Distillation review – a paean to peat that’s a feast for the senses
Luke Casserly's performance 'Distillation' at Cork Midsummer Festival is a sensory exploration of Ireland's bogs, blending touch, sound, and smell to examine the cultural and ecological transition away from peat harvesting.
At Cork Midsummer Festival, writer and performer Luke Casserly presents 'Distillation', a participatory performance that centres on a circular table covered in dried peat. Casserly hands a piece of peat to each audience member, turning initial solemnity into laughter.
The soundscape of birdsong and wind evokes the ancient bog landscape of the Irish midlands, where Casserly grew up. The performance is part essay, part dialogue, involving touch, sound, taste – and especially smells of soil, moss and peat smoke, later presented as a perfume created by olfactory artist Joan Woods.
With images of bogs projected onto Casserly's white tunic but making little impact in the bright evening light, the work has a homemade, work-in-progress feel. A co-production between the Abbey Theatre and Solas Nua in Washington DC, it has toured widely in the US and Canada since its first outing in 2023, reflecting current artistic focus on Ireland's 10,000-year-old bogs.
Returning to live in County Longford during the Covid-19 pandemic, Casserly walked the bogs and saw them in a new light. No longer industrially harvested for turf and to fuel electric power stations, the Irish bogs are being restored as protected, bio-diverse habitats capturing carbon – and in some cases, replaced by wind farms.
In a re-imagined conversation with his father, who was employed in peat harvesting, Casserly asks what is lost culturally and emotionally in this huge transition. Its immediate impact, he suggests, is a kind of grief. Over 50 minutes, this inventive, deceptively simple performance balances ecological meditation with an inquiry into cultural memory.
