“Spirits and Souls” Halloween Entertainment

Music and performance by June McGrane and Macdara Smith, with Still Underpressure

Wear your most horrific costume, embrace your dark side and immerse yourself in the spirit of the evening.

This unique ensemble has prepared a humorous extravaganza to culminate our Samhain celebrations in terrifying style! A kaleidoscope of music, pranks, stories, satire, images, festive horror and rituals to celebrate Samhain.

SAMHAIN Spirits and Souls celebrates the ancestral Irish tradition of the autumn equinox. Belonging neither to the year which ends nor to the one which begins, Oíche Shamhna is the night when the boundary between this world and the Otherworld fades. Portals open, allowing souls of the dead and beings from both divides to wander. As the veil between the living and the dead comes down, so too the curtain between this 13th century Irish Pagan festival and ‘Hollywood Hallowe’en’ rises allowing these contrasting realms to beguile, taunt and dance together in delightful and wicked ways. Masked, unmasked, transformed and disguised; seeping out from behind culinary recipes for Samhain and the home-made versus factory-made debate, come tales of persecution. We listen to women’s voices from the other side and in the shadows of their words we hear the whispers of the living and the dead, of angels, witches, mothers, daughters, judges, saints, persecutors, providers, punishers, priests, witnesses, murderers, moralists, lovers, sinners, non-believers, condemners and executioners throughout the ages.