[spectre] Prairie Voices

[Séamas Cain]

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IMRAM, a national literary festival in Ireland, in association with
the Dublin City Arts Centre and TíAitreo, will present "The Prairie
Gaeltacht" by Séamas Cain.  Performances will begin at 7:00 p.m. on
Monday and Tuesday, September 20 and 21, 2010 at CITY ARTS, 15
Bachelor’s Walk, Dublin 1, Ireland.

Describing the script for The Prairie Gaeltacht, Liam Carson, director
of the IMRAM Festival, said "poetic, beautiful, moving, simple,
evocative.  I'm really looking forward to experiencing the
performance."

And the Irish writer Gabriel Rosenstock described the script as "very moving."

http://www.cityarts.ie/events/2010/09/20/-the-prairie-gaeltacht-gaeltacht-na-bhfarthailte/


THE PRAIRIE GAELTACHT

"I remember herds of buffalo on the prairie, beautiful Indian ponies
... the coyotes howling at dusk."  So speaks one voice in Séamas
Cain’s dramatic evocation of what he calls The Prairie Gaeltacht.

Drawing on his own conversations with relatives, Séamas Cain’s
narrative probes deep into family, land and language.  Through their
plain but poetic voices, history is relived.  Here Irish settlers
learn from Indians "where strawberries grew and which birds were most
delicious to hunt."  Here is Thomas Burke, kinsman of Edmund, fleeing
to the Irish Colonies of Minnesota in 1878.  We are brought from the
time of the wagon trains to the day electricity arrived in the village
of Murdock in 1922.  Along the way we hear stories of the Molly
Maguires, the communitarian Connemaras and their vision of creating a
Gaelic socialist utopia on the prairies of western Minnesota; of
fiddlers and harmonica players at dances; of droughts, crop failures,
snowstorms, and swarms of locusts.

The Prairie Gaeltacht is an extraordinary bi-lingual journey into a
haunting past.  Actors from TíAitreo will re-create in Irish the words
and stories of Séamas Cain’s grandparents and their cousins and
friends, whilst Cain himself will narrate in English.

A unique insight into an almost forgotten history, The Prairie
Gaeltacht is a deeply personal odyssey from one of America’s most
radical and inventive of poets.

http://www.cityarts.ie/events/2010/09/20/-the-prairie-gaeltacht-gaeltacht-na-bhfarthailte/

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Séamas Cain
http://www.saorsainn.net
http://alazanto.org/seamascain
http://seamascain-writernetwork.org