Songwriter assembles NYC cultural festival to celebrate Ireland's Easter Rising 100th anniversary
Susan Mc
Keown (seen in January 2011) is the founder of CualaNYC.
(BEN GABBE/GETTY IMAGES)
A Grammy award winning songwriter who splits her time between New York City and Dublin is putting together an Irish cultural festival to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising.
The first CualaNYC kicks off on Tuesday. The two-month festival hosts over 35 events, including a performance of a William Butler Yeats play on the beach in Coney Island, Irish poetry performances on NY Waterway’s East River Ferry and a music festival at the Knockdown Center in Queens.
Susan McKeown, CualaNYC’s founder, said it was only natural that celebrating the Rising — a key moment in the fight for Irish independence — would involve the city.
“I was inspired by the amount of New York history related to the Rising, from the fact that two of the rebel leaders, James Connolly and U.S. citizen Thomas Clarke, lived in the Bronx and Brooklyn, to the immense connections with the labor movement,” said McKeown, 49. “It's known now that the Rising wouldn't have happened without New York.”
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