
Monsters in your School
Calling x4 D15 Primary School Class Groups
Dance in Your School
14 & 21 March 2025
"Messages rippling out into Dublin 15 with the flapping of a seagull's wings; who knows what storms they will in due course cause. Quandale Dingle!"
On a Sunday morning in February, I slip into the studio at Draíocht for the first readings of the NEST scripts. A slight young woman carries a large keyboard onto the stage. She starts apologetically, as if she doesn't really know what she's doing, tentatively trying some chords. But the song quickly asserts itself: the chords swell; the voice effortlessly fills the studio. The song flows out, and on, a river of sound, carrying images and names on its current. It flows between languages, crossing cultures and genres and times. It is an Irish ballad, a pop song, an Arabic lament, an Urdu praise song.
In the old Irish tradition of the aisling, a spéirbhean laments the current state of Ireland and wishes for a return to the Ireland of the deep past. But this song - Khadija's Song - seeks to celebrate the new Ireland rather than weep for the loss of an old one. It feels like the singer, Farah Elle, is calling a country into being.
Two weeks later, in a classroom in Luttrellstown Community College, Farah Elle lays a prayer may on the floor and checks its orientation towards Mecca with the compass app on her phone. And then she sings Khadija's Song for Khadija and her classmates, and the 13-year-old glows with recognition. "You can be me and I can be you”, sings Farah, and that seems to be the motif of this project: that Khadija and her classmates and all these children can become artists, if they want to; and that the artists can “become” the children. The divides that apparently separate us - age, culture, background, you name them - are superficial; empathy and imagination can allow us cross them.
At the heart of chaos theory is the idea that the flap of a butterfly's wings in the Amazon can cause a Tornado in Texas. The NEST plays were written for 23 children and young adults, aged from two months to 22 years. These watched the shows with their families and classmates and the wider community, so the shows reached a total audience of some 2,400. Every one of those audience members experienced a piece of theatre of almost unique, unrepeatable intimacy. Who knows what butterfly effects those performances may have as they ripple through time and space, travelling with these young people as they journey through their lives and through the world?
Many images linger from the 23 shows. Here are just some of them.
In the hall of St Philips SNS in Clonsilla, Jody O’Neill does a headstand to calm her racing thoughts, and the thoughts spill out of her mind across the floor, till they lap at the feet of the enthralled eleven-year-old Patrick and his classmates.
"And as the years go by / Our friendship will never die" sings Callum Maxwell, in Eimear Hussey's play, for the family of seven-year-old Ben, squeezed into the attic room of Ben's home. "You're gonna see it's our destiny / You've got a friend in me", he sings, as Ben, in pirate costume and carrying his Woody doll, happily runs rings around him.
In Monica Muñoz's dance piece for ten-year-old Adam, LA Feeney blows a blue cloth up from his face so that it floats in the air, and there is a collective inrush of breath at the sheer beauty of the moment, before the cloth rapidly becomes a bird in LA's hand.
Also conjuring creatures from cloth is Matt Szczerek, turning himself into a wooly mammoth for Liam and seven other four-year-olds in Home-Start Blanchardstown. Six of them are enraptured, one is reading an alphabet book and the other is delving into the dinosaurs box - happily oblivious to the Stone Age visitor in her midst.
Seventeen-year-old Grace, played by Sorcha Curley in Stephen Marriott's play, finds beauty in her grandfather's Alzheimer's disease: "his memory is so short that every dance with me is his first dance". And she finds righteous anger, and inspiration, in the recollection of a moment when, out shopping with her mother and sister, she found herself ignored, and screamed "three words which will stand by me forever... My opinion matters!”
Also not being ignored is fifteen-year-old Ameerat, who, in Clare Monnelly's play, is a badass boss-girl superhero with a heart of gold, who stands up to bullies but is also quick to see the good hiding in them. It's so affecting I return with my 14-year-old twin daughters. "Don’t be disrespectful, and don’t let anybody disrespect you," is Ameerat's motto. The play should be on the syllabus, I think.
The hero of Madi O’Carroll's play for fifteen-year-old Alannah is a spider - one who could do with a friend like Ameerat. Now an adult, and alone, the spider craves the companionship of her life before, when she was in the egg-sack. She tries to think herself back there, "to the we before I".
The *we before I*.
Is that why we are here, at the theatre? As society individualises and atomises, and an endless, inescapable algorithm optimises everything just for the singular *you*, theatre allows us participate in a *we* once more. NEST addresses this younger generation - a generation that understands more about screens than their parents will ever know, but has likely had less exposure to the stage - and invites them to recover this we before I.
Back in St Philip's in Clonsilla, Patrick and his class are thrilling to Jody O'Neill's play, with its litany of moments from their lives and its magic chorus: "Quandale Dingle!" they cry, and that's the magic, right there: the multiple Is have become a we.
NEST was devised to mark the end of the "decade of centenaries" - a national cultural programme that explored the history and legacy of the seminal events of 1913-1923. Now, say head of Draíocht Emer McGowan and director Veronica Coburn, it is time to stop looking back, and start looking forward, informed by the ambition and vision articulated during those years of radical change. The political scientist Benedict Anderson wrote that nations were "imagined communities", and Coburn echoes this idea. "Telling stories is a communal imagining", she says. “We want to determine our own sense of self in our own country.”
In March, shortly after NEST, I heard the novelist Paul Lynch being interviewed at an event at the Irish Embassy in London. Lynch won the 2023 Booker Prize for Prophet Song, and the interviewer was intrigued as to why he thought Irish writing was so strong at present. Lynch likened this present moment to the cultural explosion of the early decades of the 20th century, which accompanied the political events we have recently marked in the decade of centenaries. Times of great political and social energy produce great artistic energy also. He spoke of witnessing something new being born in Ireland at present - of being part of a cultural moment that is provoked by, and responding to, great change.
One part of that change is in ethnicity, or nationality (none of these terms are quite adequate; these things are all, to some degree, "imagined"). There are roughly 122,000 people living in Draíocht's catchment area of Dublin 15. A quarter of them are 14 or younger (compared to a fifth in the country as a whole). A third were born outside Ireland (compared to a fifth in the country as a whole). A quarter are citizens of elsewhere (compared to an eighth in the country as a whole). Of those in Dublin 15 who stated their ethnicity in the 2022 Census, a fifth chose categories other than "white" - three times more than in the country as a whole. Ireland is dramatically more diverse than it was, and Dublin 15 is more diverse (and younger) than the country as a whole.
According to the current media narrative, this is an "issue". "The public mood on immigration and asylum seekers is hardening", is the opening line on the top story on the front page of the Irish Times as I write this. Four in ten voters say they are more likely to vote for a candidate in the upcoming local elections who voices concerns about immigration (up from three in ten). Politicians are taking their lead from this, and talking tougher: the immigration system should be "firm but fair", say Fine Gael; there should not be "open borders", say Sinn Féin.
Early on in the decade of centenaries, there was a risk that the public commemoration would become an unambiguous celebration - a rose-tinted and one-sided retelling of a simplistic narrative of good vs bad and us vs them. Countering this was the job of the artists and writers, argued the historian Catríona Crowe: it fell to them to "complicate the narrative”.
Draíocht is complicating this current narrative around immigration. Some of the writers of NEST chose to address that narrative explicitly. " You are 'other' ", wrote Kwaku Fortune for ten-year-old Nilas, recalling how, as a child, he himself had first learned he was "black": "At five I realised what it felt like to be different, an outsider, not from here." For the most part, though, the plays celebrated diversity, in all its facets, without being *about* diversity or reducible to it. They suggested a Dublin 15 where, though the proportion of people who have some kind of diverse background is higher than in the country as a whole, this is simply the lived reality - one to be celebrated in the quotidian detail of people's lives - rather than an "issue".
In his original explanation of the butterfly effect of chaos theory, formulated in the 1960s, the mathematician Edward Norton Lorenz described a *seagull* flapping its wings, not a butterfly. (He was advised that changing it to a butterfly would make his metaphor more memorable.) The seagull effect was given dramatic effect by Little John Nee in his play for baby Emily, who was born on January 1, 2024. He wrote Emily a "lullaby opera", telling the story of Sully the Seagull.
Flying over Emily's father one day, as he sat on a bench in St Stephen's Green, Sully did a little bit more than flap his wings. Cause led to effect: Emily's father was forced to ask the young woman sharing his bench for a tissue. An unpredictable but unstoppable chain of events was unleashed and, true as the butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon caused a tornado in Texas, Sully the Seagull opening his bowels over St Stephen's Green ultimately led to a storm named Emily.
Sang Little John to Emily:
I was sent by the gentle punks
on the other side of the middle of nowhere
beyond on the far shore
soft souls for sure
here you are every bit of you fresh as air
sat in your nest
and us blessed to be looking at you
I was sent to say
you’re in the right place.
- You're in the right place.
- Your opinion matters.
- You can be an artist, if you want to.
- Don’t be disrespectful, and don’t let anybody disrespect you.
- There is a we before I.
Messages rippling out into Dublin 15 with the flapping of a seagull's wings; who knows what storms they will in due course cause.
Quandale Dingle!
Colin Murphy
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Biography: Colin Murphy is a writer for stage and screen. He is also a journalist and documentary maker. He is currently commissioned by the Abbey Theatre and TU Dublin. Recent plays include The Asylum Workshop (TU Dublin/ Grangegorman Histories), A Day in May (The Pavilion Theatre/ Once Off Productions), based on the book by Charlie Bird, The Treaty (Fishamble/Irish Embassy, London), Miasma (Anu) and The United States versus Ulysses (The Pavilion Theatre/Pat Moylan Productions). He has a long association with Fishamble, the new play company, which has commissioned his many political dramas. Haughey / Gregory opened at the Peacock Theatre in 2018 and toured Ireland. Inside the GPO was written and performed as part of the 1916 centenary of the Easter Rising. Guaranteed! and Bailed Out! produced by Fishamble, were subsequently adapted for screen as The Guarantee which was nominated for an IFTA and The Bailout. Both were broadcast by TV3/Virgin Media TV. Further screen writing credits include State of Flux (Loosehorse), Bonfire (Fine Point Films), Trial of the Century, a landmark historical drama for TV3/Treasure Entertainment and Leave To Remain, a film for RTÉ/Treasure Entertainment and winner of RTÉ’s Storyland drama competition.
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NEST is based on HOME THEATRE, an original idea by Marcus Vinicius Faustini (Brazil) and Kerry Kyriacos Michael (UK). Draíocht’s iteration, HOME THEATRE (Ireland), took place in 2018.
NEST is funded by ART: 2023, a Decade of Centenaries Collaboration between The Arts Council and the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.
#DecadeOfCentenaries #Art2023 #NEST #SpreachaSoarFestival
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