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Wake: The folk-song afterlife beyond the disco ball

Wake: The folk-song afterlife beyond the disco ball

In Thisispopbaby's circus of grief, the division between the living and the dead feels porous.

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Chris McCormack
Sep 11, 2022
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Wake: The folk-song afterlife beyond the disco ball
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Photo: Ruth Medjber.

National Stadium, Dublin Fringe Festival

★★★★☆

There is something spiritual about the ambience of an Irish pub. You can sense it in the air. If you get caught-up in the long melodic phrases of a singer’s traditional song, in the strains of a fiddle or accordion, you can be dragged through a barrier between worlds – the rift between past and present; certainty and uncertainty.

It is not outside the abilities of uplifting entertainments to explore such big ideas. Thisispopbaby and Dublin Fringe Festival’s heartrending circus-play Wake is an obvious sibling to Riot – the 2016 genre-shift by the same directors, Jennifer Jennings and Phillip McMahon – in how it combines awe-triggering displays of spectacle with the spirit-search of spoken word poetry. At this vigil, what we are watching over is not the corpse of an individual but a wave of collective anguish. “This is a wake for everything that’s not coming back,” says poet Felicia Olusanya, our MC.

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