Audience engagement and partnership
Alongside performance, The Last Céilí can support selected presenter and partner activity shaped to local context, resources and audience need. This may include artist talks, workshops, conversations around migration and memory, and story gathering with community, archive or heritage partners.
Interactive Workshops
To support the main performances, we can offer practical workshops in traditional Irish singing, music, and storytelling. These sessions can be tailored for community choirs, student groups, local musicians, or mixed public participants. Depending on the presenter’s needs, workshops can focus on song interpretation and vocal style, ornamentation and phrasing, narrative craft, or the relationship between story and melody. Workshops can be delivered as a single session, a short series during a residency or an open masterclass. Where useful, the content can connect directly to the songs, stories and source material within the production.
Special Event Hosting
To support the main performances, we can also offer private performances of selected music from the show in a venue of your choice. These can be informal and close range, designed for small groups such as donors, board members, partners, or key community stakeholders. The format can be music only, or music with a short conversation about the project, the source material, and the local participation strands. These moments can take place off site, in a private home, a cultural space, a university setting, or a civic venue, depending on what best suits your relationships. Any additional performance or private event will be subject to separate agreement, scheduling and appropriate artist fees.
Family Letters and Stories
In each host city we will reach out to Irish diaspora networks, working with the Irish Embassy and Consulates and with local Irish cultural organisations. We will invite people to share family stories, letters, photographs, and small details of emigration and arrival. With permission, these stories can be used as part of the lead up to the performance, helping the local audience see their own city and its Irish history inside the work. The longer term aim is to build a digital online resource that reflects the audience stories of the many people who have experienced the show.
Local Conversation Podcast
In selected host cities, where partnerships and resources allow, the company and presenter may work with Irish cultural organisations, archives and diaspora networks to invite local stories, letters and photographs connected with migration and arrival. Each episode will explore the wake tradition, and how it shaped community life in the 18th and 19th centuries, especially in the context of emigration. Where relevant, we will widen the lens to include other communities and cultures with comparable leave taking rituals, so the project speaks beyond Irish experience while staying rooted in it. Ahead of selected engagements, the company may record a short conversation with a local historian, artist or representative of the Irish diaspora community.