Dublin Fringe Festival 25th Birthday Feast

By Dermot Carmody

The Dublin Fringe Festival celebrates its 25th birthday this year with shows in more than 30 locations around the city running from September 7-29. The festival draws over 30,000 spectators each year to a range of innovative and often subversive events across a range of art forms.

Among the highlights promised this year is Gym Swim Party at the O’Reilly Theatre. The show is co-created by Danielle Galligan and Gavin Kostick and directed by Louise Lowe. It tells the epic tale of a turf war between rival gym dynasties through an exhilarating triptych of movement, dance and story.

Project Arts Centre and Dublin Fringe Festival bring a co-presentation series of international artists who are making waves around the world to an Irish audience. This includes Natalie Palamides’s Nate at The Project. The award-winning American comedian and erstwhile Power Puff Girl plays Nate in male-drag in a cross-dressing comedy show for the #MeToo era that workshops, with audience participation, the idea of consent.

Project Arts Centre also hosts aerialist Emily Aoibheann’s Sorry Gold, a ground-breaking live art piece, where sculpture and body merge to create the ultimate moving artwork. If aerial is the dance of industrial technology, what will the dance of biotechnology be? Sorry Gold is part one of a twin-production project on the themes of civilization and nature

Fringe presents Things We’ve Always Wanted To Tell You at Project Cube. The show is directed by UK-based writer and actor Scottee, and performed in collaboration with spoken word artist and poet Felispeaks, aerialist Jade O’Connor of Femme Bizarre, photographer Brian Teeling, plus actor/writer from the North inner-city Thommas Kane Byrne.


Scottee, Director Thing’s We’ve Always Wanted To Tell You (Photo: Holly Revell)

This world premiere production invites patrons to sit down to a dinner party, shut up and overhear the conversations of four proud working-class Irish folk as they discuss the middle classes, privilege and the bright lights of Lidl. It’s a show for any of us who think Ireland doesn’t have a class system and for those of us who are aware enough to know better.

The Ringside Bar at the National Stadium, Dublin will be transformed into a music venue on the brink of closure for We Are Lightening, a show about gentrification and the resulting loss of music and club venues.

A teen band, a brass band, a community choir and ageing rockers from Dublin join Joseph O’Farrell’s drums and Sam Halmarack’s guitar to mark and protest its demise, leading audiences through a strange ceremony and heartfelt celebration of how music shapes the lives of the people who play it.

Dublin Fringe Festival runs from September 7-22 at over 30 venues in Dublin

For more information and booking visit http://www.fringefest.com/