Stones: whispers from the workhouse

Stones: whispers from the workhouse is a site-responsive dance for the camera. It is an evocative and impressionistic rendering of sensations and images informed by harrowing stories of workhouses, laundries, and industrial schools in Ireland and the US. Here, dancers inhabit the space listening for the whispers of the past and feeling their way through imagined memory.

Choreography/Direction/Camera: - Catherine Gallant

Music Composed and Performed by: Dana Lyn and Kyle Sanna

Editing/Design: Erica Lessner

Costumes: Ivana Drazic

Dance artists/performers: Kelli Chapman, Abra Cohen, Halley Gerstel, Megan Minturn, Cecly Placenti

The project began as a continuation of our live performance work, Escape from the House of Mercy, and was shot on location in Portumna, Ireland in 2022. The design, edit, and commissioned score were completed in 2024, and the dance film premiered in 2025. Since then, the work has received recognition from numerous festivals, including the Mobile Dance Film Festival (NYC), East Coast Dance Arts (Wicklow, Ireland), New York International Women Festival, Edinburgh Film Awards, San Francisco Arthouse Festival, Florida Shorts, and the Palermo International Film Festival. Composer-musicians Kyle Sanna and Dana Lyn created the evocative soundtrack, and the film was edited by dancer, educator, and videographer Erica Lessner.

Dancers trace the austere outlines of the spare stone-filled interior yard and adjoining fields, which become the backdrop for embodied narratives of loss, longing, and hope. Hands and voices whisper of the lives that were forever changed there. Flesh and tears haunt the stones with dreams and shattered hopes of climbing to freedom from grueling labor. The ghost-filled air surrounds the dancers as they wrap themselves in transparent net fabric, both isolating and protective, from the forces at work against them in these ruins from the past.

In the famine-era workhouse, families were separated upon arrival, and all were put to work regardless of age or health. The unbearably difficult labor in the workhouse could be momentarily forgotten by eating sand and stones, becoming sick, and finding a moment of rest in the infirmary, which was often an equally dangerous and deadly space. A few young orphaned women could escape the workhouse by being shipped to Australia to become brides and servants. While most perished in the workhouse due to malnutrition and disease, one mile away, the inhabitants of the castle dined on a full array of foods. This site in Ireland expresses the turmoil, suffering, and devastation of the Irish famine and the subsequent cycles of poverty, discrimination, and injustice, especially towards women in contemporary Irish history, including the Magdalene Laundries, run by the church until the early 1990s.

Our project is an outgrowth of our investigation into an infamous workhouse for women and girls in NYC from 1877-1927 called the House of Mercy. This project has had various iterations, from live performances to dances for the camera. This embodied history project survived the COVID pandemic and continues to grow. This woman-identified perspective includes a focus on reproductive rights, which are currently under siege in our own country. At the same time, the once ultra-restrictive laws in Ireland have become more open. When we brought our work to the Irish Workhouse Centre Museum in Portumna, Ireland, we focused our video project on the women's stories from the famine era to connect to the ongoing need to support women's rights worldwide. Also, by focusing on the stories from the past's wealth divides, we can begin an urgent conversation addressing the current staggering space between comfort and struggle in everyday life.

Our research and background resources have included Justice for Magdalenes Oral History Project, Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice by McGettrick, O’Donnell, O’Rourke, Smith, and Steed. (A)Dressing Our Hidden Truths by glass artist Alison Lowry from an Exhibition at the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin, 2019, Lost Inwood by Cole Thompson, Damnation Island by Stacy Horn, and Ten Days in a Madhouse by Nellie Bly.