Y-Performance, Care and Intergenerational Response: Grieving for ‘ungrievable’ bodies in the Tuam Oral History Project

How can performance enact care for bodies rendered vulnerable, ungrievable, and unknowable to a certain extent, particularly in political climates that challenge the emergence of institutional histories? This essay offers a critical reflection on how ‘care’ manifest through the processes of performance in a recent devised university production, Nochtaithe (Unveiled), created as an artistic response to testimonies from survivors of the Tuam Mother and Baby Institution in the west of Ireland, made with the support of survivor-advocacy group the Tuam Home Alliance. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theorisation of ‘grievable’ bodies (Frames of War), this analysis will critically examine the expression of collective grief by students and survivors in rehearsal, performance, and post-performance as an expression of care for lives lost, for the intergenerational relations underpinning the Tuam Oral History Project (TOHP), and for each other as they confront a deeply contentious shared history that is violent, fractured, and intensely local.