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For Falana, the venue is not the backdrop. It is the point.
Most concerts ask you to forget where you are. The lights go down, the stage goes up, and the room disappears. The music happens in spite of the space, rather than because of it. For most of Lagos's concert history, that has been the default, partly by necessity and partly by habit. The venues that exist were built for function, and artists have largely had to work within whatever those functions allow.
Falana has spent the better part of a decade asking what happens when you refuse that default. The Take Me Home Pop-Up Concert Series is her latest answer to that question, but it is not her first. In 2016, her Uncover'd series did something that felt genuinely new in the Lagos music context: it took performances out of traditional venues and placed them inside the city's living fabric. The I.Am.Isigo fashion store. The Centre for Contemporary Art. The David Adjaye-designed Alara store. Lagos City Hall. The first show had under 100 guests. By the final one, it had sold out at over 300. The format worked because the idea behind it was precise.
Take Me Home picks up where that series left off, but with a deeper intentionality. The Sultan Bello Hall Dome in Ibadan, which has stood for over fifty years, became one of its stages. Whitespace in Lagos too. Alara also returned. Each venue chosen not for convenience, but for what it carries, architecturally, historically, culturally.
The argument at the heart of the series is one Falana articulates clearly. "I've always believed that the context of a performance matters," she says.
"A stage exists for a reason. It draws focus, creates intention, and shapes how people receive the music. Space and context completely change perception."
That is not a new idea in the world of performance art or theatre, where the environment has long been understood as part of the storytelling. But in the context of Nigerian live music, where the infrastructure often forces compromise, it is a deliberate and meaningful choice. Rather than working around the absence of purpose-built concert infrastructure, Take Me Home treats that absence as an opening i.e. If the conventional venue does not exist, you find the space that does and you build the experience inside it.
The result, when it works, is something a conventional stage cannot produce. Performing inside a dome that has existed for over half a century is not just a logistical decision. It is a statement about continuity, about the relationship between contemporary Nigerian culture and the spaces that have held it across generations. Falana, speaking on the Sultan Bello Hall Dome, said "It was an incredible opportunity to reimagine the structure in a new way, explore its place in the contemporary cultural conversation, and highlight its beauty for new audiences. It was also an opportunity to show my deep respect for history and for the work of artists before our time."
What the concept asks of its creator is significant. Every show in the series is built from the ground up. There is no house system to plug into, no existing lighting rig, no production infrastructure waiting to be used. Sound, lighting, staging, the entire physical experience, is constructed specifically for each space, each time.
"One of the realities of creating these kinds of shows is that you are often building the experience from scratch,"
Falana acknowledges. "There is the cost of sound, production, lighting, and everything it takes to produce a show, even beyond trying to execute a creative vision. It is not easy."
The creative integrity required to sustain that level of investment, financial and otherwise, across a series rather than a single event is not incidental to the project. It is the project. The series is a demonstration of what it looks like to hold a specific vision without compromising it into something more manageable. "It is about having a vision and having the creative integrity to stay true to that vision. Not just accepting what exists, but asking what else is possible and finding a way to build it."
Take Me Home is also a reconnection. Falana describes the series as a way of rebuilding proximity with her community and her audience ahead of new music, a space to tease unreleased material in an environment that feels intimate and communal rather than promotional.
There is also a deliberate decision to share the stage. The series creates performance opportunities for other artists, with a specific emphasis on female artists, building something collaborative rather than simply self-promotional. The space Falana creates is, in that sense, not only for her own music. It is for the broader idea that performance in Nigeria can look different from what it currently does.
"These shows feel like love letters to Nigeria and Nigerian architecture," she says, "and an opportunity to also celebrate design and spaces that we may take for granted."
That framing matters. Falana was born in Canada to Nigerian parents, and she chose to build her practice in Lagos. The love letters she describes come from someone who came home deliberately, who looked at the city's spaces with the eyes of someone who had lived elsewhere and knew what it meant to be here. The Sultan Bello Hall Dome. Alara. These are not just backdrops. They are the point.
Underneath the architectural concept and the production ambition, Take Me Home is making a simpler argument about why live music exists at all.
"More than anything, I think we are in a time where people want to feel things again," Falana said. "People do not want to be numbed by the internet or overwhelmed by repetition. They want to experience something human. There is nothing more powerful than witnessing music being created and performed in real time, surrounded by other people. It creates memories that stay with you long after the moment has passed."
That is the oldest argument for live performance, and it remains the truest one. What Take Me Home adds to it is specificity: the memory does not just come from the music. It comes from the room the music lived in, from the particular quality of a space that has its own history pressing against the present, from the understanding that where something happens is part of what it means.
Lagos & Nigeria as a whole, has buildings worth that kind of attention. Falana is one artist paying it.
