Director's Notes - Celtic Revels

In this Revels, we take you to Queenstown, County Cork, where in 1905 alone, over 50 thousand Irish embarked on a voyages to new lives in America.  The land they were leaving behind had been visited by darkness many times over hundreds of years yet their music, stories and customs while shaped by adversity and sorrow display an irrepressible strain of hope. 

All the many emigrants who left the British Isles in this era, faced a similar fundamental choice: what does one take and what does one leave behind?  Ultimately, one takes what will be most useful, be it warm clothing,  kitchen utensils, a necessary trade - or even an old fiddle or a tall story.

 Their songs and dances, the artifacts of Celtic culture were packed up and brought along, because when all is said and done, it is a sense of where we come from, and a sense of who we are as a community that allows us to face the uncertainties of the future with courage and hope.

There is a traditional Irish saying, often expressed in times of adversity: “We never died a winter yet”. This simple but basic expression of faith in survival, the surety that the cold and dark will pass and that hope will shine anew is a message we need to hear in these troubled times of ours.

Welcome Yule!