what
Literally:
fun + funeral + for all + feral
The James Joyce Funferal is a performance ensemble, loosely based in the Australian capital city of Canberra and dedicated to reimagining our experience of literary works. Our funferals combine in one event:
Literary recitals, that serve to bring the implicitly performative nature of all fiction reading to the fore
Mini-lectures of a para-academic nature, which draw fire from the fact that the lecture is itself an innately performative, audio-visual experience, and that ideas can be dramatic and exciting, and
Musical performances, which range from the reenactment of musical works referenced in the texts we are bringing back to life to original compositions dedicated to the ongoing reimagining of the written word.
The broad aim is to amplify the text. We specialize in James Joyce, but are open to all sorts of works.
who
Gabrielle Carey is a non-fiction author of ten books, including Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and my Family, which jointly won the 2014 Prime Minister’s Award for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for the National Biography Award. In 2020 Carey was shortlisted for the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship for her biography of novelist Elizabeth von Arnim, Only Happiness Here (UQP, 2020). Her essay ‘Waking Up with James Joyce’ was chosen as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2019 edition. She has coordinated Sydney's Finnegans Wake Reading Group for the past 18 years.
Nicci Haynes is a visual artist whose roaming practice includes print, drawing and installation. Performance-drawing along with experimental film and animation have become significant components, acting as vehicles for capturing liveness and movement, and accommodating assorted collaborations with dancers, musicians and poets.
Paul Magee teaches poetry and creative research methods at the University of Canberra. He has published two books of verse: Cube Root of Book, which was shortlisted in the Innovation category of the 2008 Adelaide Festival Awards, and Stone Postcard, named in Australian Book Review as one of the books of the year for 2014. Paul's monograph Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought was published by Rowman and Littlefield International in May 2022.
Billy O’Foghlu's PhD (ANU) involved working with Traditional Owners to study North Australian late holocene archaeological sites (Earth Mounds). Born in Sligo, he also studies Irish iron age music, and has published in Emania, The Journal of Indian Ocean Archaeology and Serenade Magazine.
Russell SmitH lectures in Modernist Literature and Literary Theory in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the Australian National University, Canberra. He has published widely on Samuel Beckett, and recently completed an essay on the French linguist Émile Benveniste for the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literature.