Tara Brandel’s show CIRCUS in collaboration with Nigerian street dancer Nicholas Nwosu at Smock Alley Theatre aimed to probe its audience into asking questions of contemporary Irish identity. Accordingly, the show’s blurb contained little but the instruction “Interrogate what makes an acceptable performer in contemporary Ireland.”
Guests arrived at Smock Alley Theatre to find their seats papered with a handout on Ireland’s ‘controversial’ direct provision system, and a brief outline of the relationship between the two dancers. Nwosu, while living as an Asylum Seeker in direct provision, had on the basis of a recommendation of a mutual friend sent a Facebook message to Brandel asking if he could “maybe” one day dance with her. Brandel at the time had been studying in LA, and Nwosu, living in Direct Provision, lacked the necessary resources he needed to dance (direct provision hostels only contain shared space). Instead, they began a five-month long Skype correspondence. CIRCUS was realised during a week-long residency they spent together at Dance Ireland this July.
On stage Tara Brandel moved through a cycle of character – each ambiguous, but physically familiar. She opened as a yoga-mom type/ virginal Madonna in white linen, who undressed to a costume of black underwear. This character then put on patent stilettos and worked her body through a routine of struts in time to Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’. Brandel’s body already seemed controlled and mechanical, when with an unexpected and level-headed air of normality, the performer smeared herself with a concealed handful of red glistening blood. She continued the application in time to the pop-melody’s discipling rhythm. Her daub here and daub there motion was reminiscent of the regal tolerance with which women modify themselves before a bathroom mirror. Simultaneous to her ‘make-over’, Brandel intently stared at a corner of the room, in what occurred to me as the staging of John Berger’s line on the effect of the male gaze: “A woman must continually watch herself.” The scene was punctuated by staccato waves of the audience’s discomfort (when Lauper’s chorus of the soaring lyric came ‘Girls just want to have fu-un’ and Brandel responded with a maniacal cackle). Girly fun didn’t seem harmless anymore.
Brandel’s next character performed in elastic denim jeggings and crop-top upon a pink aerial pole, but youthful energy wasn’t just at the level of clothing: when air-borne upon the pole, the dancer’s body became svelte, and almost capable of flight – performing a bodily metamorphosis to youth like Daphne and Apollo might accomplish, or Peter Pan on his way to Never Never Land. Through this, she challenged the dominant narrative that a dancer’s career must end must be dictated by the passing of time.
Brandel next emerged in a boxy, bulk-shouldered houndstooth suit and tie. With sway and glam-rock rollick, and performing to a repeated refrain of ‘I’m a Man’ she exuded confidence and security – while upending the idea of gender-determined identities. Soon, Brandel’s moves loosened out to the point of frenzy, beginning a devolution into a figure of crisis. The tie, once a badge, became symbolically closer to a noose, and the bulk of the suit, now hung unseemly, like an embarrassing relic of unmet ambition. In an Irish and global context of rising inequality, where precarity becomes ever more common, this character’s plight didn’t evoke pity. It fit all too well that on my way home I walked past two soup kitchens, feeding some of the 10,000 Dubliners without homes.
Brandel’s performances were intercut with projected video-pieces of Nwosu dancing to voice-overs through which he described his experience of the punitive and frustrating Irish Asylum Seeker system. While he gave anecdotes pertaining to racism on the street, or hostility experienced from The Irish State, his dancing body was dissonant: he moved with a playful, strong, vibrant force of life. He burst with beauty and hunger. In like theme, Nwosu’s absence from the stage; only semi-presence on a screen, doubled this effect of social exclusion.
At one stage, Nwosu’s routine had something of the mania of teenage angst – he cha-chaed, jived, shimmied – aching for freedom. Just like the age-old story of imprisonment at home, Nwosu’s surroundings were a grey staid, institutional room, the only ornament a wilted-floral curtain to the side. But of course Nwosu’s frustration isn’t teenage angst, it’s the desire to participate in Irish society as a citizen. His oppression isn’t parental propriety, it’s Irish legislation – Amnesty International has recommended that the Irish government ends Direct Provision.
The show worked in this rhythm – of each dancer taking it in turns to embody a character rarely seen on stage or screen. The final scene featured both dancers come together – onscreen. They entered from the left, moving, composed, self-reliant yet connected. They were a black-man and a queer Irish fifty-year-old woman illuminated in sunlight and looking straight ahead – a resounding proclammation of contemporary Irish identity.
The only pity was that some of the voice-overs in which Nwosu spoke were difficult to make-out. Had they been of better recording, the piece might have been profoundly moving, not just probing and optimistic.
