Bloomsday Celebration, Georgia 2022, and Uysses 100 Conference Day 2

The Bloomsday Celebration is held annually on 16 June.

In Tbilisi, Georgia, for 2022, it was celebrated on 4 June, during the Ulysses 100 International Conference on 2-4 June 2022 that celebrates a hundred years since the first publication of James Joyce’s novel ‘Ulysses’ in Paris in 1922 by Sylvia Beach.

Bloomsday celebrates the life of Irish author James Joyce, and the day his 1922 novel Ulysses takes place in 1904. The novel is set over the course of one day – a day in the life of Leopold and Molly Bloom – on 16 June 1904. It was, in reality, James Joyce’s first date with Nora Barnacle, who became his wife.

The Bloomsday Celebration involves a range of culural readings and dramatisations of the novel. In Tbilisi, Georgia, there were activities at the Georgian American University (GAU) – with exhibitions of Georgian translations of Joyce’s works, and readings from the novel Ulysses.

One of the translations was of Finnegans Wake by Tamar Gelashvili, Doctor of Philology, and GAU Guest Lecturer at the Humanities and Liberal Arts School, which included her own illustrations.

The Bloomsday Celebration concluded the Ulysses 100 Conference, where one of the presentaions on Friday 3 June was a trailer for the film ‘Lucia’s Room.’ Lucia is the name of James Joyce’s daughter, who was an aspiring dancer in Paris. The film ‘Lucia’s Room’, directed by Mariam Aleksidze and David Maziashvil, was part of the Giorgi Aleksidze Tbilisi Contemporary Ballet’s digital choreography performance series.

‘Lucia’s Room’ Contemporary Ballet Hallucination is based on Lucia’s life as a talented dance artist who spent most of her adult life in lockdown due to mental health issues. The ballet is set in a flat, a room, in the virtual world. It was filmed in the Axis Tower in Tbilisi during the Covid-19 lockdown and premiered on YouTube on 11 September 2021. Hence, it was created specifically for an online performance.

The dancer is Mariam Darchia, and the original music, vocals, and sound design are by Anamaria Burduli, with instrumental and sound production by Patrick Hemington, and make-up by Ekaterine Chancchibadze.

The film was selected to be presented at the Bloomsday Celebration in Dublin on 16 June 2022.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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