My talk at today’s TCDSU Activism Festival curated by Lynn Ruane

Hello everyone and good morning

It’s a privilege to be here at the inaugural turning theory into action activist festival.

My name is grace dyas and I am an artist and an activist. I work with a theatre company called THEATRE club and we make performance, film and large scale participation projects. The work I do centres around social justice issues and within my work Ireland is the main protagonist.

Today I will be talking about my experience of facilitating four activism workshops as part of this festival with a group of trinity students. The programme called, MOVE, was designed to get participants out of a theory space and into an action space, the task, which was a tall order, was to meet once a week, hear from other activists and plan a specific action around an area of society we wanted to change.

My activism began in 2008 with a piece called HEROIN. I was provoked to make the work by the way I was hearing people talk about addicts around me. I wanted to interrogate how addicts could be so dehumanised.  

Over the three years I made several large scale projects like HEROIN, covering every aspect of irish social history, from republicanism to housing and church and state abuse, to the dynamics of Irish families.  I met activists from all over the country, I started to be invited to give talks this, I started to call myself an activist and an artist. The type of work I was doing was often about tracing histories usually from the 60s/70s up to the present day, and as a result, i met a lot of older inspiring activists. To me, these people seemed like selfless warriors, giants, and appropriate role models. I hero worshipped them, I coveted their status, their contentment, their sense of belonging, their place in the struggle.

I sat with people and heard their stories of trauma. I sat with the bigger picture, head scratching, navel gazing, crying about it. I took on the national trauma, I let it filter through me, I expressed it in beautiful images, and repetitive lines, the work gave people relief, it gave people a voice, I was in magazines, I was on television and radio programmes. I had the luxury of being busy, busy saving the world, way too busy to look at my own stuff, I had lists to write, I had research to do, I had to track down someone elusive and interview them, I had to bang down the door of a funder, I couldn’t do anything for my own self care, I was too busy saving the world, I had to talk about my colleagues, and the fights we were having, it was very important that I did that. It was essential that I did that. And it was really important that everyone listened to me.  I couldn’t understand how people couldn’t see how important it all was, could they not see that it was me holding the whole thing up above our heads? Don’t be talking to me and hold a piece, it’s really important, you don’t want to know what will happen if you let it fall, if we let it fall, it’s really heavy and it’s up to us to keep it all up there.

And then, It all came crashing down around me, like an addict, the payoff of this drug became less satisfying, and then, it wasn’t there at all.

I was sitting in my friend’s kitchen in Limerick, another activist, she’s about ⅚ years older than me. She said “It’s fundamentally not ethical to harm yourself to help others”. The penny dropped. This was a massive revelation for me. I realised that many of my heroes had been doing that all their lives, and were now so burnt out that they were sick.

This realisation was so deep, so intense, that it became necessary to rebuild the whole thing and start again. I radically changed what THEATREclub was and how it works, by dissolving the original structure and creating a more equal one, we extended the company membership from three to seven, and crucially, we started to get supervision, and we now work with a therapeutic supervisor on all our activities.

When creating the programme for the activist workshops, all of this was on my mind. This was the most valuable thing I had learned so far and I wanted the students to know it before we explored anything else. So for the first workshop I invited Sean Millar to talk about self preservation as an activist.

To try to paraphrase Sean’s talk a little; In these spaces of activism, you are often dealing with life and death situations, and so what happens is naturally, the cause, becomes more important than you. In this space you are not a person, you do not have needs, you are a vessel for the struggle. And when your needs are not met, you become angry, and you burn out. Your needs are seen as a middle class pursuit getting in the way of the task ahead, you are a person who doesn’t have problems, you’re there to talk about other peoples problems and that is unsustainable. And what happens is, you start to become a saint. And there are no saints.

The best activism comes from people taking care of their own needs. Looking after their own shit.

This was the quote I used to preface the session:

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

― Audre Lorde

After this session, three people dropped out of the course…

and I was delighted!

They recognised that they didn’t have the time to commit to doing something like this. They took ownership for what they needed, and that was the number one thing that I wanted to get across. It’s not okay to harm yourself to help other people.

As the weeks went on, there were other moments of personal development and revelations for each of the participants on the course. One participant had a very strong idea, which I of course ran with, with all my manic ambition, the rest of the group got excited about the idea too, and we managed as a group to grow the idea exponentially in about twenty minutes and then leave him with all the work to do! He came in the next week and said you know what, you are all going at one hundred miles an hour and for me, I need to go at ten miles an hour and I am okay with that. I loved that moment too. Having the courage to be grounded in your feet and know what you need is essential to our activism.

We talked a lot about sacrifice, and how much we were willing to risk personally for our activism. That was a central question that came up time and time again. The group are still negotiating that I feel, but the very act of asking that question is an act of activism, like Audre Lorde’s in itself. Because so many of us aren’t asking it, so many of us are blindly going into these spaces without asking those questions.

As the next few weeks unfolded and the general election rolled around, as I observed what was happening I thought a lot about our first MOVE session with Sean. I wonder how often in the activist space we see this burnout, manifested as sainthood. Could this be why we have ‘The Poverty Industry?’ Could it be the route of the fractures in the left? I started cooking up my own actions around all of this, one of which is about The Dail Bar. I want to close the Dail Bar down for a few weeks, and replace it with a holistic health suite, featuring supervision, mindfulness, yoga, therapies, and measure the results, and see how the Dail chamber, and the country would change.