Rádán

Description

In the late 1930s, schoolchildren from across the Irish Free State were enlisted to collect the folklore of their local area. One contributor to this Schools’ Collection was Anna Ní Ghallchobhair of Commeen Co. Donegal, who related a story from her father: a person who ate berries after Halloween, it was said, would invite a Fairy curse, called rádán, whereupon ‘his body would shrink, his cheeks would become wrinkled, and before a year he would have the appearance of an old man’. There’s a good deal of sense in forgoing berries that might be starting to rot. In a time when viruses and bacteria were not yet understood, vectors of disease were mysterious and preventative warnings had to be amplified, not by the media or the government, but by storytelling and the supernatural. This piece is a musical imagining of such a folk warning in the present pandemic, where the lungs of the infected, the bellows of accordion, gradually become inflamed and congested by an insidious, invisible force. It could be the coronavirus or the King of the Fairies.