In the summer of 2020, in the midst of cancelled and indefinitely-postponed plans, I received a Rapid Residency grant from the Science Gallery, Dublin. The Rapid Residency Programme is an initiative that allows artists to collaborate with expert researchers while they develop a new project or idea over 5 weeks. For more on the Rapid Residencies, and to see the work of the other Rapid Residents, visit the Science Gallery website, here.
The bursary allowed me to invest time and energy in the early stages of a performance project, 25 minutes, 21 seconds, exploring the abolition of Dublin Mean Time in 1916.
Brendan Owens and Mitzi D’Alton at the Science Gallery connected me with Dr Ben Davies at the University of Portsmouth, and Dr Jane Carroll from Trinity College Dublin. I worked with designer/dramaturg Ellen Kirk to conceptualise a performance piece, which I am in the early stages of writing, though most of my 5 weeks were given to reading and research.
The research period spanned the fields of history, physics, geography, literature, anthropology, philosophy and postcolonial studies.
Here are some things I’ve pulled from my notebook.
In May 1916, Westminster passed the Time (Ireland) Act, which synchronised Irish and English clocks, bringing both countries into one time zone. As a result, on October 1 of that year, when British clocks went back by one hour for the winter months, Irish clocks went back 35 minutes, ending Ireland’s separate time zone, known as Dublin Mean Time.
The imposition of Greenwich Mean Time onto Ireland was hardly the most forceful imposition of 1916, but I am curious about what it means to impose time, to regulate time, to take away 25 minutes, within a colonial context.
Constance Markievicz later in a letter decried the “forcing of English Time on us”, while John Dillon (Irish Parliamentary Party) defended Ireland’s 25-minute time difference from the UK, as it “reminds us that we are coming into a strange country.”
There is a rhythm in the metabolism of life in a given people and culture that is resonant with the environment that surrounds it. Any system of measurement of that rhythm is relative to the needs, understanding and consensus of a given culture. Eurocentric, bureaucratic clock-time is often at odds with those rhythms.
In 1793, French revolutionaries attempt to impose a decimal 10-day week and to change the Roman calendar, creating a system known as French Revolutionary Time. It doesn’t last.
In the Old Testament, God stops the sun in the sky, lengthening the day to help Joshua defeat the Amorites in battle.
How time is measured and valued is inherently political.
Philosopher Georgio Agamben writes that ‘every conception of history is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated. Similarly, every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new culture is possible without an alteration in this experience. The original task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to “change the world”, but also – and above all – to “change time”’.
Critic Frank Kermode writes ‘Let us take a very simple example, the ticking of a clock. We ask what it says: and we agree that it says tick-tock. By this fiction we humanize it, make it talk our language. Of course, it is we who provide the fictional difference between the two sounds; tick is our word for a physical beginning, tock our word for an end. We say they differ. What enables them to be different is a special kind of middle. We can perceive a duration only when it is organized.’
My conversation with Dr Carroll leads me to think about ghosts and hauntings, which are inherently tied up with time: the past, imposed on the present. Ghosts challenge the neat linearity of time, being perpetual as well as past. We talk about Derrida, we talk about how time is measured under capitalism, we talk about 1916 and haunting.
Commemoration is a kind of haunting. We are in the midst of decade of remembrance where old figures hang over the city.
Theatre is a kind of haunting. It is a cultural activity deeply involved with memory and haunted by repetition. Audiences rely on the spectre of past performances seen to interpret the present, ‘bringing together on repeated occasions and in the same spaces the same bodies (onstage and in the audience) and the same physical material’. (Carlson)
Live performance, which is fundamentally composed of space and time, seems to be the ideal medium for engaging with the abolition of Dublin Mean Time. Ellen Kirk and I sit in her studio and sketch out a gallery piece in which light passes slowly through a room.
By the end of the five weeks, the way I think about time has been robustly challenged. I start to see the metaphors, the linguistic tropes we use to conceptualise and structure Time. I try to free myself from those constraints. I can’t.
In particular, my own sense of time passing is challenged by a zoom conversation with Dr Ben Davies, and by the book The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, whose poetic, accessible prose gently dismantles things that I previously thought to be fundamental truths (that time is universal, that time moves forward, that time ‘moves’ at the same rate everywhere).
Time suddenly seems embedded in the fabric of this very residency, in ways I hadn’t noticed before. For these five weeks, time is a prize, a commodity to be used wisely, to be used up. I tell the manager of the bookshop I work in that I won’t be looking for any more hours from her, for a while at least.
I’m taking time and spending it on reading, on thinking, on conversations. Time is currency. The value of those things – reading, thinking, conversations - announce themselves in a way that they didn’t before.
I ask myself constantly: Am I using this time wisely? Is the time running away on me? I hope this email finds you well in these Strange Times.
With Mitzi and Brendan, I set out a timeline for five weeks, I set deadlines. Time is linear in this configuration, a road marked with milestones that get closer and closer, and then disappear behind me. Time moves differently in the Time of COVID - our meetings are added to google calendars, over the ghosts of dead plans, places we should be, things we thought we’d be doing right now, in formerly imagined futures.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all at the Science Gallery, particularly to the wonderful advisors Brendan and Mitzi, for the rare luxury of time and space to sit with this idea. More soon.