In this solo performance walk, I dressed as the Celtic God of Death, Donn, on the Celtic ritual date of Samhain (Oct 31) when the portals between the dead and the living open. I walked a reverse ziggurat—the Egyptian funeral design that shows the direction the dead should take to the underworld—in order to reverse the invitation and direct our ancestors above ground to earth. I also swung, in my left hand, a sonic boom music speaker in place of a priest’s censer. Instead of swinging holy smoke, I swung the music of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in Dm on an endless loop.

Drawing on my eclectic Irish, Mediterranean, Catholic-raised heritage, I sought to bring to a very public place, a center of higher learning, not an outward facing performance, but a very inward-facing, slow, and otherworldly event--so as to raise open the everyday public space to one of interiority, unfamiliarity, and otherworldliness.