For the past 19 years, Bloomsday in Melbourne Inc. has unceasingly promoted and celebrated the works of James Joyce, offering original theatre events based on the novels or on Joyce, and forums for critical discussion.
Bloomsday in Melbourne Inc is part of a loosely affiliated international event which celebrates one of the most significant writers of our times, and one who has profoundly influenced thinking and the practice of literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
In 2002, the New York Times deemed Bloomsday in Melbourne as one of the leading five Bloomsdays worldwide. Since then, it has increasingly professionalised its offerings, moving into better-resourced theatres, and offering innovative staging of highly complex and challenging aspects of the novel.
The 2012 Bloomsday Festival will celebrate the leading female character in Ulysses, Molly Bloom:
- on the stage
- at the lectern
- bringing a critical eye to the previous theatrical and academic engagements with Molly
- and marking the 19th anniversary of Bloomsday in Melbourne with a 400-strong gathering at three separate events
Bloomsday’s Modus Operandi:
Our mini-festival consists of a centrepiece original play, a seminar and a dinner. In 2012, the main event is "Curves of Amplitude", an original adaptation of "Penelope", the final (and most accessible) chapter of Ulysses which focuses on Molly Bloom.
It will be directed by Brenda Addie and involve a cast of women. Multiple Mollys permit an exploration of Molly as a woman at home in her lubricious body, at different stages in the life-cycle, in all her contradictoriness, outrageousness, as well as her often ham-fisted attempts at emancipating herself from various nets set to immobilise her vaunting ambitions.
A seminar will provide an intellectual buttress for the play and explore the sources for Molly and academic reception of her and the debates surrounding her. Interestingly, this chapter, Penelope, in particular and Ulysses in general, inspired a generation of postmodern feminist theorists, and indeed several key cultural theorists. Under scrutiny will be:
- Penelope as a revolutionary, emancipatory text
- the rupture with traditional ways of representing women and challenging taboos
- writing the embodied woman
- the tension between realism and mythic elements in Penelope.
Bloomsday has a long history of self reliance, typically generating funds for its recurrent and pre-production expenses by running fundraisers, in the form of plays and courses, designed to illuminate Joyce and his contexts. These events give us an opportunity to build the Bloomsday in Melbourne community and to explore Joyce and his literary contexts more thoroughly. We are particularly interested in how later Irish and Irish-Australian playwrights and artists have worked with Joyce’s literary legacy.
The Organisers:The Bloomsday Committee, a group of Joyce enthusiasts and volunteers, is able to draw on a wide range of Joycean cultural capital among its members. Under the direction of Honorary Associate Professor, Frances Devlin-Glass, who has taught Joyce and Irish Literature since 1971 and run Bloomsday since 1994, it devises scripts, provides dramaturgy, and supplies the administrative base for the organisation.
Creative Personnel:Bloomsday in Melbourne draws on a large reservoir of professional actors, lighting, stage and costume designers, and musicians. Its current resident theatre-director is Brenda Addie who has worked for Bloomsday since 2006. She is an experienced actor and theatre director, and a playwright and adaptor of literary texts for the theatre, and a scholar of theatrecraft, and educator in Theatre Management Studies. She is also an effective networker and draws on a wide field of potential actors, stage managers, lighting designers and designers.
How you can help?Donations are being sought to assist with theatre hire and to support salaries for creative personnel and production costs.
Image credit: Cast of 2011 Bloomsday production
An Irishman and a Jew Go into a Pub. L to R: Phil Roberts (narrator), Silas James (Joe Hynes), Susannah Frith (Celtic Narrator), Jim Wright (Alf Bergen), Jason Cavanagh (the Citizen and his dog) and David John Watton (Bloom). Photographer: Maireid Sullivan.