At Totally Dublin we’ve found ourselves, issue on issue, interviewing a certain type of person. Across the country there’s a set of inspired folks who are tracing new paths of discovery and opening up their cultural world through vision, wit and invention. These are the people who can join the dots between diverse disciplines, and inspire others to do the same, creating and refining brand new experiences through deft fusion.
Jameson Ginger & Lime is proof that three is the magic number — combine three familiar ingredients and you’ve got a distinctly new taste. That’s why we’ve teamed up with the Irish whiskey exemplars on our mission of discovering new taste in this showcase of three cultural champions who are truly mixing things up.
BRENDAN CANTY
Film/Art/Music
Iconic music videos become synonymous with the songs that soundtrack them – can you hear the Beastie Boys Intergalactic without a 20 foot robot smashing around your mind’s eye, or hum Sledgehammer without wanting to binge on Wallace and Gromit? In 2014 Hozier’s world-beating Take Me To Church joined that canon, thanks to the provocative, graceful video from Feel Good Lost, a Cork-based collective headed up by Brendan Canty.
Before the entire world and its mum posted Take Me To Church to its Facebook walls, Feel Good Lost had been building up a reputation for gorgeous, abstract music videos thanks to their emotive visual accompaniments to tracks by Jape, MMOTHS and AlunaGeorge. Aside from these works of visual poetry, Feel Good Lost functions as a music label, a platform for art and a live projection collective. All of these faces make Canty’s company a powerful force for breaking new Irish music and video on an international stage.
When we talk, Brendan is in a buoyant mood – he’s just finished work on a narrative video for Gavin James, a video he says is Feel Good Lost’s best yet. It’s been something of a pet project. “The second I heard the track I knew it was the song I’d been waiting for to make a video for,” he tells us. “It’s cinematic, it’s emotive… It ticked all the boxes I look for.”
Canty stays true these criteria when it comes to taking on a new project: just before we speak, he’s turned down an Olly Murs video. “It’s not that we only we work with alternative artists. I think some of the best directors have worked on pop songs,” he says, citing Martin Thurah, a progressive videographer who’s worked with Will Young. “It wasn’t even the worst Olly Murs song or anything… but I need something with lyrical subtlety, so we can read between the lines a little bit.”
Turning down a pop star of the Murs magnitude as a company that began, just a few years ago, as a bedroom project, is an astounding position to be in. What attracted Brendan to music videos was the fact that there are ‘no limitations’ when it comes to the format. “Even though budgets were falling (when I started out), it was becoming much cheaper to make videos and to just put something up on YouTube and get some real attention.”
Rather than post videos as a lone wolf director, he decided to create Feel Good Lost ‘like a band comes up with a name’ to define the work. The project has mutated over time, building close relationships with acts like Young Wonder, a band as remarkable for their visual sheen as the their polished electro-pop.
Canty’s visual aesthetic is instantly recognisable: elegant, earthy and awash with emotional allure. It draws much of its power from the Irish landscape. “Our secret weapon was staying in Cork,” the director chuckles. “Everybody says you have to move to London to make it work. I can’t imagine not being a 20 minute drive from the beach, or the countryside – even in our towns, we’re rich with all these potential settings.”
After the global success of Hozier, Canty says that “everybody is looking to Ireland”. Feel Good Lost is an able ambassador: Canty is distilling the beauty of the songs of our most talented musicians and the grace of our extraordinary landscapes into a refined, heartfelt document of the contemporary moment.
JETTE VIRDI
Food/Design/Community
Did your parents tell you to never play with your food? We suspect that Jette Virdi’s didn’t. As we chat to this Southampton-born art director and food stylist, she’s putting the finishing touches on some onigiri sushi and coconut macaroons. Her creations look more like tiny works of architecture than the delectable nibbles they are.
It makes sense that Virdi’s banquets are as much a feast for the eyes as the palette. “I come from a design background,” she explains. “So I’m much more visual that I am with weighing, measuring, working to precise recipes”.
By not caring too much about convention, Jette has a made a profound impact on her adopted city in the year or so since arriving from Mexico (where she renovated and ran a once-abandoned hotel). All of her projects come from an urge to create new, open social possibilities and build a community of (adventurous people) dying for new experiences.
One of those projects is Long Table Suppers, which connects people over one of those universal human needs: stuffing our faces with unbelievably delicious food. “Supper clubs are sort of the AirBnB of dining”, Virdi says. Combining her formidable culinary skills with a panache for dressing up out-of-the-ordinary venues, these evenings are a loud, lively alternative to the formalities of restaurant dining.
Long Table is not just a showcase of gourmet pyrotechnics, however. “I don’t want people to pay money for the supper clubs to fill my pockets,” she says. The proceeds of each meal go towards fine causes, like Men’s Sheds and Marriage Equality. After the success of Dublin editions of the club, it is preparing to go on tour. Next up: Dingle, Amsterdam and London
After the dishes are done and the banquet tables folded up, Virdi finds time to work on The Creatives, an open-ended organisation based around people from a plethora of different backgrounds pooling their expertise (and upper-body strength) to build new projects in their communities. There’s no such thing as a typical member: “one of the guys – I call him the man-help – he’s a cancer researcher. He’s in the labcoat all day, and then comes around with his tools and his ladders after work and asks ‘what can I do right now?’. Being involved has opened him up to learning photography from another one of the crew.”
As with her own work, The Creatives is all about tracing those invisible connections, and having the trust in your instincts to knot them together. “What I’ll always tell people who want to be involved is: take a chance, take a gamble.”
Doing it your own way – I ask her – does it always pay off? She doesn’t bat an eyelid: “Yes!”
NEIL CURRAN
Performance/Comedy/Festivals
Comparing improv and stand-up comedy is a little like comparing rugby and football – that’s how Neil Curran, Ireland’s foremost champion of the vibrant improv underground, describes his chosen art. If you’ve never been to an improv show in Ireland, you might be surprised to find the extent of a scene that’s spreading rapidly beyond the basement club stage.
When Curran was first initiated into the cult of improv, Cork’s Snatch club was the only dedicated outpost. He was plying his trade as part of a theatre group, but found the world of theatre ‘elitist’ and ‘rigid’ – improv’s collaborative spirit, grassroots enthusiasm and lawlessness was poles apart. Now, with Curran at the helm, we are hosts to one of the world’s fastest growing Improv Festivals, attracting artists from across the world.
“A few years ago I was teaching a class in Shanghai,” he tells us. “I was working with friend who had moved over and learned Chinese through teaching improv. Naïvely, I presumed there was no real scene in Asia – then I found out there’s festivals in Hong Kong, Seoul, Manila. Naturally, I thought: why don’t we have one in Dublin?”
The success of the festival has been built on the bedrock of years of hard work by Curran and the rest of the community. He leads from the front with his own show, Neil+1. The concept could strike the fear of god into any improv newbie: at each show he plucks an audience member, preferably one who’s never been to a show before (let alone performed) and invites them on stage to riff with him.
For anybody who’s been on the receiving end of abuse by stand-ups, this may sound like hell. Curran is at pains to make the whole process a positive experience: “The aim is to make the other person look good – the philosophy of improv is that there’s no wrong way to do it. I’ve never had a disaster with Neil+1 – once the audience member moves out of survival mode, you can see a complete change come over them, and that’s when they get creative.”
It’s not just on the stage that Curran is preaching the power of performance. Realising there are only so many mindfulness gurus you can lock employees into a conference room with, employers and institutions are booking improv crash courses for their staff. Neil visits the Googles, O2s and Facebooks of the country for workshops that are becoming an increasingly popular way of learning how to be comfortable making a bit of a tit of yourself in front of your peers and realising just how elastic your brain and body can be. In improv, he says, “it’s not what you teach; it’s how you teach it”.
His craft faces an uphill struggle: from setting its stall apart from stand-up to a lack of funding recognition of it as a standalone art. Rather than a charm offensive though, Curran explains that the beauty of improv is its virality. “There’s not much that compares to the hit, the thrill of getting your first laugh or round of applause. But it’s the kind of thing that you can’t relate through words, so you go off and convince your friends to try it too. You know, like cults.”
If improv is a cult, then Curran makes for a charismatic leader. We ask him to let us in on the secret mantra for any new initiates: “do it, do it, do it.”
Three is the magic number…
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