YES, there’s a new Joyce-inspired female-focused festival
The final stage of ULYSSES European Odyssey 2022–2024 lands in Derry~Londonderry next June with the YES Festival celebrating female creativity.
The final stage of ULYSSES European Odyssey 2022–2024 lands in Derry~Londonderry next June with the YES Festival celebrating female creativity.
The YES Festival is inspired by the most famous female character in Joyce's landmark novel Ulysses – Molly Bloom – and has as its theme The Future: A Female Vision. It marks the return of ULYSSES European Odyssey to Ireland after a journey that, over three years and three acts, will have taken it to 18 European cities where unique responses were created to a range of issues facing contemporary Europe, each corresponding to one of the episodes of Ulysses.
Produced and curated by ARTS OVER BORDERS Ireland, the YES Festival will celebrate the work of established and emerging women artists from across Europe through theatre, dance, visual arts, installations, film, writing, photography, textiles, circus, music, rap and song. The events will take place over four days in venues and public spaces across Derry~Londonderry and Donegal.
The festival is inspired by the Penelope episode of Ulysses, and Molly Bloom's extraordinary stream-of-consciousness monologue, which begins and ends with the word 'yes'. It invites audiences to think about the role of women in Joyce’s life and work, and more widely, in society, in art, in business, in politics, as thinkers, as creatives, and as leaders.
One of the centrepieces will be the Molly~Bed, a large-scale public installation in Derry’s famous Guildhall Square, which will feature a digital screen as a headboard conveying messages by women from around the world, including leading artists and other public figures. People living in or visiting the city will be able to submit messages and questions through a 'letterbox' in pillows on the bed, which will also be shown. Eight female stage and screen performers are being invited to take part in a reading of Molly Bloom's soliloquy.
Derry~Londonderry was chosen as the centre for the YES Festival because it relied on a predominantly female workforce at the time that Joyce wrote Ulysses. Bringing the Dublin-based novel north also highlights the year in which Joyce was writing the Penelope episode, 1921, which was when the Government of Ireland Act divided Ireland into two territories.
The YES Festival – and ULYSSES European Odyssey – will close on 16 June with Molly~Bloomsday, turning on its head the annual event that conventionally focuses on her husband Leopold. Molly~Bloomsday will take the 18-hour journey depicted in Joyce's novel onto the streets of Derry~Londonderry with costume and character, a factory girls-inspired dance event, a Sirenscircus, a Galician lunch of white wine and cheese and an unprecedented event bringing together marching bands on Derry’s seventeenth-century walls.
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