‘Don’t anticipate the ending’ is an Irish Research Council and Arts Council Ireland funded collaborative practice-based research project by academic researcher Dr. Zosia Kuczyńska, dancer-choreographer Jessie Keenan, and performance-maker Robbie Blake. 

Focusing on the creative process of Irish playwright Brian Friel as revealed by his literary archives at the National Library of Ireland, it asks whether one artist’s ways of working can generate new ways of making art for contemporary practitioners through archival engagement. 

In this way, the project aims to set a major creative legacy in motion whilst laying the groundwork for future archival projects that seek to understand and transmit cultural knowledge through the body. 

Three years, a pandemic, and many reinventions later, the project has produced two original films, the beginnings of an evolution in the creative and scholarly practices of the project leads, and a rich archive of its own. 

This exhibition sets up a space for encountering that archive, allowing users to explore the connections between Friel’s own fascinating writing process and the contemporary experiments in dance and performance it has helped to inspire.