166: The Wedding - What Can We Learn From Activist Artists in Northern Ireland?
About this episode
This episode explores the lessons from a community play in Northern Ireland that brought together divided groups to foster peace and collaboration.
How can a play devised by enemies, performed in four locations across a peace wall in the middle of a war zone help provoke lasting peace? In November 1999, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, a community play called The Wedding brought Protestants and Catholics together to rehearse a shared future in the fragile aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement. It wasn’t a feel-good arts project. It was risky, volatile, negotiated truth performed in living rooms and kitchen houses on both sides of the peace line. In this episode, we revisit that moment — not as nostalgia, but as a live question for a divided United States struggling to imagine a coherent democratic future. In this episode, we explore three critical lessons from Belfast that feel urgently relevant today: Proximity changes people. Intimacy — not abstraction — makes caricature impossible. Shared labor builds trust before shared opinion. Competence together can precede consensus. Hope is not a feeling. It’s a container built through practice. Democracy survives inside structured collaboration, not slogans. Listen in for a return to Belfast — and a serious invitation to consider what it would mean to rehearse the future together…
More episodes of ART IS CHANGE: Strategies & Skills for Activist Artists & Cultural Organizers
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- 172: Jordan Seaberry - What Use is Art Making When Freedom is Under Fire?
- 171: Artist Proof Studio - What Can We Learn From Activist Artists in South Africa
- 170: Is Community Based-art Making at the Heart of Cultural Democracy?
- 169: Joni Doherty: ART IN ACTION Is Fueling Free Expression & Democracy
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