Karan Casey: 'I have a scene where my mother comes back as a heron'
Karan Casey, musician.
There is a scene in the riveting new performance piece by Cork-based traditional musician Karan Casey in which she stands in Heathrow Airport, queuing for a flight.
“I see the mud on my boots from this morning,” she says. “From when I dropped my child off to school.”
I Walked Into My Head, which Casey performs at Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny August 5 to 8 as part of the city’s Arts Festival, is a liminal work equidistant from spoken word, theatre, and folk. Casey, a highly respected traditional player, and musical folklorist, describes it as ‘walking the corridors of her mind, looking for her voice”.
“It’s not really a biography,” she says. “I’ve been writing prose and poetry for a long time. Often trying to hammer that work into songs. I felt it wasn’t working. That I needed to try something else.”
Casey has been a leading figure within Irish folk since the mid-1990s, when she fronted Solas, the Irish American group founded by Seamus Egan. However, her life as an artist has really been one long journey of discovery. From Kilmeadan in Waterford, she studied music at UCD while singing jazz in clubs and bistros at night.
It was in Dublin, too, that she played with Frank Harte, the influential musicologist and collector of songs. Having moved to New York to study jazz, she discovered the Irish-American folk scene and joined Solas. Moving back to Ireland, in 2001 she released her acclaimed solo project The Winds Begin To Sing.
I Walked Into My Head, which is directed by Sophie Motley and produced in association with Cork’s Everyman Theatre, is something else. Ten years in the writing, it is both personal and political. Having experienced bereavement, Casey talks about grief and healing and the death in 2010 of her mother.
“There’s lots of imagery from nature and shape-shifting,” she says. “I have a scene where my mother comes back as a heron. She comes and picks me up in Glen Park in Cork. We head off around different parts of Cork. And I have another scene where I met a hare in Dublin Airport car park. She becomes a magic woman and I have conversations with her about the environment”
I Walked Into My Head goes on to address the issue of sexual abuse within traditional music. It is a subject about which Casey has spoken in the past.
“I co-founded group called Fair Plé. It is basically a movement of people, women, and men, advocating for a safe environment for women in traditional folk music. Particularly against the many stories that came out due to the campaign. A lot of women came forward about rapes and assaults.
Formulating an artistic response to these issues was challenging she says. “As an artist, I’m trying to find a way of talking about it. One of the rooms discusses that. And then I go about how we can try to overcome this.”
While the presence of predators in other areas of the music industry is long acknowledged, folk music tends to get a free pass. “There is an almost sanctimonious atmosphere around traditional and folk music. There are many wonderful things about folk that I love. The treatment of women, from what I have learned, is just awful. I’m just appalled by the accounts that have come out. As someone who has been a campaigner for women and who has campaigned for equal pay, I was stunned.”
These issues are not specific to folk, or even to music of course. “It is true to say that women performers in every artistic work have been subjected to some form of harassment. At the moment Fair Plé is in receipt of information about various sexual predators who are still out there. The only thing protecting us at the moment is the pandemic.”
She has always thought of herself as an activist. Audiences have not necessarily been comfortable with her sharing her perspectives, however. Which is what motivated her to create a piece of work that would serve as a conduit for her campaigning, but also for her deepest hopes and fears. And for her experiences as daughter, sibling, mother and wife (she is married to folk musician Niall Vallely).
“My folk career has been very much informed by my activism. It determines a lot of the songs I sing. When I talk at gigs people say things like, ‘you should sing and not be talking’. I wanted to get into an area where I could talk a bit more. And talk, in particular, about the nuances of gender equality. I feel it’s important that women are given a safe space and that we advocate for that. I wanted to talk about that issue in depth, not just for one song.”
- I Walked Into My Head is staged at Watergate Theatre as part of Kilkenny Arts Festival, August 5-8
