This June 3-21, Irish Arts Center (IAC) and Solab, in association with the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, will present North Star, created and directed by Kwame Daniels.
This collaborative, immersive, standing-room theatrical event brings together Belfast artists and students from Belfast and New York for an epic live music and spoken word performance responding to abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ historic visit to Belfast in 1845.
In 1845, only seven years after escaping slavery and immediately after publishing his first book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Douglass was suddenly a widely known figure and at risk of re-enslavement. To avoid this fate and spread the abolitionist cause abroad, he journeyed across the Atlantic to Ireland, visiting Dublin, Waterford, Limerick, then Belfast. He spent multiple weeks in Belfast, delivering eye-opening speeches and engaging local abolitionists. The stay was both influential to Douglass (who felt so welcomed in the city he declared, “I know I will always have a home in Belfast,” and whose speaking tour across the UK helped him gain the funding for his future publication, The North Star) and pivotal for the city, where the Belfast Ladies Anti-Slavery Association formed following his visit. In 2023, the city unveiled a statue of Douglass—the only in Europe.
Kwame Daniels, a celebrated DJ and founder of Solab (a culturally responsive initiative building a digital platform for artists across Africa, the African Diaspora, and their wider creative networks), said that after the murder of George Floyd, he still encountered people in his circles not understanding a need for the Black Lives Matter movement at that particular time. He found himself thinking, “Rather than continue to be angry behind a keyboard, why don’t I set up a project that enables people to come closer to Black cultures and Black people, but essentially that is based on the island of Ireland?” He adds, “Those opportunities felt very rare, because historically discussions have centered the two dominant cultures—Catholics and Protestants—and other communities coming here didn’t really have a place at the table.”
As movement across borders, whether physical or ideological, becomes, in this era, an increasing challenge, North Star inquires about the nature of welcome: what makes a place hospitable to new people, to new ideas? The production asks what in particular about Belfast in 1845 made the city feel like a “home” to Douglass? For whom do Belfast, and New York, feel like a home today?
Mosaicing a variety of artists’ considerations of how Douglass’ warm welcome in Belfast resonates in today’s world, North Star includes musical compositions spanning the likes of jazz, hip hop, soul, classical, and contemporary by Kaidi Tatham, Winnie Ama, Leo Miyagee, and Hannah Peel. It features arrangements and music supervision by Kaidi Tatham; choral arrangements by Jennifer John; and text and spoken word by Nandi Jola, Colin Salmon, and school pupils of Belfast and New York City.
North Star emerged from Belfast 2024—the city’s largest cultural program to date—and is a Belfast City Council via Belfast 2024 and Belfast Stories co-commission. The unveiling of the Douglass statue a year prior led Daniels to realize that exploring “Douglass’s sentiments about how Belfast welcomed him presented an opportunity to share a piece of history, and celebrate Belfast 2024 how [he] wanted to.”
Daniels, harnessing his DJ background to organize gripping evenings around a collage of artists’ works, reached out to artists from an eclectic range of genres and prompted them to write responses to the subject. North Star joined musicians, poets, and young people from Belfast, and now New York, in a moving, provocative artistic journey rooted in Black cultures.
Central to North Star is an engagement with the next generation in tackling the questions it presents. IAC worked with New York high schoolers at The Urban Assembly School of Design and Construction and 5th graders at P.S. 69Q. Across 10 weeks, teaching artist Jennifer Cendaña Armas worked with each class to develop poems, responding to the prompt “Does New York feel like home to you?” (Belfast students had the same prompt for the Belfast run, and connected with New York students via Zoom to discuss the project.) Students will appear in the North Star performances reading their work.
Says Daniels, “For this work to come from a region that was so divided adds extra power to it: That we’re able to come together and create a piece of work like this to then travel to New York. Hopefully, wherever we go, we act like a beacon, a north star, as such, to give young people a voice and young people and adults a chance to reflect on their environment.”
Based in New York and renowned for presenting dynamic, inspiring, collaborative experiences of the evolving arts and culture of Ireland and Irish America in an environment of warm Irish hospitality, IAC reflects an ever-expanding vision for what’s possible within its walls with this vastly multidisciplinary production gathering over 25 artists and students onstage nightly.
Since the opening of the new Irish Arts Center and its vast and adaptable theatre space in 2021, both Good Vibrations and Agreement; as well as last season’s presentation of Druid Theatre’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame; the five-week-long North American premiere of Colin Murphy’s The United States vs Ulysses; the New York and North American debut of the Irish theatre company Malaprop’s Hothouse; and more have demonstrated the organization’s newfound capacity to program ambitious, highly theatrical works. Setting a new precedent for the scale and artistic breadth of work it can host, North Star brings a momentous conclusion to IAC’s Spring 2026 season.
North Star also continues a vital dialogue Irish Arts Center began with New York audiences and the legacy of Frederick Douglass and the impact of his time in Ireland: in 2009, the organization presented, in repertory, Donal O’Kelly The Cambria — largely set on the ship he took across the Atlantic leading up to the visit North Star centers — and Roger Guenveur Smith’s celebrated solo performance Frederick Douglass Now.
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