WHAT is the sound of 50 women keening? Well if you come to the Wonders of the Wake show at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast this weekend you'll find out.
For the first time in a century, Féile Womens' Community Choir, from west Belfast, along with Co Donegal folk trio The Henry Girls and traditional singer Niamh Parsons, will be recreating this unique feminine chorus in three shows that celebrate the lost arts of the Irish Wake.
The keen, caoine in Irish, is a sound that, once heard, is never forgotten.
"When you hear the sound of over 50 women keening and howling it's incredible, stunning. The hairs really do stand out on the back of your neck. Celebrating the ancient rite of the Irish wake has also been a great artistic opportunity to bring something unique to the audience," says Féile choir leader Clare Galway, who has composed original keening music for the show.
Keening is said to be the oldest music of humanity, the oldest sound of womankind and was practised by the Aztecs, the ancient Greeks and the Irish for thousands of years. Sometimes hundreds of women would keen together around a corpse both in the wake house and at the graveyard in a traditional mourning ritual.
A true keen is a strange kind of music. It is more of a raw emotion that springs out from the soul as an expression of grief for the lost loved one. It has hypnotic, ethereal power that sounds almost like its own primitive language.
Up until the 1950s keeners were still common in Donegal and Mayo but then the tradition was lost. And the sound of the keen disappeared for generations.
My great-grandmother on Achill Island in Mayo was a traditional keener but I never thought I would ever be able to hear such keening again in my lifetime. But thanks to Féile Women's Community Choir we are all going to be able to hear that sound.
The wake remains a true defining icon of Irish culture, a ritual that truly teaches us all to live, love and die. We forget how unique the rite of the Irish wake is, in contrast to the Anglo-Saxon way of death where the dead simply disappear from sight and hardly anyone in England ever goes to funerals, or ever in their lifetime sees dead body.
After I wrote my book My Father's Wake: How the Irish Teach us to Live, Love and Die about the rite of the Irish wake, I wanted to do a show that did not just talk about the lost arts of the wake but also celebrated them.
So last year I started working with the fabulous Henry Girls and Niamh Parsons to really recreate on stage the best wake you'll ever get to this side of heaven.
We called our show Wonders of the Wake because the best wakes, although they can have their sorrows, are also full of fun and mischief. And so there is a lot of laughter in the show too, with a few comic stories and wake tales.
So working with Joleen and Lorna from The Henry Girls, together we composed original songs and laments. I also wrote some original bardic poetry, echoing the poetry of Homer, the ancient Greeks and Irish bards, that is recited and performed from memory as it would be at a traditional wake.
Recreating the sound of the keen was always something we wanted to do but always seemed impossible until this amazing opportunity arose to work with Féile Women's Community Choir on the Lyric production.
At last we had the numbers of voices, a full chorus, to try and recall what the keen would sound like if you were surrounded by 50 grieving women in an Irish rural graveyard sometime in the 19th century.
After months of rehearsal the choir have truly recreated a sound that has not been heard in Ireland for 100 years. Not just a song or an ordinary lament but a true keen that fills up the whole universe.
:: Wonders of the Wake, the Lyric Theatre, March 14, 8pm, and 15, 3pm and 8pm (tickets at lyrictheatre.co.uk/event/wonders-of-the-wake/); The Dock in Carrick on Shannon, March 20, 8pm (thedock.ie/events/the-wonders-of-the-wake).
