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drinks Monday 2 June 08
DUBLIN ... Colman Higgins describes the scope and history of Dublin Gay Theatre Festival ... and reviews two of its shows ... Down Dangerous Passes Road ... Confessions of A Mormon Boy /// LONDON ... film on now ... La Question Humaine / Heartbeat Detector /// BRIGHTON ... It's on till 26 May and here's at least 20 Things you might want to know about Brighton Fringe /// PEOPLE ... Who was there at Fringe Report's First Monday 5 May - photographs & article /// CULTURE ... One Culture ... film screening 30 May booking now ... details
Dublin Fringe Festival
12 Sep - 2 Oct 05 www.fringefest.com
Dublin’s Fringe Festival comes of age after 10 years (writes Colman Higgins).
'All the alien brought' – so the Irish poet Louis McNeice described Dublin in the mid 20th century. His comment still rings true – Dublin is a sprawling interface between Ireland and the outside world.
Stuffed with belching buses and trucks, which make the stacked Georgian redbrick terraces shudder and crack, wreathed in Victorian pubs which thread through the city like a seductive necklace, and pavements packed with the youth of the world, Dublin is in one of its golden ages - even if the locals barely realize it.
During the 1980s, Dublin was a grey and decaying town, its main streets disfigured with empty lots like gappy teeth, the grimy and cynical capital of a dying nation. Since the 1990s boom, the gaps have been plugged with shiny new bars and apartments - and the streets are filled with people from Manchester to Mongolia.
Dublin is at once beautiful and ugly – its charm is that both exist happily side by side, in an unplanned chaos that is full of energy and vitality. It's like a Georgian relic overshadowed by colourful and exciting plants growing between the cracks.
The Dublin Fringe Festival began in 1995. Like all fringe festivals, it rode the coat-tails of an older parent - the Dublin International Theatre Festival.
This year’s festival has 750 individual performances of 134 shows over 3 weeks. For the first time, it has cut itself free from the same dates as the Dublin Theatre Festival, running from 12 September to 2 October. (The older festival runs from 30 September to 15 October and has 22 separate shows.)
On 7 September, the Fringe Festival 2005 announced that its pre-festival sales have doubled since last year. It expects to attract about 65,000 audience members across 30 separate venues.
For the first time, the 2005 festival has a significant non-theatre element to the programme, which includes music, dance, live art and visual arts. While theatre still accounts for about half the programme – 65 shows - there are 12 dance shows, 45 music shows, 9 live art performances and 3 visual art events.
Most of the music programme takes place at the Spiegeltent, which is floating on water for the second year in a row, in the heart of the docklands financial district.
Another innovation this year is ‘Young Fringe’ a programme of theatre, dance and music geared for a younger audience. There are 14 shows in this category, ranging from free outdoor concerts to theatre clowning.
There are also workshops, for the first time ever – a total of 18, with many of them lasting up to four days. These range from ‘Fan Dancing and Tassle Twirling’ to ‘Tai Chi Rejuvenation’.
This year’s festival director is Wolfgang Hoffmann, who will be familiar to regular Edinburgh Fringe visitors for his role in the acclaimed Aurora Nova venue in recent years. Aurora Nova is a joint venture between Brighton’s Komedia and Fabrik of Potsdam.
Companies taking part in this year’s festival come from the usual gamut of western European and North American countries, but also from the Czech Republic, Romania, Columbia and India and even Tuva Mongolia (the latter being a musical act mixing traditional throat singing with punk-inspired electric guitar). In total, as many as 60 of the shows originate from outside Ireland.
Shows that are selling well include: Rumble (from Renegade Theater, Germany), a hip-hop version of Romeo and Juliet from Germany; Knots (from CoisCeim Dance Theatre, Ireland), described as 'exposing the fine line between love and madness' in 'a violent and extreme' show; and up-and-coming Irish singer Camille O’Sullivan.
Several plays take place in unconventional and mystery locations. One that is already selling well is from Dublin group Semper Fi - who sold out an excellent show based in a public toilet several years ago. This year’s show, Adrenalin, starts on the steps of the 18th century Custom House. Adrenalin is described as an 'all-guns-blazing, kick-ass homage to the 1970s'.
Another on-location show is Tumbledowntown, staged in an abandoned flat in the infamous Ballymun housing complex - which is currently being rebuilt. Part of the ‘live art’ programme, it includes recorded memories of local children. The Irish Times calls it 'disturbingly realistic'.
Pushing out the boundaries still further is London-based group Rotozaza. Their 2004 Dublin Fringe show took two volunteers and put them on either side of a partition, with a director ordering them to undertake certain tasks which they did not know in advance. Their 2005 show ‘Romcom’, similarly explores the territory between improvisation and scripted theatre, with two different performers on each night asked to act out a story based on instructions they receive through headphones.
END
(c) Colman Higgins 7 September 2005
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2008
