Words by: Barry Fitzgerald – Creator/Performer
Dublin is the city where I properly came out as queer. It was the place where I found friends and community, fell in and out of love for the first time, experienced a new version of myself and danced a lot! So there’s something special about bringing Mourning is a Muscle to the city that was so important in my formative queer years.
Mourning is a Muscle is a project about mourning, memory, queerness and home. It’s part performance, part installation, and it brings together some unlikely things – Westerns, Neil Diamond, Annie Lennox, line dancing, lip-syncing and the Irish countryside.
The piece began back in 2020, when I was in a London lockdown and unable to travel home to Ireland. In the stillness, I tried to focus on work but instead I found myself writing to my father – he had died four years earlier. I didn’t know what I was making, or if I was even making anything at all. I think I was writing to him as a way of processing grief and keeping a conversation going with someone who was no longer physically there, but who still felt very present in my life.
The letters move back and forth through time, from rural Carlow to London streets, and through different versions of myself. I looked at our relationship across different moments, at what it means to be a father and a queer child, the joy and friction in that, and started doing little everyday rituals. I made tea the way my father liked it: very strong, almost treacle. I listened and danced to music that reminded me of times together. I wore his shirts and cravats, sometimes his shoes – the ones with steel caps on the heels – because then I could hear his walk in mine.
These rituals inspired the work and became part of its language. I realised that mourning was something I wanted to explore in all its spectacular and everyday forms, but I didn’t want to make a show where people simply sit and watch a story about grief. I wanted something more shared, more physical – something people move through together. I also wanted it to be fun.
My father’s world sits alongside mine. Westerns and Neil Diamond meet Annie Lennox and camp. There’s line dancing and a lot of denim. The work moves in much the same way that memory does, and doesn’t stay in one tone for long.
The design is part of that journey too, with a brilliant creative team bringing this world together. Denim became an important material, my mourning veils in a way – layered and layered again throughout the performance. It’s a material that can feel utilitarian, masculine, queer, avant-garde or even funny. It belongs to my father’s world, but also my own.
Earlier this year, we brought Mourning is a Muscle to Carlow Arts Festival. Sharing the work in my home county was incredibly special because so much of the piece comes from that place – its landscape, memories and references. Now we’re bringing it to Project Arts Centre as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, an incredible festival that has supported the work from day one. Project has shown some of my favourite work over the years, so being able to share my own in that space feels like a dream.
Alongside the performances, we’re sharing some exhibition elements in the foyer at Project across the run. I wanted people to have space to encounter the work in their own time and at their own pace. They can come to the performance, or they can pop into the foyer to read, listen, have a cup of tea and contribute to the exhibition. You can even learn to line dance in our denim booth!
I think about the younger version of me who first found queer life in Dublin – the person who was going out, dancing, figuring things out and finding community. I couldn’t have imagined then that years later I’d be bringing a piece of work about my father, grief, queerness and home to Project Arts Centre. There’s something a bit wild and lovely about that.
Show booking info and dates: www.fringefest.com/festival/whats-on/mourning-is-a-muscle
Cast & Crew:
Creator/Performer: Barry Fitzgerald
Set & Costume Designer: Rūta Irbīte
Sound Designer: Tadhg Kinsella
Lighting Designer: John Gunning
Movement: Barry Fitzgerald & Daniel Hay-Gordon
Dramaturg: Ben Buratta
Costume Maker: Harry Whitham
Graphic Design: Brenda O’Lochlainn
Stage Manager: Em Kelleher
Production Manager: Iris Liange
Producer: Anderson de Souza
Photo credits: Amanda Braide
