Film
Deirdre’s short dance film ‘Lucia Joyce: Full Capacity’, starring Evanna Lynch, premiered in 2019 at Bloomsday Trieste, followed by Kerry International Film Festival, a Special Funders’ Event at MoLI Dublin, and the Richard Harris International Film Festival, Limerick, where Evanna was nominated for Best Actor in a Female Role. In 2020 the film featured in Dublin’s Bloomsday Festival, at IFF International Film Festival, Elysium Gallery, Swansea, Waterford Film Festival; MexIndex “Displacements” curated by Richard Ashrowan; ThinkND Kylemore Bookclub with Declan Kiberd, and in Paul Muldoon’s Princeton University FÍS series. In 2021 the film featured at Rejkavik Feminist Film Festival, and Light Moves Festival of Screendance. In 2022 it was selected for Bloomsday Film Festival’s opening programme “Brief Encounters: New Joycean Shorts”, at the Irish Film Institute.
Laura Cernat wrote in Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022):
“…what is brilliant about Mulrooney’s film is that it does not surmise… It just suggests, discreetly, through poetry, rhythm, and colour, that the girl in the mermaid photograph had more to show the world. Swathed by the costume, the setting, the reconstructed choreography, Lynch’s “body swayed to music” makes the dance come to life and, recalling Yeats’s memorable line, tries to resurrect the dancer, too. At the beginning and end, we can see the actress step in and out of the role, as if it were a trance. The suggestion is subtle but clear: Lynch is not just performing the part of Lucia, she is trying to let Lucia inhabit her past and future self.”
Curator Richard Ashrowan wrote in his essay “Displacements” (MexIndex, 2020):
In Deirdre Mulrooney’s Lucia Joyce: FULL CAPACITY, we see the dancer Evanna Lynch re-imagining a dance performance, based on a 1928 photograph of Lucia Joyce taken by Berenice Abbott. Lucia was the daughter of James Joyce and experienced a very particular kind of erasure, her artistic career ending in forced incarceration in a psychiatric asylum, where she spent most of her later adult life. The backstory here is tragic and compelling, yet even this stark and oversimplified re-telling performs a secondary erasure. The story displaces Lucia Joyce’s own achievements, the ten years of her life and art dedicated to professional practice as a dancer. What Mulrooney creates within her film is not another re-telling of this deadening narrative, but a living re-inscription of Lucia Joyce, her body vitally reconstituted in celebration of her creative life. Lynch, as a dancer, displaces the erasure, her own body in place of the absented body of Joyce. For Mulrooney, “the female body has always been displaced and disenfranchised in 20th century Irish culture.” In reckoning with the multiple narratives of female displacement within her film, Mulrooney is also reflecting upon her own female identity within Irish culture. Born in Canada to Irish parents, she was sent back to Ireland, where she says she experienced not quite alienation, but that she felt “slightly at an angle.” This is a subtle shift in point of view, forging an ability to glance sideways into the gaps between places and cultures, between histories and actualities.”
(Thanks to Laura Cernat and Richard Ashrowan for their thoughtful responses to the film).
In 2017, Deirdre produced and directed “TRUE NORTH: Paud Mulrooney’s Irish-Canadian Adventures in Super 8” a short documentary featuring her father’s Super 8 films from the 1970s and 1980s offering a rare glympse into life on remote First Nations Reserves in North Ontario, where her parents ran the local schools. The film has been widely screened internationally, from the 2021 Association of Canadian Studies Ireland “Borders & Beyond’ Conference, to the 2020 Canadian Independent Film Festival; the 2019 Richard Harris International Film Festival (Nominee, Best Documentary Category); the 2018 Belgrade-Irish Festival; a 2017 Canada Day screening at The Dark Room, Dublin; an August 2017 post Pow Wow Screening in Ogoki Post, North Ontario; and most recently a screening and talk at Grenfell Art Gallery as part of Dr. Shoshannah Ganz’s Fall 2021 English programme at Memorial University, Newfoundland.
In 2018 while Craig Dobbin Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at UCD, renowned Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart screened ‘True North’ for her Canadian Studies class, and commented:
“I personally found your elegiac film very moving, and that the coming together of your Irish parents and their children, with the people of the Aboriginal community and their children, shows how authentic respect for Aboriginal traditions can build relationships and enrich the lives of everyone involved.”
In 2017 Deirdre also produced and directed a short film about Colin Davidson’s exhibition “Jerusalem” for Oliver Sears Gallery. (John Hewitt School, 2017; 92Y, NYC).
Deirdre’s film “1943 – A Dance Odyssey” was first broadcast on RTÉ One on Easter Monday 2013. Screenings included Bealtaine Festival 2013 (Ballymun Axis Theatre); Galway Culture Night 2013 (Druid Theatre); Galway Film Fleadh 2014; Dublin Festival of History 2016 (Pearse Street Library), and a Gala reunion screening at Trinity College Dublin’s Samuel Beckett Theatre hosted by Ruth Barton, in 2015.
Once upon a time, during World War Two (or “The Emergency”, as it was known in Ireland), enigmatic Irish-German woman Erina Brady brought cutting edge Modern Dance to Ireland, from Germany. A forgotten reel of film by Irish film industry founder Liam O’Laoghaire immortalised the mysterious modern dancer teaching her tiny pupils in her Harcourt Street Studio and dancing freely in the open air in his 1943 gem of a film, “Dance School”.
Setting eyes on this rare footage for the first time, 1943 – A Dance Odyssey brings five of Brady’s former tiny tots on an odyssey to a bygone era in her enchanted Irish School of Dance Art studio.
Seventy years on, 1943 – A Dance Odyssey, explores who were these dancing tiny tots, attempting an arabesque, and stretching out their little limbs in barefoot dance of expression? Where did the dance of life take them?
Unlocking fond memories of those extraordinary classes the women share how the modern dance pioneer influenced their lives, and opened them up to a lifetime of creativity.
“Dance Emergency”/ “Damhsa na hEigeandala”, Deirdre’s hour long TG4 Splanc thriller/modern dance documentary set in 1940s Dublin, premiered at Galway Film Fleadh in July 2014, and had its TG4 premiere broadcast in January 2015. Damhsa na hÉigeandála was selected for screening at the Belgrade-Irish Festival in March 2015. Its North American Premiere took place at the prestigious Dance on Camera Festival, Lincoln Center, NYC in February 2016 (kindly supported by Culture Ireland). The Canadian Premiere took place at Irish Film Festival Ottawa, in 2017. The film was the focus of Deirdre’s keynote lecture at University of Limerick’s Irish-German “Connections in Motion” Conference at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance in October 2016. Dance Emergency’s Dublin premiere took place in the Military Archives at Cathal Brugha Barracks – home of Erina Brady’s secret G2 file – on Culture Night (September 22nd) 2017.
Against the backdrop of seldom-seen 1940’s bohemian Dublin, and suspicions of Nazi espionage, we recount an Irish-German artist’s forgotten struggle to bring Modern Dance/ German Ausdruckstanz to a conservative, inchoate Ireland that was not yet ready for it. Interpreted beautifully by the great Olwen Fouéré, choreographed by Jessica Kennedy, we frame Brady’s legacy in the context of the thriving contemporary dance scene in Ireland today. Features the late Patrick Scott, as well as Fearghus O Conchuir, Declan Kiberd, Peter Sheridan, Una Kavanagh, Karen Gleeson, Lucia Kickham, Tom Hickey, Pat Laffan, Michael James Ford, Zena Donnelly, and the students of The College of Dance.
In May 2015 Deirdre was commissioned by Dublin City Council Arts Office and Department of Parks to produce and direct “In the Studio with Sculptor Danny Osborne”, a short documentary about the making of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Statue in Dublin’s Merrion Square by sculptor Danny Osborne. The interview with Danny was shot in his West Cork Studio on the Beara Peninsula on a beautiful sunny day. Part of the Dublin City Council “Art in Parks” Project, it is available via QR code at the Oscar Wilde Memorial Statue in Merrion Square and on Dublin City Council Website.
Deirdre’s Photo-Documentary “Journey to YU (in the footsteps of Rebecca West)” premiered at the 2015 Belgrade-Irish Festival, supported by Culture Ireland, and crowd-funded via Kickstarter. Its Dublin premiere was at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios in July 2015 as part of Photoireland Festival 2015, and it was subsequently selected for Guth Gafa International Documentary Festival 2015, the first Sarajevo-Irish Festival in March 2016, supported by Culture Ireland, and Dublin Festival of History 2017 at Pearse Street Library.
In 2010, the great Valerie Waters of RTE Nationwide presented a report on Deirdre’s background, ongoing research and projects.
Deirdre’s short dance film ‘Lucia Joyce: Full Capacity’, starring Evanna Lynch, premiered in 2019 at Bloomsday Trieste, followed by Kerry International Film Festival, a Special Funders’ Event at MoLI Dublin, and the Richard Harris International Film Festival, Limerick, where Evanna was nominated for Best Actor in a Female Role. In 2020 the film featured in Dublin’s Bloomsday Festival, at IFF International Film Festival, Elysium Gallery, Swansea, Waterford Film Festival; MexIndex “Displacements” curated by Richard Ashrowan; ThinkND Kylemore Bookclub with Declan Kiberd, and in Paul Muldoon’s Princeton University FÍS series. In 2021 the film featured at Rejkavik Feminist Film Festival, and Light Moves Festival of Screendance. In 2022 it was selected for Bloomsday Film Festival’s opening programme “Brief Encounters: New Joycean Shorts”, at the Irish Film Institute.
Laura Cernat wrote in Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022):
“…what is brilliant about Mulrooney’s film is that it does not surmise… It just suggests, discreetly, through poetry, rhythm, and colour, that the girl in the mermaid photograph had more to show the world. Swathed by the costume, the setting, the reconstructed choreography, Lynch’s “body swayed to music” makes the dance come to life and, recalling Yeats’s memorable line, tries to resurrect the dancer, too. At the beginning and end, we can see the actress step in and out of the role, as if it were a trance. The suggestion is subtle but clear: Lynch is not just performing the part of Lucia, she is trying to let Lucia inhabit her past and future self.”
Curator Richard Ashrowan wrote in his essay “Displacements” (MexIndex, 2020):
In Deirdre Mulrooney’s Lucia Joyce: FULL CAPACITY, we see the dancer Evanna Lynch re-imagining a dance performance, based on a 1928 photograph of Lucia Joyce taken by Berenice Abbott. Lucia was the daughter of James Joyce and experienced a very particular kind of erasure, her artistic career ending in forced incarceration in a psychiatric asylum, where she spent most of her later adult life. The backstory here is tragic and compelling, yet even this stark and oversimplified re-telling performs a secondary erasure. The story displaces Lucia Joyce’s own achievements, the ten years of her life and art dedicated to professional practice as a dancer. What Mulrooney creates within her film is not another re-telling of this deadening narrative, but a living re-inscription of Lucia Joyce, her body vitally reconstituted in celebration of her creative life. Lynch, as a dancer, displaces the erasure, her own body in place of the absented body of Joyce. For Mulrooney, “the female body has always been displaced and disenfranchised in 20th century Irish culture.” In reckoning with the multiple narratives of female displacement within her film, Mulrooney is also reflecting upon her own female identity within Irish culture. Born in Canada to Irish parents, she was sent back to Ireland, where she says she experienced not quite alienation, but that she felt “slightly at an angle.” This is a subtle shift in point of view, forging an ability to glance sideways into the gaps between places and cultures, between histories and actualities.”
(Thanks to Laura Cernat and Richard Ashrowan for their thoughtful responses to the film).
In 2017, Deirdre produced and directed “TRUE NORTH: Paud Mulrooney’s Irish-Canadian Adventures in Super 8” a short documentary featuring her father’s Super 8 films from the 1970s and 1980s offering a rare glympse into life on remote First Nations Reserves in North Ontario, where her parents ran the local schools. The film has been widely screened internationally, from the 2021 Association of Canadian Studies Ireland “Borders & Beyond’ Conference, to the 2020 Canadian Independent Film Festival; the 2019 Richard Harris International Film Festival (Nominee, Best Documentary Category); the 2018 Belgrade-Irish Festival; a 2017 Canada Day screening at The Dark Room, Dublin; an August 2017 post Pow Wow Screening in Ogoki Post, North Ontario; and most recently a screening and talk at Grenfell Art Gallery as part of Dr. Shoshannah Ganz’s Fall 2021 English programme at Memorial University, Newfoundland.
In 2018 while Craig Dobbin Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at UCD, renowned Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart screened ‘True North’ for her Canadian Studies class, and commented:
“I personally found your elegiac film very moving, and that the coming together of your Irish parents and their children, with the people of the Aboriginal community and their children, shows how authentic respect for Aboriginal traditions can build relationships and enrich the lives of everyone involved.”
In 2017 Deirdre also produced and directed a short film about Colin Davidson’s exhibition “Jerusalem” for Oliver Sears Gallery. (John Hewitt School, 2017; 92Y, NYC).
Deirdre’s film “1943 – A Dance Odyssey” was first broadcast on RTÉ One on Easter Monday 2013. Screenings included Bealtaine Festival 2013 (Ballymun Axis Theatre); Galway Culture Night 2013 (Druid Theatre); Galway Film Fleadh 2014; Dublin Festival of History 2016 (Pearse Street Library), and a Gala reunion screening at Trinity College Dublin’s Samuel Beckett Theatre hosted by Ruth Barton, in 2015.
Once upon a time, during World War Two (or “The Emergency”, as it was known in Ireland), enigmatic Irish-German woman Erina Brady brought cutting edge Modern Dance to Ireland, from Germany. A forgotten reel of film by Irish film industry founder Liam O’Laoghaire immortalised the mysterious modern dancer teaching her tiny pupils in her Harcourt Street Studio and dancing freely in the open air in his 1943 gem of a film, “Dance School”.
Setting eyes on this rare footage for the first time, 1943 – A Dance Odyssey brings five of Brady’s former tiny tots on an odyssey to a bygone era in her enchanted Irish School of Dance Art studio.
Seventy years on, 1943 – A Dance Odyssey, explores who were these dancing tiny tots, attempting an arabesque, and stretching out their little limbs in barefoot dance of expression? Where did the dance of life take them?
Unlocking fond memories of those extraordinary classes the women share how the modern dance pioneer influenced their lives, and opened them up to a lifetime of creativity.
“Dance Emergency”/ “Damhsa na hEigeandala”, Deirdre’s hour long TG4 Splanc thriller/modern dance documentary set in 1940s Dublin, premiered at Galway Film Fleadh in July 2014, and had its TG4 premiere broadcast in January 2015. Damhsa na hÉigeandála was selected for screening at the Belgrade-Irish Festival in March 2015. Its North American Premiere took place at the prestigious Dance on Camera Festival, Lincoln Center, NYC in February 2016 (kindly supported by Culture Ireland). The Canadian Premiere took place at Irish Film Festival Ottawa, in 2017. The film was the focus of Deirdre’s keynote lecture at University of Limerick’s Irish-German “Connections in Motion” Conference at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance in October 2016. Dance Emergency’s Dublin premiere took place in the Military Archives at Cathal Brugha Barracks – home of Erina Brady’s secret G2 file – on Culture Night (September 22nd) 2017.
Against the backdrop of seldom-seen 1940’s bohemian Dublin, and suspicions of Nazi espionage, we recount an Irish-German artist’s forgotten struggle to bring Modern Dance/ German Ausdruckstanz to a conservative, inchoate Ireland that was not yet ready for it. Interpreted beautifully by the great Olwen Fouéré, choreographed by Jessica Kennedy, we frame Brady’s legacy in the context of the thriving contemporary dance scene in Ireland today. Features the late Patrick Scott, as well as Fearghus O Conchuir, Declan Kiberd, Peter Sheridan, Una Kavanagh, Karen Gleeson, Lucia Kickham, Tom Hickey, Pat Laffan, Michael James Ford, Zena Donnelly, and the students of The College of Dance.
In May 2015 Deirdre was commissioned by Dublin City Council Arts Office and Department of Parks to produce and direct “In the Studio with Sculptor Danny Osborne”, a short documentary about the making of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Statue in Dublin’s Merrion Square by sculptor Danny Osborne. The interview with Danny was shot in his West Cork Studio on the Beara Peninsula on a beautiful sunny day. Part of the Dublin City Council “Art in Parks” Project, it is available via QR code at the Oscar Wilde Memorial Statue in Merrion Square and on Dublin City Council Website.
Deirdre’s Photo-Documentary “Journey to YU (in the footsteps of Rebecca West)” premiered at the 2015 Belgrade-Irish Festival, supported by Culture Ireland, and crowd-funded via Kickstarter. Its Dublin premiere was at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios in July 2015 as part of Photoireland Festival 2015, and it was subsequently selected for Guth Gafa International Documentary Festival 2015, the first Sarajevo-Irish Festival in March 2016, supported by Culture Ireland, and Dublin Festival of History 2017 at Pearse Street Library.
In 2010, the great Valerie Waters of RTE Nationwide presented a report on Deirdre’s background, ongoing research and projects.