Medicated Milk

Medicated Milk is a re-telling of the life Lucia Joyce, daughter of celebrated Irish writer James Joyce. One of the first things I learned about Lucia was her passion for modern dance. She trained in France with Raymond Duncan (brother of Isadora) and performed with a group of female dancers called Les Six de Rythme et Couleur. She created her own choreography and received critical acclaim from the Paris Times. Lucia’s career was cut short due to supposed mental illness but the details around this seem very undefined. As Dublin celebrated another Bloomsday on the 16th of June honouring the revered literary giant, a silenced, counter-narrative was being heard in the IFI – that of Joyce’s mysterious daughter, Lucia. Little is still known about Lucia Joyce yet her limited biography points to a controversial, untameable figure, who scholars agree was a clear muse for her father’s work. What is accepted is that Lucia, born in Trieste in 1907 and showed great promise in becoming a dance artist, had her own artistic ambitions abruptly halted in the cutting-edge world of modern dance, yet the exact circumstances remain shrouded in mystery. She was to spend 50 years of her life in a mental asylum, forgotten and erased, owing to the Joyce estate destroying or closely guarding documents, making them unavailable to scholars; any scholastic enquiry met with forthright resistance for attempting to penetrate the sovereignty of Joyce’s work.