Niall Sweeney is designer and co-creator of THISISPOPBABY's acclaimed show WAKE, which returns to the National Stadium in Dublin this March as part of the St Patrick’s Festival celebrations.
Design legend Niall is a long-time collaborator with THISISPOPBABY and he has helped create, shape, craft and propel the company’s work over the past two decades - below, he revisits a wild collaboration.
"I wanna feel the heat with somebody!"
The creation trajectories of WAKE sparkled into being way back — at the very moment that any of each of us first stepped out on a dance floor, each of us at different times, different points in the primordial constellation of Dublin, each now suddenly energised by the power and potential of music and lights and the night, the promise of a new family of friends and loves, and the absolute revolutionary joy of it all. And everything that we have done since has been propelled by the power of community gathered on the dance floors of our own making.
"Dress as if you have just come from a funeral" — was pretty much the first thing I said to Jennifer Jennings and Phillip McMahon when we first met, some time in 2006. I was hastily gathering last-minute participants for a marathon six-hour performance lecture I was staging at the Sugar Club, and they had been suggested to me by Panti, whom I had also roped in to perform. "We have", they said. And they had. They had also just given birth to THISISPOPBABY. It was a pivotal moment. Atomic. Astronomic. Anatomic. We started to make a lot of heat together.
and bathe you in the ancient glow of a new day rising.'
And what joyful, intoxicating heat THISISPOPBABY has created over the past 18 years. We flew giant inflatable babies over the crowds at Poptopia at Electric Picnic; we reconstructed the solar system as a futuristic tanning salon, invoking the ecstasy of tomorrow with WERK at the Abbey Theatre, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Melbourne Festival; we rode side-saddle with Panti, barnets blowing in the breeze, as she circumnavigated the globe many times with her political wit, big bosom and high heels in low places; we celebrated glorious outsiders (well, we always do) sliding along a blade of hilarity with the subversive Queer Notions; we conjured up one rather portly, dishevelled, but much loved, human-sized seagull that would serenade us with achingly beautiful a cappella songs of the city, an angelic apparition of our times; we built an underground cabaret set deep in a silver salt cave, filled with the hopes, dreams and desires of post-human bacterial revolutionaries with the outrageously fun Club Salty; we predicted a glittering riot with the seminal RIOT, one of the many shows where we thought "this changes everything!" — which RIOT did, as it sling-shot into orbit around the world.
WAKE is a celebration of the power of the spirit and the power of the body.
And then, as if hailed by the stars, came WAKE. The birth of WAKE began sometime early 2018, a process that would continue for the next, tumultuous, four years. RIOT had just landed in New York with a glorious full-page, full-colour review in the New York Times — and yet at the same time the world was taking increasingly accelerated and discombobulating turns around us. Something was needed, a moment of transformation, of universal togetherness, a new kind of heat. We needed the power of an Irish wake — a wake for, well, just everything really — a wake that would swirl through the chaos with the outrageous abandon and visceral power that only THISISPOPBABY could create. A wake for the heart of our times.
Drawing on our very origins, our Irishness and our belief that the physics of the dance floor on which we were reared is as cathartic and essential as that of the vortex of life itself, we set about to create that kind of moment of elastic time and togetherness that happens on a dance floor — or, as we also knew, at an Irish wake — where time both stops and suddenly expands like a bomb of giddy light in the dark. Like banging a giant drum-skin on which everything that ever existed lay, and is suddenly up in the air all together at once, shook like a snow globe filled with star dust.
And so we embarked on a series of adventures in known and unknown territories — voyages of discovery as to what exactly is this stuff, this star dust, that we are all made of? And what is the energy that binds it all, that binds us all? An energy both ancient and new, that we knew would be at the beating heart of WAKE.
We got lost in spiralling Kolo dances with the infinite crowds at a Balkan music festival; we interviewed underground revolutionaries in secret backrooms of undisclosable coffee shops on what felt like the dark side of the Moon; we fell in love with the physical beauty of Irish tap dance; we choreographed lost boys and girls to the projected trajectories of the Voyager spacecraft in warehouses under the Brooklyn Bridge; we incanted Amergin’s first utterance — the ancient words that brought the world around us into existence — to an electro beat; we got enchanted by nymph-like aerialists as they spun silvery pulsars opening up windows in time; we got spiked by, and marched with, the heels of radical drag queens as they wielded their fierce powers to shake down the ills of the city; we got transformed in our knowledge and understanding of Irish mythologies, of Púcas and Banshees and of the ancient female powers of Cailleach, and how we might lift the veil between worlds to discover how those loved-ones now gone are always with us; we whirled in unison with roller disco queens who were transforming their communities through the collective power of movement; we danced with strange strangers on dance floors that floated high above the city lights as we looked out upon the past, present and future; we sang Raglan Road together at dawn on the banks of the canal on the way home.
And we brought all of this, and more, with a 14-strong cast of outrageous talent, to the National Stadium Dublin in 2022. That it did what we set out to do is an understatement. People are still aglow with its heat, dusted in its starlight, giggling at its mischief. And now we are gloriously back, back to its spiritual home at the National Stadium for a three-week run.
WAKE is a celebration of the power of the spirit and the power of the body — and such hot bodies they are — in an exchange of heat that takes all of us, audience and performer alike, from dusk ’til dawn, gathered around the giant beating drum of its stage, a giddy bomb of light in the dark. It will raise your Irish spirits, connect your souls, and bathe you in the ancient glow of a new day rising.
Come feel the heat.
THISISPOPBABY’s WAKE returns to the National Stadium, Dublin from 6 – 23 March, as part of St Patrick’s Festival 2024 – find out more here.
