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place These feature the lyrics to their opening s
ong, Joyous Rage. The words, written in sharpie, read like one-word protest slogans; Liberate, Power, Empower, Metamorph, Reclaim. As the cast merges to form a single file in the centre of the linoleum floor, marked with duct-tape, a voice chants from a stereo set, “aggravate pollinate, liberate.” It is a cabaret of decolonisation, flamboyant musically, and teeming with impassioned anger in the message. “Walk with the power of Ancestral legacy,” the cast sing. “Not a minority, nothing minor about me.” An open call had been put out back in late March, with the Hot Brown Honey group declaring that they were on the search for Irish and Irish-based female identifying artists who were black, indigenous or persons with colour. Hive City Legacy, they explained, would interrogate political and social structures by staging “a conversation around gender, race and identity, decolonisation [and] body image.” “It just seemed like an exciting project,” says Venus Patel, a trans artist, content creator and filmmaker. “I mean, like the number of women of colour in Dublin is just so tiny. It was great that there was something that could bring us together, where we could share our different experiences.” Patel moved to Dublin from Los Angeles in 2018 as an international student. During the early months of the pandemic, she took to TikTok, amassing a following of 150,000 users. More recently, in March, Patel made her Jess Kav theatrical debut in Privilege: The Musical, written and directed by Louise White. Subsequently, she produced the short film Egg Performance for Fanvid, an underground DIY film club. On this particular Thursday, for Hive City Legacy, Patel takes the lead in one darkly comedic sketch, titled ‘How Irish Are You?’ The skit lampoons racial and ethnic stereotypes and the question of national identity by way of a Family Feud-style quiz show in which two teams, “Light-Skinned” and “The Blacks” compete for citizenship. Their task is simple. They are to answer Alessandra Azevedo a series of questions, such as “where are you really from,” and “how do you greet your black friends?” Patel says the idea came about from discussions around micro-aggressions which they all encountered regularly. “What does a black Irish person look like?” Patel asks in-character, the correct answer to this being, “actually, I don’t see colour.” As the cast play out the scene, they are constantly throwing in improvised pieces of dialogue. In one moment of unsettling inspiration, Jess Kav suggests that the host offer all participants a voucher for the sports shop Decathlon, “so nobody will leave without a home.” In another instance, as both teams break Busty Beatz, Lisa Fa’alafi, Yami “ROWDY” Lofvenberg Deborah Dickenson out into song, Patel ad-libs a compliment, remarking how wonderfully “tribal” all the women are. 17