Injustices suffered by women – whether burnt at the stake or incarcerated in the Magdalene Institutions – threads through this powerful and moving show, a follow-up to Jesse Jones’s 2017 Venice Biennale work Tremble Tremble
âWhat do you call a memory that never happened?â 13-year-old Kyla asks an imaginary group of peers as she rehearses the speech she plans to give at a belated graduation ceremony for the Class of 2020, whose primary school career was cut short by the pandemic. As she starts secondary school and says goodbye to childhood, Kyla is grieving, not just for those formal markers of transition from one stage of life to another, but for the little personal markers of her self-identity: her ability as an organiser, her talent as a dance captain.
Kyla is the central character in Shaun Dunneâs new play What Did I Miss?, which was to be the centrepiece of the Dublin Theatre Festivalâs family programme in 2020, an annual partnership with the Ark, a cultural centre for children. Like all arts organisations around the country, the global pandemic presented the Ark with a challenge: how to reach young audiences when coming together is problematic.