While the chicken roasts in the oven and I await visitors and participants - I’m wondering about what makes a Home for me. 

There is freshly baked soda brown bread sitting on the table beside me which instantly throws up memories of my home in Dublin and my granny-mae’s in Kildare, a smell that pervades the room and the mind, somewhere safe and wholesome and healthy.

Wholesome and healthy - in recent months taking the time to create a sense of home and calm has become incredibly important to me. My sense of home and time for me are things that I have very little time for with work and when they are absent I feel a very palpable separation from who I am and where I should be.

Today, at this moment, I realise that I am facilitating a Home for myself, in performance, for an audience of me. I want to share this experience with the outer world, as I know it is one, that we each facilitate for ourselves on a daily basis. The routine, the act of cooking, cleaning and being in a space, creates the assurance of a home. The regularity of something, such as baking bread and sharing it, is what validates the sense of Home day by day.

 The chicken needs basting and there is a Pavlova for dessert and if you like, come along and join my conversation, its happening right now, with or without you, there is a Home being created in the middle of this festival with all of you in mind. 

I’ve been thinking about all the wonderful spaces I’ve seen so far as part of the festival, and what strikes me now, is that every one was open, different but true:

WHELP - by Come as Soon as You Hear, took over a house that I know intimately, but in through the performance I was able to experience it in an entirely new way. 

INNER SKIN - a house with echoes and imagery that brought me on a journey I can’t quite explain. It was subtle in a way that it is hard to describe - subtle in exactly the way defining what HOME is something that is known but hard to describe. Each image, each space, they presented was in some way familiar to me. 

Put Tha Pink Up - was a world that was so bizarre and yet inviting. The performance was entirely surreal and yet and I partook in the events as if it was completely natural. Perhaps more of the House Party vibe, where you make yourself at home in somewhere unknown. You go in with an apprehension about being in someone’s Home and you leave feeling part of it. 

Maybe there is something in making work from a place that you feel most calm and most at HOME…not sure what yet. Gonna go baste the chicken and think some more!

HOME Festival opened yesterday in Cork’s fair city and I was lucky enough to set it off with a piece in my own home called ‘A Welcome Home’. 

Opening up my house for anyone to drop in and have a chat about what HOME means to them…

I had the lovely Joanne Quinn helping me facilitate yesterday and it was a truly amazing experience. What was surprising to me overall was that while we all have a very strong idea and connection to the idea of Home - it completely differs from person to person. It differs in ways that I didn’t expect as well.

Home is a place that won’t let you leave.

Home is where you lay your head.

Home is what forms you.

Home is always on my mind.

Home is under construction.

Home is happiness.

Home is where the art is. 

Today is Saturday and the second instalment of ‘A Welcome Home’ is under way today from 1pm - 4pm at my house at 4 Sidney Place, Wellington Road.

Today I’m gonna make us a dinner of Roast Chicken, because food and going home for a big dinner is something that I associate with my Home in Dublin when I got to visit my parents. I invite anyone visiting Cork for Home  or anyone craving a good feed to come along at 1pm. The conversation will continue…

Come along and dispel the myths of voice work! 

1-4pm at Voiceworks Studio on North Mall, Cork. 

There’s only so much that you have
And you’ve got to keep it safe
You’ve been spreading it round the place
Now it’s gotta come back this way

And you’re giving it all away
You’re giving it all away

And you’re lying through your teeth
You said you found a song to sing
And you’re riding on a wave
whatever helps you get along

And you’re giving it all away
You’re giving it all away
You’re keeping nothing for yourself
You’re just giving it all away

There’s so much that you know
There’s so much that you don’t
Can you not accept its all the same?
Just accept it’s all the same

And you’re giving it all away
You’re giving it all away
You’re keeping nothing for yourself
You’re just giving it all away

I can’t quite believe his accent…. although it is as I imagined it would be uttered. 

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flag-staff -
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes away from death -
Beneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs.

-Philip Larkin

Since the majority of me 
Rejects the majority of you, 
Debating ends forwith, and we 
Divide. And sure of what to do 

We disinfect new blocks of days 
For our majorities to rent 
With unshared friends and unwalked ways, 
But silence too is eloquent: 

A silence of minorities 
That, unopposed at last, return 
Each night with cancelled promises 
They want renewed. They never learn.

Philip Larkin

I have been known to rant about Irish accents and their versatility. I am also a fan of rather heavy electronic music, which I’m sure if you don’t know me well, would jar with the idea of me as a voice coach and speaking to releasing and relaxing.

That aside - I am a fan of the spoken word and I do work as a manager with Eat My Noise who remixed this track and I think its a veritably awesome remix of a Rap in one of my all time favourite accents. 

So give it a listen. Listen Loud and you might surprise yourself by liking it…

If the dull substance of my flesh were thought, 
Injurious distance should not stop my way; 
For then despite of space I would be brought, 
From limits far remote where thou dost stay. 
No matter then although my foot did stand 
Upon the farthest earth removed from thee; 
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land 
As soon as think the place where he would be. 
But ah! thought kills me that I am not thought, 
To leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone,
But that so much of earth and water wrought 
I must attend time’s leisure with my moan, 

Receiving nought by elements so slow 
But heavy tears, badges of either’s woe.