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Off Plan is a series of three double-bill showing
s of works in progress, as part of ThisIsPopBaby’s Where We Live. We speak to three artists who will be presenting their work, each attempting to wrestle with, and understand a world in flux. “It’s a response to being bombarded by images, videos and articles about the world ending, and where I fit into that,” says Fionnuala Gygax, whose work, Remember This Night, directed by Dan Colley, seeks to drill down into ideas around what we would take from the world, what we would leave behind, and what we would change about it, were it to end tomorrow or next week. In a time characterised by instability and upheaval, strategies for understanding, adapting and coping come to the fore. When big questions concerning our continued existence loom large, they can feel impenetrable and isolating in their scale, and debilitating in spite of their urgency. Gygax is up-front about her own despondency: “It’s a very strange feeling that I am living in a generation where the world might actually come to an end. Emotionally, it’s too much to deal with. I have this semi-detached feeling about it all, and I wanted to make something about that sensation.” Influenced by work seen during a recent trip to Berlin, from companies like Forced Entertainment, Gob Squad and She She Pop, Gygax is dispensing with extravagance in theme, narrative and production, favouring instead a simple system and a belief in her concept, to focus on the task at hand and her search for answers. Remember This Night will see Gygax and a guest performer ask each other questions, “from the mundane to the epic,” in a semiimprovised way, inviting the on-the-spot and unfiltered insight that something unstructured like this can offer. A third partner will also be at play: the audience. Its involvement will be crucial to the success of Gygax’s idea. “I really want the audience to feel that its presence is important. Without putting it on the spot, I want there to be a kind of internal performance going on, where people ask these same questions of themselves.” A problem shared is alleged to be a problem halved. The degradation and demise of the world is everyone’s problem, and there is enough to go around. Gygax is keen to explore the role of theatre – what it could do, and what it should do – in supporting us in our response. Put plainly, she says: “My hope is to create a kind of community. We’re all in this together.” Wherever the earth is in its lifecycle, our sense of our own ephemerality has never been felt more acutely. Remember The Night offers a chance for audience and performer alike to come together, arrive at answers to questions big and small; contributing to, and leaving with a shared time capsule of the experience to be held on to and treasured, come what may. If Remember The Night grapples with the finite materiality of our existence, then Deities appeals to our spirituality and offers a bridge between the two. “It’s about how humans and gods interlink, the pathway between human and god, and how to see the human in the god,” according to Felispeaks, one-third of spoken-word troupe, WeAreGriot, which also includes Dagogo Hart and Samuel Yakura. The work will see each of the three reference gods from their specific ethnic groups in Nigeria, riffing on established mythologies and “screwing things up as Nigerians and as Irish people, reshaping what the history says and reimagining it on stage.” It’s a fluid, ’pick and choose’ approach to religion that seems especially at home in the Ireland of today, a point not lost on Felispeaks, who hopes audiences will “find their own dots to join.” Presenting the gods as siblings, and following a more typical story arc, told through Top: Fionnnuala Gygax Middle: Samuel Yakura, Felispeaks and Dagogo Hart of WeAreGriot, photo: Bobby Zithelo Bottom: Tara Brandel and Nicholas Nwosu, photo: Arielle Estrada Sol 28