On this week's Out & Proud, poet, performer and playwright Felicia Olusanya aka Felispeaks sits down with Trevor Keegan.
A self-described Black, Irish, queer culchie, Felicia’s latest project, Octopus Children, is a love letter to those who sit at that intersection.
The piece will debut as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival in September and is produced by This Is Pop Baby, the powerhouse collective behind WAKE, which saw Felicia hold audiences in the palm of their hand as narrator.
When asked what Octopus Children is about, they say: "Octopus Children is layered for me ... it's a combination of everything that I've either lived or attempted to live. And it's a combination of memory and imagination. It's a dreamlike landscape. It's a poetic landscape, but it's a coming-of-age story, and it's a love letter to the Black, Irish and queer communities."
Making sense of those labels took time: "I think I've been in a state of sorting for a lot of my life, like deciphering what each meant and what weight I decide to carry with each and then accepting it and being comfortable with it."
Through their writing, they were able to make sense of it all, words provided a safe space to experiment, tease things out and offload. "Like I was writing about gender identity before I knew that I was writing about gender identity ... I didn’t have those terms for a really long time ..."
As their conversation continues, Trevor and Felicia talk about everything from being spiritually queer, to God’s pronouns and how to push past bravado into brave.
Octopus Children is at the Project Arts Centre from the 5th to the 14th of September.
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