On a weeknight in the West End, there’s a Death Notice Disco held after hours in Plámás.
Coffee is served to a small audience filtering in from a rainy evening. As the lights are dimmed and the light dies outside, a man starts speaking from behind the espresso machine.
This moment, he says, is magical. Because, for the time between the last of the rustling and him coming before the audience, there is endless possibility.
So begins Andrew Galvin’s one man act, on which we accompany him into the underworld and out again; carrying our own grief – and maybe a little hope, too.
The Death Notice Disco – in development for about two years – is based on an experience he had here in Galway.
Having ingested a mind-altering substance, Galvin “was cracked wide open,” on the rocks of Salthill and faced with a reckoning: courtesy of a talking heron, David Bowie, and his own death notice played to synth.
Galvin later discovered that in Celtic myth, the heron is a threshold guardian, a guide to the underworld. “Of course,” he recalls thinking. “That’s why I saw the heron.” Among other things.
But though he took a bit of “poetic licence,” the main beats of the show are as he experienced them, if compressed for the sake of narrative (and a well rounded 60 minute performance ).
Born and bred in Donegal, Galvin is the youngest of his family. Getting into the arts scene as a teenager – thanks in part to an “adult” artistic education provided by his much older siblings – he pursued music and theatre.
Nearly a decade ago, however, he got “annoyed with art,” and walked away to pursue a BA in Sociology and Politics from ATU Sligo. He later earned an MA in the same subject from University of Galway and is currently working toward a PhD on creative practice as research.
Galvin tells me he did a "terrible leaving cert," struggling academically in his youth. “It was always kind of a dragon in the back of my mind that I wanted to face, a kind of shadow to look at.
“I like turning my back on what has worked for me in the past. And facing into what has scared me.”
Grief is another dragon he did not want to face.
Before Galvin was born, his mother was receiving cancer treatment that should have made her infertile. “In a sort of poetic way, I’m kind of fused with my mother’s cancer story as this unexpected thing within it.
“From birth basically, my mother’s in and out of the hospital. And so that’s my childhood, this wondering, is this the last time in hospital? Is this the one that gets her?”
In the beginning of the show, he describes this evocatively as his “sword of Damocles,” from the ancient Greek story of a king who ruled as a sword, hung by a horsehair, dangled above his head.
The sword fell when he was 23. Galvin didn’t look at the grief. “I kind of felt like I'd done the work ahead of time or something. I've been saying goodbye for 22 years. How could I have grief after that?
“I never looked at it even in my art and I thought, I’m so sick of it. It’s been my life for 23 years. I’d like to live a different life.”
But that trip in Salthill was a tipping point. “It was kind of like getting my marching orders. It was like okay, if you want to move forward, have any kind of life, you got to go back. What I didn’t want to do - never wanted to do.”
Despite a feeling a kind of embarrassment about being the “dead mother guy,” Galvin says that experience showed him “in no uncertain terms, not only do you have to face it, but you’re gonna have to make art and show it to people, because that’s what you do, and that’s who you are.”
There’s a line in the performance that captures that feeling of finiteness, the necessity of facing those dragons:
“No platitudes pass between us, myself and my mother. Clear-eyed acknowledgement of mortality. And that’s such a gift. For as long as you’re avoiding facing death, you’re not living.”
But while the Death Notice Disco is about his personal experience with loss and grief, Galvin draws it out to encompass something wider.
“I have this idea that unprocessed grief is kind of what’s playing out in the world right now, generally speaking. War is unprocessed grief. Racism is unprocessed grief. Sexism is ridiculous.”
Perhaps if we could face that grief inside ourselves, Galvin muses, we’d act out less in destructive ways.
Together with the audience, he chants cathartically: “The death has taken place of: the rule of international law… our capacity to remain meaningfully informed… the post-war dream… consensus reality… ‘I wonder what I would have done in 1930s Germany’...”
“I’ve always had quite a political viewpoint on things,” Galvin tells me. “I felt like such a fraud not acknowledging global issues in work.” It doesn’t belong in everything, he acknowledges, but if you are dealing with death and grief, the work should not exist in a vacuum.
While he wanted to acknowledge that global experience (such as the “horrific genocide ongoing at the minute” ), he feels a “duty of care to grant people a thread of hope out of it.”
Galvin strives to “make sure I have grounding and context for what I’m talking about that goes out beyond my own personal story. That’s when it really can do something in the world.
“And that’s the beauty of going backwards into myth and old stories as well, a grounding in the past and grounded in the present.”
Part of the Disco is about his exploration of grief rituals, like Irish keening and the tradition of the grief eater.
It’s not just ancient death practices that he’s interested in. The show, he laughs, is especially for the “Rip.ie freaks.” And while the performance is bone-heavy at times, Galvin’s natural good humor breaks the weight just when we need it.
He is aiming toward a premier and tour next year, currently working on the “horrible little funding application” phase of the process.
Galvin hopes his intimate understanding of grief, with his creative work, can help people make their own journeys to the underworld. Creating the Disco led to the realization of this “dialectic gift side of the curse” – to guide others to and through those places.
Walking out of Plámás into a soaking mist, daring to glance into the shadows I usually avoid, I think he just might have that gift.
Visit www.andrewgalvin.ie for news about the Death Notice Disco.
