.
4. BLOOMSDAY, 2013
16
June 2013 will mark our 20th successive celebration of Bloomsday. To
celebrate this milestone, this year we will be mounting an extended programme
run over four days from 13-16 June. We will be collaborating with
fortyfivedownstairs, the bijou, arts-focussed theatre in Flinders Lane. Details on email/website from end of March.
Details
are still being finalised but will probably include five performances (Thursday
and Friday at 7.30pm, and Saturday at 6pm and Sunday at 1pm and 6pm) of our
usual high-quality play, a seminar on Life and Death in Joyce on 16 June at
3.30pm, and free lunchtime readings in the Gallery at fortyfivedownstairs on 12
and 13 June.
We
are excited about the script which uses Jacques’ speech from As You Like It for presenting an
irreverent account of the life and fiction of Joyce.
All the world’s a
stage
And all the men and women
merely players:
And one man in his time
plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages...
It gives us the opportunity to range widely
through Joyce’s works, from Portrait to
the Wake and to show how art became
Joyce’s ‘cracked mirror’.
Bloomsday
in Melbourne greatly appreciates the support patrons have provided to our
annual festival over the past 20 years. Many patrons have commented on the
increased dramatic quality and professionalisation of the theatrical offerings.
Last
year we registered Australia Business Arts Foundation’s (AbaF) Australian
Cultural Fund in an effort to raise the funds necessary to maintain the quality
of our offering and raised $900, for which we thank businesses and patrons.
This Fund was established to encourage people to donate to the arts and enable
not-for-profit groups like Bloomsday in Melbourne to benefit from this
generosity. All donations are made to the Australia Business Arts Foundation
(AbaF) which considers donor preferences when allocating grants. In the past
eight years more than $10 million has been donated to AbaF and granted in full
to more than 400 artists and cultural organisations – it is a great program for
groups like ours.
2013 marks 20 years of celebrations in
Melbourne of James Joyce’s novel. Our
main event will be a very lively account of Joyce’s life told through his
fiction, from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake. It is an original play
entitled The Seven Ages of Joyce. Our mission is to bring Joyce in the form of
high quality theatre and discussion to as wide an audience as possible. We are
firmly of the view that it is a treasure to be shared by all, not just the
academic boffins. We think this play will be of broad general interest, and we
are taking a risk in staging it at one of the city’s bijou theatres, fortyfivedownstairs
(at considerable cost, but hoping to capitalize on their extensive mailing list
and their enthusiasm for the project and marketing know-how). We also plan the
traditional seminar (on birth and death, we hope), and lunchtime readings in
the Gallery at fortyfivedownstairs.
As you no doubt know, Bloomsday costs rather
more than we can bring in the door on the day itself, so fundraising is a major
task for us if we are to pay actors what we think their 3-4 months of
preparation warrants. Our major costs in 2013 include (these are indicative,
except for the theatre, which is a fixed price):
·
Creative
personnel (theatre director, lighting designer, designer, about 8 actors)
($14,000+?)
·
fortyfivedownstairs
theatre (45 Flinders Lane) ($4000)
·
Public
Liability Insurance ($800)
·
Flyers
and postage ($800)
·
costumes
($400)
·
music
rights ($250?)
·
theatre
heating ($250)
·
Seminar
Paper Honoraria ($300)
Small donations will help Bloomsday afford
materials for our fine prop-maker ($20), or buy tights ($5), or create special
effects or hire another light. Every little helps.
We are therefore asking you whether or not
you would be willing to support us through ABAF. Inevitably some paperwork is
involved. If
you can help, we’d be very happy to do what we did this year and acknowledge
your support in our program and on our website.
We understand that there are many calls on people’s resources, and if
the kind of support that better suits you is attendance at our events, that’s
also grand, and more than welcome. Perhaps you could support us by bringing a
friend? Or organising a group?
ABaF information is available online and the form needed to make donations is also available online. Be sure to specify that you are a Bloomsday supporter, please.
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