On Sunday morning, I started a weeklong trip to Lagos Nigeria to work on the sound design for an adaptation of UCI colleague Bryan Reynold's play 'Eve's Rapture.' The trip started with a 6am flight from LAX to Atlanta, followed by an overnight direct flight from Atlanta into Lagos. We arrived Monday morning in Lagos to a sticky cloudy day. The airport was chaotic and felt half-finished, but our host hired a guide to help us navigate immigration. We got through the airport without to much trouble and were on our way.
Our hotel is in Ikeja, a relatively pricy area of Lagos. There are gated houses all around, range rovers and jaguars driving driving down the street. We wandered into an organic grocery store, and the manager took a shine to us and walked us across the street to a high-end department store/art gallery. This being a tony part of a tony part of town makes some of the other bits more pronounced and meaningful. Most sidewalks are just concrete slabs laid over sewage, and every ten feet or so a slab is missing, so you either have to jump over the gap or step into the street. There is still visible poverty, and guards at the doors to shops and hotels are a reminder that while rich, this place isn't completely safe.
After a siesta and a walkabout, Kate came to the hotel to join us. She's a local actor, not in the show, who seems to have been voluntold to be our companion for our trip. Lagos isn't really set up with a tourist infrastructure, so it's great to have someone around who knows how the city works. We first headed to the Kalakuta Museum, the former home of Afropop founder and Nigerian musical pioneer Fela Kuti. His house has been turned into a museum, and his grave is in the front area.
From there, to a traditional Nigerian dinner at
Ile Iyan, where had a delicious meal of pepper soup, chicken, goat, snails, fish, and plantains!
We were in bed by 9.
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On Tuesday morning (Day 3), I woke at 4.30 (jetlag) and got some work done before breakfast. At 7.30, we hopped in a car with Kate and a friend of hers for the 90 minute drive northeast for rehearsal. Along the way, we could see that Lagos was already up and hopping, even at that early time!
As we left the city proper, the roads got crappier, and even the potholes had potholes!
After a little more than an hour on the road, we turned off the pavement for the final 25 minutes of driving along a very rutted-out dirt road. The dirt was red and dusty, but the activity on the side of the road didn't stop. Vendors, clothiers, schoolkids, motorbikes, etc, were all jockeying for position on the road.
We finally pulled up to a big wall with a metal gate in and honked the horn. Someone came to open the door and we drove into the parking area/rehearsal space for the
Crown Troupe of Africa, our hosts for this trip and the company putting up 'Eve's Rapture.' The space a big open dirt area, in full sun. Along one wall was a laundry rack and a little coop for a fresh batch of puppies. At one end was a big house with running water but (as far as I could tell) no electricity (maybe they had it but didn't use it since it was not and no one wanted lights on). The cast was waiting for us, and as soon as we got settled, they started the rehearsal.
The rehearsal was glorious. Segun, the artistic director, translated the text into Pidgin (a thick local dialect that sounds like English if you squint), expanded the cast from 4 to 17, and turned the whole thing into opera complete with an orchestra. It was stunning. And hot.
After rehearsal I got to spend time with with Segun and the other artists, eating lunch and talking about music and theatre.
The ride back to Lagos was uneventful, and Bryan and each took a siesta after we returned. For dinner, we me back up with Kate and her friend for dinner at a local restaurant called Tilapia. No one ordered the fish.
