By not supporting the arts, the State is impoverishing imagination
Next Saturday, London will be alive with cries of God Save the Queen as the longest-reigning British monarch celebrates her official birthday. She was born on April 21, but monarchs may have two birthdays as they have two bodies — a body politic and a body natural. The body natural dies, but the body politic is inviolable, hence the cry at the death of the monarch of ‘the King is dead, long live the King’. Political succession passes seamlessly, though the natural bodies die.
Ireland will be on a London stage next Saturday night as her majesty’s realms are en fête. The bodies, natural and politic, of Roger Casement will be exhumed in The Place, the hub of contemporary dance in London, by Irish choreographer Fearghus Ó Conchúir. The premier of the dance performance Butterflies and Bones is part of the Casement Project, one of the Arts Council’s 16 commissions for 2016. The phenomenally political nature of Casement’s own body, successively hanged in Pentonville Gaol in 1916 and reinterred amidst the pomp of a State funeral in Glasnevin Cemetery in 1965, was in effect a double denial. Contesting narratives required his body, first on the gallows and then on a catafalque provided by the State, be dishonoured in different ways. In London, his homosexual body was blackguarded. Fifty years later in Dublin it was whitewashed. It is not just the bodies of kings that are contested; the politicisation of the body is a recurring Irish motif.
