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shades of drama and colour, Deities will emphasis
e the primacy of family – chosen, biological, or however you have yours – as something common to both the worldly and the transcendental, which offers reprieve, and which unites us all. Deploying universal themes of family and spirituality makes this a timely acknowledgement of our fundamental human sameness. Deities is also inherently a piece about place, by virtue of stories from Nigeria being told on a stage in Ireland. “We arrived from Nigeria at different ages, and we’re at different stages in our relationship with Ireland. We’re undeniably a strong three-man squad of bold Afro-Irishness. We’re Irish kids, we’re Dublin kids, talking about Nigerian gods in our wonky accents. It’s a merger of one home with another.” As people enter Ireland, and as people leave, it’s a welcome reminder that migration is not zero-sum; we can belong to here and there at once. Place, specifically Nigeria, will feature also in Tilt, a dance piece from Tara Brandel and Nicholas Nwosu, who previously worked together in Circus, which debuted in last year’s Fringe. Although Nwosu only appeared in the video projections of that production, for Tilt he joins Brandel live on stage, where the pair will attempt to get to grips with current worldwide political and environmental changes. “This will be the first time we have gotten into a studio together for almost two years,” Branden says. “We’ll have around five days of research and then we’ll perform whatever happens at the end of those five days. There’s a lot of risk-taking in that but it will be exciting for us and the audience. I’m trusting our chemistry as dancers.” This promises to be full of the fascinating rawness that only a work in progress can provide. In a not dissimilar way to Fionnuala Gygax’s Remember This Night, Tilt will lean into the notion of being off-kilter in our current state in the world. Working towards a much bigger show, Brandel and Nwosu are using this early research phase to work with a sense of being “off-centre”, exploring what it’s like to physically work with imbalance, and introducing their intimate experiences of being off-centre. A mood of disequilibrium should find expression in the pair’s contrasting styles: she is a contemporary dancer, and his background is as a street-dancer, with a focus on twerking. “There’s something really fascinating in seeing the juxtaposition of the two,” says Brandel, “I’m very fluid in some ways, I’m supple and I can kick my legs high. Nicholas is much more controlled. It’s all twerking so he’s doing this really intricate, isolated movement in his pelvis.” While massive global change may sometimes seem ‘over there’, or distant in relation to our own location, Tilt may serve as an important reminder that the effect of such changes extend far, and do trickle down to the level of our own communities. Both Brandel and Nwosu will reference their experiences of change from their respective home places to make this point. “I’ll be bringing my own stories from West Cork about the environmental changes [I’ve witnessed] there, and Nicholas will be bringing his experiences of what it’s like to be Nigerian in Dublin. We’re all feeling the reverberations of these enormous global changes and seeing how the particular flavour of those differ from place to place,” Branden says. “The finished performance will be weaving together everyone’s individual stories about change, and hopefully we can create something that resonates with audiences, including their own personal experiences of change.” Trite as it is to say, change is a constant, and any direction on how best to negotiate it, or feel less alone in it, is welcome. Where We Live 2020 takes place from Wednesday March 11 to Saturday March 21 at Project Arts Centre. For more information, visit: thisispopbaby.com ThisIsPopBaby will also present a career retrospective as part of Offset Festival which takes place in the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre from Friday April 3 to Sunday April 5 iloveoffset.com Peter Maybury is a graphic designer, a musician and an artist. For his part in Where We Live, he’ll be presenting Landfall, an immersive installation comprising an accumulation of a number of smaller films he has shot over several years, accompanied by a sound installation. Describing the concept, he says: “It’s about this idea of what comes to this little island of Ireland and what shapes it: the outside influence, and the other way around. It’s about resources, and public and private space, and how we negotiate those.” Constructing the films around the sound, Maybury says, leads them to being very sonically led. “The sound is used to charge the psychological space of the imagery.” Not to be missed is a once-off drum performance, which will see Maybury live processing mostly electronic drums, themselves played live, offering an on-the-spot soundtrack. “It should be fairly visceral and loud.” 30 photo: Therese Rafter