Audience engagement and partnership
Alongside performance, The Last Céilí can support a range of presenter and partner activity, shaped to local context. This may include artist talks, workshops in song, story and performance, conversations around migration and memory, small stakeholder or donor events, and local story gathering with community partners, archives or heritage organisations. The aim is not to add activity for its own sake, but to create meaningful local connection around the work.
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. Sessions can be delivered as a single 90 minute workshop, a short series across a residency week, or an open masterclass format with audience observation. Where helpful, we can link the workshop content directly to themes and source material in The show, so participation deepens the experience of the performance rather than sitting beside it.
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.
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
Ahead of each city visit we will record a short 30 minute podcast with a local historian or a representative of the Irish diaspora community. 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.