DEE Mulrooney is the first to acknowledge that it sounds “bonkers” when she claims that one day she began talking to her vulva and it talked back.
At the time she says she was on the verge of a mental breakdown as she and her family had been forced to leave Ireland because the tenancy ended on their Dublin home and they could not afford to rent anywhere else.
Having moved to Berlin where her brother lives, Mulrooney was having a hard time coping with the displacement and was also facing a hysterectomy as a result of severe endometriosis.
“I felt I was too young for a hysterectomy and one day I just started talking to my womb,” she says.
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That was when her “alter ego” made her presence felt – an 82-year-old drum banging, shamanic vulva from inner city Dublin who is called Growler.
“Basically Growler just came through – there is no other way to describe it although it sounds bonkers,” says Mulrooney. “She talked back to me so that is how the dialogue started.”
Songs also “just fell” into her consciousness. Mulrooney, an art teacher, used the songs and the dialogue with Growler to create a show.
“When I moved to Berlin, I had a sense of exile and no voice around that so Growler saved my life, or at least saved my mental health - I couldn’t believe how art works as a medicine,” says Mulrooney. “I think it is our birthright as it is so connected to human expression.”
Her arrival in the city coincided with the arrival of Syrian refugees who had fled the war.
“I ended up collecting a lot of the stories of the women who had come in on the boats – I am talking about women whose babies had fallen into the Mediterranean so it was heavy stuff but my heart was wide open,” Mulrooney says. “I felt akin to these women and that story of displacement and rootlessness and the longing to belong and have a home and what that does to our psyche.”
It is five years since Mulrooney first brought Growler to the stage and she is bringing her to Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival this year where she will “commune” with women who were burned as witches in Scotland.
Although dark in places, there are also songs and humour – Mulrooney does the whole performance dressed as a vulva as she sees Growler as a separate entity from herself.
“Growler is really working class, she has had three husbands, eight kids, had to be a sex worker in the 60s and is a bit of a misfit,” Mulrooney says. “She takes the audience on this theatrical journey down to the shadowlands to reclaim the broken and missing parts of ourselves. It goes really dark because I am talking about dead babies and what happened in Ireland with the mother and baby homes. I noticed there was one in Glasgow which was just as brutal so I will be touching on that.”
The mother and baby homes are a shameful part of Ireland’s past but Scotland’s treatment of women who were thought to have broken society’s norms was also brutal.
“Ireland had mother and baby homes but Scotland had witch trials and this was the worst place in Europe for its persecution of people suspected of withcraft,” Mulrooney points out. “Scotland killed five times the amount of women per capita than any other place.
“Growler’s reason for coming to Scotland is to honour the women, the so-called witches, and have a conversation with them - not for revenge or anything like that but to have that voice heard. There is a natural alchemy in the telling of the story and there is a healing in the story being told.”
One of the “witches” that Growler communes with is Agnes Sampson, a healer known as the Wise Wife of Keith who lived in East Lothian and was arrested on suspicion of using witchcraft to create storms that beset the voyage of King James VI on his way back from Copenhagen with his new wife, Anne of Denmark. Tortured until she “confessed” to using witchcraft, Sampson was garrotted then burned at the stake.
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Scotland’s dark past should be recognised properly, according to Mulrooney.
“It needs to be atoned and it is the same in Ireland with the mother and baby homes,” she says.
Growler / Where Ye From? is at Summerhall, Edinburgh from August 2-26.
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