Cork dancer: “I always knew I would come out the other side... I had to be very patient”

“TERRIFYING,” is how professional dancer Tara Brandel describes the debilitating condition she experienced for 14 months, following her third Covid vaccine.

Tara, who will perform her new dance piece at the Uillinn Dance Season in Skibbereen on October 27/28, was always very fit.

“The day before it all started, I had gone for a five mile hike up a mountain and had gone to a pole dancing fitness class. I was really healthy.”

But just five minutes after receiving her vaccine, Tara, who never actually contracted covid, experienced her heart racing and her blood pressure “going crazy”.

“Then things calmed down. But the next day, it started again. I became more and more exhausted and couldn’t do anything. The racing heart would happen on and off all day.

“Eventually, I went to an incredible neurologist (Dr Oliver de Buyl) at Bantry Hospital who diagnosed me with Pops (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome). Basically, with this condition, when you stand up, your heart races and you get weird sensations under your skin. 

It took me about ten months before I saw the neurologist. He gave me medication which really helped.

Tara was so unwell that she couldn’t even walk. What really cured her was a result of working with a lady called Suzy Bolt.

Suzy, who had long Covid, is a yoga expert and uses a gentle form of exercise and breath work to help unwell people. It worked for Tara, who says that she is lucky to be a hopeful kind of person.

“I always knew I’d come out the other side. I realised I had to be very patient. I really trusted my body to find a way through.

“I’m now back dancing and doing pole fitness and working. For a lot of last year, I couldn’t walk. 

I’ve been building myself back up and have my fitness back.

In her mid-fifties, Tara hopes to continue dancing for as long as she can.

“Martha Graham, who invented modern dance, danced into her sixties,” she said.

Artistic director of Croí Glan Integrated Dance, which works with dancers both with and without disability, Tara’s new dance show, entitled Unseen, is a multidisciplinary performance. She has developed it with her visual artist American wife, Stacey White, who has created abstract paintings for Unseen. Stacey drew from plankton for her inspiration. Over 50% of the world’s oxygen is produced by plankton, a microscopic organism undetectable to the naked eye.

Since 2019, Stacey has gathered water from multiple global locations to develop microscopic images of plankton. This included working at Lough Hyne Marine Reserve in West Cork with scientists from West Cork.

“If I had to describe the piece in one sentence, I’d say it’s about plankton, hidden disability and the enduring nature of love,” says Tara.

“Stacey and I got married in August, 2021. Four months after that, I became really ill. Stacey had to become my carer. We had gone from making Unseen long distance because of lockdown to Stacey coming over here from California, looking after me.”

Tara’s ‘hidden disability’ is dyslexia.

It used to affect me a lot. I very recently got a smartphone which I can dictate into. It has changed everything for me.

Stacey suffers from epilepsy.

Tara says that plankton is vital for our existence.

“I was thinking about how benevolent and important it is. It was the middle of the pandemic. We were all worried about breathing in each other’s air. I thought it would be amazing to make a piece about important but hidden things. In a spoonful of sea water, there will be hundreds of thousands of plankton in it. The phytoplankton, which is a tiny plant, creates oxygen through photosynthesis. I started thinking about invisible forces and hidden disabilities. I asked Stacey if she would come on board.

“We started talking about what it’s like to have a hidden disability and how it shapes your life.

“We researched how we could mix the visual with dance. Then we had this massive lockdown. Stacey was back in the States and couldn’t get back here. For about seven months, we worked online via zoom. She would paint and I would watch. I would dance and she’d watch me. We’d go back and forward, developing a way of working together.”

The piece is multidisciplinary and includes video by Luca Truffarelli, who Tara praises, saying his work is “absolutely gorgeous”.

“He came down to West Cork in the summer and did a lot of videoing and filming of me and of coastal areas. 

There’s me dancing in the water and under the water. 

"The multimedia work includes 300 of Stacey’s abstract paintings of plankton. There will also be voice recordings of snippets of conversations from us describing things around disability.”

Tara says that the plankton “has become a kind of metaphor for something that’s invisible but so vital.”

Uillinn Dance Season at the West Cork Arts Centre is on from October 27-November 5.

www.westcorkartscentre.com