Yeats and the arts take center stage at Notre Dame Kylemore’s ‘Threshold’

W.B. Yeats, playwright, poet, founder of the Abbey Theatre, and winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature, among other accolades, was front and center in conversation, art, and spirit at Notre Dame Kylemore’s Threshold Festival. Mirroring Yeats’ own breadth of work across creative writing, literary criticism, and drama, the festival expanded upon his legacy through the unveiling of new and old works, offering a fresh perspective on the connections between Yeats and his contemporaries, as well as Irish creatives of this moment.

Held over the unusually warm and sunny weekend of August 14-17, between venues on the estate of Kylemore Abbey and Notre Dame Kylemore, the event was nothing short of celebratory. The opening remarks of the festival were made by Former Taoiseach of Ireland, Enda Kenny. He emphasized the importance of programs that push audiences towards an empathy grounded in academic and artistic influences that they might not be otherwise exposed to: “The Threshold Festival [itself] becomes a threshold: we come here to cross [it], to feel it, to understand it, to come together in our common humanity.” This sentiment of connection through the arts served as the foundation of the weekend.

Day One of The Threshold Festival

Enda Kenny’s introduction was followed by a lecture by David Kenney, the W.B. Yeats Fellow in Irish Literature and postdoctoral research associate at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. His talk, titled “Retreat to the Gothic: Yeats, Le Fanu, and the Supernatural,” engaged with Yeats’ belief in mysticism and magic as a conscious structure in his work, notably that he “often preferred the mystical over technical side of occultism, something that mirrors his preference for the romantic over the political side of nationalism, and also with his faith in the visionary over the rationalist.” Kenney concluded that Irish Gothic authors such as Yeats and Le Fanu translate their own phantasmagoria into fiction in order to explore the frustrations of being lost. A meaningful Q&A session from this lecture transitioned into the opening of the art exhibition, titled Roots.

Roots was centered thematically in the woodlands and landscapes of Connemara, united by the West family, three generations of artists local to the West of Ireland. The exhibition served as a grove of multiple forms and representations of forests that are living and have lived. The room was hung with several ink drawings of Ballynahinch Forest by the youngest artist, Manon West; chestnut, elm, and ash carved into bowls and artistic forms by her father, Richard West; and natural observations in colored etchings on copper by Manon’s grandmother, Margaret Irwin West, among other forms of art. The artists house their practice in Studio West, which serves multiple purposes as a studio, gallery, and workshop in Cleggan, Connemara. It was a true delight to witness three generations of artists standing together at the exhibition opening, and see the natural beauty of Connemara interpreted, repurposed, and expressed in new everlasting forms.

That evening, Notre Dame Kylemore hosted the first of two Taste of Connemara dinners, featuring an expansive spread that spanned Dawros Beg Oysters and mignonette, Irish charcuterie, Connemara smoked salmon, Killary Fjord clams, Galway Bay prawns, Ballyconneely Bay crab meat, dipping sauces of hummus, red pesto, and green pesto in crusty local bread, and topped off with a selection of delicate desserts and high-quality wine.

As dusk started to draw near, the attendees walked down from the Notre Dame center to the Gothic Chapel on the grounds of Kylemore Abbey, where Irish singer and folklorist Lisa Lambe held a new concert titled “Nightvisiting; The Hauling Home.” Combining the narrative of an old Irish wedding custom with the artist’s research at The National Folklore Collection, the performance showcased her skills as a traditional artist, folklorist, and storyteller. With flaming red hair and a flowing floor-length dress, she held a large book full of stories that she read aloud to a wash of drones and drums skillfully crafted by a collection of traditional Irish instruments. Whirling tunes and haunting melodies reflected the range of heart-pounding swings and pangs inherent to the changes that marriage brings, including “The Wedding Jig,” “Haste to the Wedding,” “I buried my wife and danced on her grave,” Blackwaterside,” “Banks of the Lee,” and some fast reels by Seamus Ennis. The hearth-like lighting of the Gothic Chapel’s sanctuary by production designer Simon Morgan added to the warmth and ambience curated by multi-talented instrumentalists Claire Sherry, Eoghan Scott, and Vincent Lynch. Closing the day with this concert solidified the purpose of the weekend: to capture the University of Notre Dame's commitment to the arts through exploring Irish literary work at the intersection of artistic expression, cultural heritage, and scholarly inquiry.

Day Two of The Threshold Festival

Day two began with a guest lecture by P.J. Mathews, founding member of the Creative Futures Academy and director of the CFA at University College Dublin, where he is a professor of Irish literature, drama, and culture. The lecture, titled “J.M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time,” introduced Synge, a major figure in the first decade of the Abbey Theatre. The lecture covered Yeats’ meditation on art and Synge—examining more broadly how art should function in society as nourishment. This lecture unveiled to the group that art at its best is a cohesive, exciting, cathartic experience that takes us closer to ourselves, but also allows us to think more broadly on our lives and the world as a whole, contemplating the questions, tensions, and injustices of the moment.

Ted Barron, executive director of the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center (DPAC) at Notre Dame, reflected:

“I am still contemplating P.J.’s framing of the arts as a balance between didacticism and decadence, and how this might inform our own programming at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. For us, the challenge is to present events that carry a strong sense of purpose—in our case, aligned with the University's Catholic mission—while remaining accessible to a wide range of audiences.”

This kind of dialogue between academic inquiry, Notre Dame’s Catholic character, and performing arts programming is precisely the kind of cross-connection the Threshold Festival seeks to foster.

The day closed with a Taste of Connemara dinner, followed by a performance by ANÚNA in the Gothic Chapel. The ensemble glided into the space holding lit candles and cloaked in deep velvets and flowing garments, a vision that echoed David Kenney’s talk on the occult and imbued the evening with a sense of mystery. Over the course of an hour, Anúna presented reconstructions of medieval Irish songs alongside traditional arrangements—weaving stories of death, memory, family life, and heritage. The performance unfolded in a series of solos, duets, and choral interludes, with the singers moving among the audience, their candlelight flickering against the Gothic stone. Sung entirely a cappella, the music transformed the chapel into a realm of haunting beauty and mystical resonance.

Day Three of The Threshold Festival

The third day of the Threshold Festival opened with an illuminating afternoon lecture, as Declan Kiberd took the stage to explore “Yeats: The Dance as Religion and Politics.” With wit and subtle irony, he reminded the audience that Yeats himself could never dance, yet turned to the image of dance as a living metaphor for ritual, memory, and community. Kiberd traced how Yeats’s paintings and writings offered a vital link to the Irish Revival, showing movement not in the body, but in the cadence of language, the rhythm of politics, and the ritual of performance.

Later, the festival guests gathered for a champagne reception in the Fordham Ballroom, a moment of elegance and anticipation before the evening’s operatic centerpiece, the Wexford Festival Opera (WFO). An international opera festival founded in 1951 in a harbor town in the south east of Ireland, WFO brings forgotten masterpieces of the opera world back to life, commissions contemporary works, and discovers national and international artistic talent.

The evening featured a specially crafted one-act performance by WFO: Lady Gregory in the West, composed by Alberto Caruso with libretto by Colm Tóibín and directed by Aoife Spillane-Hinks. It was a pleasure to welcome composer Alberto Caruso to the Threshold Festival, as he accompanied the performance on piano.

The opera, sung in English, offered a condensed yet powerful retelling of Lady Gregory in America, weaving together scenes of Lady Gregory alongside two lovers acting in Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. As the story unfolded, the audience was transported back to 1911 New York and Philadelphia, where the staging of The Playboy led to adventures and difficulties encountered by the Abbey players and by Lady Gregory, one of the Abbey’s founders. As this opera functioned as a comedy, the actors navigated humorous challenges such as struggling to learn their lines and getting arrested.

The production was set with an impressive wooden backdrop resembling the reverse side of a stage. The performers delivered a strikingly physical interpretation, often balancing atop crates that doubled as the “stage,” further heightening the sense of immediacy and improvisation. Furthermore, a costumed performer was strategically placed among the audience, embodying a disgruntled playgoer. This device blurred the line between stage and spectatorship, adding a meta-theatrical layer to the show.

Through Caruso’s score and Tóibín’s text, the opera recalled this extraordinary clash of art, identity, and politics, reminding festival-goers of the turbulence and passion that shaped modern Irish drama, ending with a question: “Who can say what will happen next?” Lady Gregory in the West closed the evening in a blaze of history and music, as well as a second round of champagne.

Day Four of The Threshold Festival

The final day of the Threshold Festival opened with “Spreading the News,” a panel interview with Caitríona McLaughlin, artistic director of the Abbey Theatre. The discussion turned toward the Abbey’s history and its evolving role in Irish theatre, framing how past and present meet in the work being created today.

The panel was followed by playwright Marina Carr, who introduced her ambitious new work, The Boy, a two-play theatrical event inspired by Oedipus Rex. Carr described it as a meditation on legacy and mortality: “What does one wish to leave behind when one is no longer here?” The Boy is structured as two full-length plays, staged across consecutive evenings—or together in a single day—as part of the upcoming Dublin Theatre Festival. Drawing on the disturbing trajectory of Oedipus’s life, the plays explore themes of pride, vanity, rage, pity, fear, and horror.

Carr highlighted her fascination with lines from Sophocles that still feel urgent and contemporary: “Only a little time to please the living, all eternity to please the dead”; “We will never be here again. Everything flows, nothing stays.” She spoke of Oedipus not as a hero of free will but as a man trapped by fate, his story unfolding as a discovery of what has already come to pass. The Abbey ensemble then presented selected scenes from the play in progress. McLaughlin noted that Carr’s gift lies in her ability to humanize and simplify difficult truths, bringing audiences into moments of confrontation and intimacy, such as the devastating first meeting of Jocasta and Oedipus, neither yet aware of their true bond.

The day concluded once again in the Gothic Chapel with a staged reading of Yeats’s The King’s Threshold, directed by McLaughlin. Performed in a simple, static formation with actors reading from binders, the Abbey cast nonetheless brought a gravitas to the text that resonated deeply with the festival audience. Scholar Declan Kiberd reflected: “The entire reading of Yeats’s play The King’s Threshold by the Abbey was magnificent—brought me back to my great uncle Edward Keegan who featured in the first production.”

Deemed a success by all who attended, the Threshold festival filled an important gap by amplifying emerging creative voices and building community—goals central to the Arts Initiative within the University of Notre Dame's Strategic Framework. DPAC Executive Director Ted Barron described the event as one that took “great care to create such a productive space for the exchange of ideas and the passionate defense of the arts in modern society.”