Incantation review: Misty performance art about intergenerational trauma

Maïa Nunes, an artist of Irish-Trinidadian descent, connects to her forebears in this performance art. Photo: Alan Gilsenan

The Chocolate Factory, Dublin Fringe Festival
★ ★

Shafts of autumn sunlight fill the white exposed interiors of an old industrial building. Notes of birdsong transport us away from the metropolis. A musician gives reassuring plucks of a harp. It’s hard to deny Incantation, the new performance art by Maïa Nunes, its moments of tranquillity. 

These might seem like picturesque surroundings for a performance about intergenerational trauma. But Nunes, an artist of Irish-Trinidadian descent, has the presence of someone whose mind is elsewhere. If the birdsong doesn’t suggest the solitude of island life in the West Indies, maybe a boat rope tied to a bell does. 

From a high-stool, Nunes takes a strip of fabric and carefully ties it trance-like against the rope. The cloths seem to contain different stories - a poem about a mother, a song about a father, a prayer to a god above. Each of them resembles a kind of cord, connecting her to her forebears.

When Nunes says “Though her babies were taken from her, she never cried,” the performance glimpses a history of women’s distress. A set of horrifying events from the past that, in one recurring song, might be fusing in the present. (“Lord save us / We’re back where we began”). 

That’s a compelling idea, a history that’s repeating itself. But the production also has a habit of keeping this oppression artificially vague. Nunes performs in leaning-in whispers, against an elaborate soundscape. Even though she’s repeatedly performing the same texts, creating an assuring ritualistic effect, many details are still difficult to pick up.   

In fact, the performance art seems most interested in altering these stories on different tellings. The harpist adds new effects, as Nunes gives her accounts against different discords. Even still, those multiple meanings are left vague. (“We’re back where we began” seems more an admission of hopelessness).

Only when the harpist retires does the production seem intentional in lifting the mist, allowing us to hear about an absent father whose “shadow is cast / In the morning and in the evening”. A mother who loved women, even though her religion “Which she clung tightly / Prayed away desire”. That’s an interesting inheritance. On her website, Nunes describes herself as a queer femme of colour.

What’s unsatisfying here is the absence of Nunes’s own story in the performance. That creates the incongruity of a conversation where we only hear one side. At the end she closes her eyes, as if envisioning a new perspective. The dialogue might be missing, but there’s no doubt a connection has been made. 

Runs until Sep 22nd.