SHOUT Community Day: The Devotions (Formerly A New Order)

The Devotions (digital sharing)

4 years ago, Barry met Bernárd. Both of them Irish, gay, and culturally Catholic. Barry is a performer. Bernárd is a priest. This meeting inspired Barry to dive into their own experiences of religion, sexuality and growing up gay in rural Ireland.

Part biography, part testimonial and part imagined queer heavenly utopia, The Devotions is an interdisciplinary solo piece exploring the intersection between queerness and Catholicism.

Through collaboration with visual and aural designers and a filmmaker, Barry is repurposing some of the piece and presenting a short digital commission for SHOUT Festival. Movement, sound, text, video and design combine in a visceral exploration of queer spirituality.

Expect beats. The Virgin Mary. Latex. And running.

Artist Bio:

Barry Fitzgerald is a queer, Irish performer and theatre-maker working between the UK and Ireland.

Barry’s practice is concerned with the intersections of identity. Playing with form and connecting with communities is at its heart – striving to make high quality, experimental work that is aesthetically rich, accessible, thought-provoking and fun.

As an associate artist with Outbox Theatre, a company of LGBTQIA+ artists who ‘make theatre queerly’, Barry has devised and performed in productions at the Arcola Theatre, Birmingham REP, Contact Theatre, Hackney Showroom, Shoreditch Town Hall and Outbox’s latest show, And The Rest Of Me Floats (Bush Theatre 2019).

As a freelance practitioner Barry has worked with the Almeida Theatre, Complicité, Barbican, Gendered Intelligence, Punchdrunk, Royal Court, Unicorn Theatre and been mentored by artists including Lies Pauwels and Ron Athey.

Barry is currently an artist-in-residence at VISUAL Carlow, one of the leading arts centres in Ireland.