History, Storytelling and the 1916 Rising – In Conversation with Cilian Fennell
In 2016 to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Rising, RTÉ, the Irish national broadcaster, commissioned an 85 minute live show, Centenary, which was first broadcast on 28 March 2016. Critically acclaimed as a masterpiece of storytelling, told through drama, dance and music, with over 600 people involved in the production, including 21 choirs, 10 actors, 18 dancers, six aerial dancers and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. The creator and producer of the award-winning show was Cilian Fennell.
This webinar provides a rare opportunity to explore the creative journey behind Centenary with Cilian Fennell, who will be joined by a panel of experts from Ireland, Britain and the United States to discuss the show, storytelling and the 1916 Rising in what promises to be a fascinating conversation.
View the Centenary Programme here:
Cilian Fennell is a Director of Stillwater Communications and is one of Ireland’s leading communications experts. After travelling extensively as a fisherman and sailor, Fennell began a career in television. His experiences as producer of The Late Late Show in RTÉ and Head of Programmes in the Irish language television network TG4 gave him an insight into connection and engagement with a wide range of audiences. He used this insight to set up a storytelling consultancy helping individuals and organisations develop and deliver their stories. In 2016, he was the Creator and Producer of RTÉ’s Centenary Show, which won an Irish Film and Television Academy Award and Celtic Media Award for Best Live Show and Best Entertainment respectively.
Panel members
Sarah-Anne Buckley is a historian of modern Ireland and is an expert on the history of gender and childhood, on which she has published extensively. She lectures in History at NUI Galway. She is the Co-Principal Investigator of the Tuam Oral History project. She is also the co-author (with John Breslin) of the prize-winning, Old Ireland in Colour (Merrion Press) series of books, and is a frequent contributor to both Irish and international media.
Roisín Higgins’ work focuses on social and cultural history with particular interest in the politics of historical memory. She is an Associate Professor in History at Teesside University. Her book, Transforming 1916 (Cork University Press, 2013), won the prestigious American Conference for Irish Studies James S. Donnelly Sr Prize for the best book in History and Social Science. She was one of the presenters on National Treasures, a public history project run in association with RTÉ, the National Museum of Ireland and the Irish Broadcasting Authority. Roisín has received a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, 2021-22, for her project ‘Sensing the Troubles: A Critical Reimaging of Life in Northern Ireland’.
P. J. Mathews is Director of the Creative Futures Academy and Associate Professor in Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin. He has written extensively on the literature and culture of the Irish Revival, especially the work of J.M. Synge, twentieth century Irish writing and contemporary Irish theatre. He edited The Handbook of the Irish Revival (University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), with Declan Kiberd. He acted as the Historical Advisory to the Centenary project.
Barry McCrea is a novelist and scholar of comparative literature. He is the Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches in the departments of English, Irish, and Romance Languages. His most book, Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe, won the American Comparative Literature Association’s René Wellek Prize for the best book of 2016.
