Perspectives on Water and Death (WT)

Ireland, its collective imagination and its theatre are permeated with images of death, sorrow,
and water. The latter is no surprise, considering it is surrounded by the sea, cut through by rivers, and
plagued by the rain. The former two aren’t surprising either, then, when we learn from Gaston
Bachelard, in his book Water and Dreams: An Essay On The Imagination Of Matter, that water is the
elemental realm of Death and Suffering, that such images and all they hold belong to the imagination
of Water. And yet, the moribund, the departure from life, once seen as a natural occurrence taking
place inside our homes, today has become a taboo, death and aging are shunned away, hidden,
unspoken, best forgotten.

Death is so often seen as an act of violence, something that strikes, a ripping. But could it not be
something else? A transformation? An embrace? An emergency exit? A belonging? How do we
understand death? What relationship do we draw with it?

A transcultural Adaptation of Riders to the Sea originally written by J.M.Synge, text by Clodagh Healy, developed by Papadaya.

Summer 2025 Dublin