A memória em movimento: Dancing at Lughnasa no teatro e no cinema
memory, theater, cinema, Dancing at Lughnasa
One of the main features of Brian Friel´s work is to represent memory on stage. Dancing at Lughnasa is one of his plays classified by critics as a "memory play" because it presents, like The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, a narrator who narrates the events taken from his memories. The play is also Friel´s autofiction and contains some autobiographical traces of the playwright.
However, Dancing at Lughnasa's relationship with memory goes beyond the thematic and becomes the playwright's procedure and way of making theater in memory of the theater itself, bringing back its origins in rituals and tragedy, and re-reading the main elements of the foundation of the Irish Literary Theater. Dancing at Lughnasa is not only a memory play, but also refers to theater, which is also memory, and thus can be considered a metatheatrical text, as it enables discussions about drama, its techniques and its functioning.
By analyzing the notions of time, space and body in the play, essential elements for both the theater and memory, this research intends to delineate the conception of memory brought by Friel and how it relates to theater, referring to the tradition and at the same time, corroborating to an idea of community different from the one imagined by the members of the Irish Literary Theater. As a dramatic text first presented in the 1990s, aiming at opening the Irish theater to an international context, this research also intends to consider its adaptation to the Hollywood cinema directed by Pat O'Connor, and the treatment given to the local memory in this media that allows its globalization.
From life to writing, from writing to stage, from stage to cinema, memory as a repetition in difference is in constant movement and in a continuous process of making meaning in time and space, according to the bodies and communities involved.