GHOSTS OF IRELAND

My brother and I were not friends. We weren’t enemies, and we were friendly; We had fun at family functions, called each other once in awhile, but we didn’t confide in one another, spend one-on-one time together, or have many experiences together as adults.

My strongest family memories with my brother were from childhood – camping trips, family vacations, awkward coming of age moments… the events that occur before you have any say in your life. Now we are in our 40’s and can do whatever we want; we live a few blocks from each other in the same city and we don’t see each other often. But more than likely, at the end of a few decades, it will be just him and I. As we learned during a stretch of events, relationships end and parents fall ill and people pass away. What remains in the end is family, still there, even if untended to for some time.

We decided we needed to confront our shared history, the reality of death, and a future that ties us together.

So we built two ghost costumes and headed for Ireland to understand where we are from, and how we ended up here. Ghosts of Ireland is an exploration of family history, confrontation, death, and (like most people with Irish heritage) a dark sense of humour.