Dublin Fringe: Setting Irish theatre on edge
NEXT week’s Dublin Fringe Festival will be sentimental for its artistic director, Róise Goan, who is leaving after five years.
“It’s just the right time to go,” she says. “A festival like Fringe, which is all about new ideas and the next big thing, should take the same approach to its own leadership.” Goan will be succeeded by Canadian Kris Nelson who, Goan says, will “keep the things that are good and throw out the things that aren’t working.”
Things seem to be working well. During Goan’s tenure, the Fringe has identified itself as the spiritual home of contemporary performance in Ireland. The Fringe does not programme as much international work, but the calibre of its native artists has improved. The Fringe offers year-long support to the artists it programmes, providing rehearsal and writing space in the ‘Fringe Lab’.
“The Fringe really supports people who are trying to do their own work and to push boundaries,” says Ruth Lehane, winner of ‘best female performer’ at Fringe 2012. “Last year was the first time that I produced my own work and, you know, that’s a scary business. But, even close to the festival, when it must have been insanely busy for them, any time you went in to them, they were delightfully pleasant and calm.”
Bush Moukarzel, a nominee for last year’s ‘spirit of the Fringe’ award, says: “They’re really approachable and really practical. And they’re not prescriptive. They don’t try to bend your idea, one way or the other. They’re just enablers.” The Fringe, he says, is “the most important producing institution for theatre in the country.”
Lehane and Moukarzel are among a coterie of artists returning to Fringe 2013 with new work. Lehane’s clown theatre show, Ruth 66, picks up from last year’s The Lehane Trilogy. “They’re stand-alone shows, but it is the same character,” she says. “In The Lehane Trilogy, the character is both literally and metaphorically stuck at a crossroads. Ruth 66 is a year later and she’s thought, ‘to hell with this’. She manages to leave this place and head off for Route 66 in search of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. It’s about a quite naive person leaving everything that’s familiar to her and going off to this big place. It’s bold and raucous.”
Moukarzel’s company, Dead Centre, return with Lippy, a contemporary theatre show prompted by an incident in 2000, when an elderly woman and her three middle-aged nieces entered into a suicide pact, starving themselves to death over 40 days. Writer Mark O’Halloran, of successful films Adam and Paul and Garage, as well as the hit play, Trade, contributed.
“Lippy is very much a show about putting words into people’s mouths,” says Moukarzel. “It asks ‘how do we tell a story that’s not ours to tell’. These women didn’t want to tell their story. These women boarded up their house, sealed off all the entrances, and put the heating up full in the height of summer, and came to this very private decision. So what has that got to do with us and what right do we have to open the door on those deaths and to try to understand them? And, yet, our point is that we can’t help but try. My contention is that we can’t just leave this alone. The role of art is to make a raid on mystery and these things that seem to be hard to articulate.”
Other troupes returning this year include Briefs, from Australia, who present The Second Coming, touted as “Cirque du Soleil meets RuPaul’s DragRace.” There are 100 productions scheduled, traversing the spectrum of performative arts.
Citizenship is the theme of this year’s Fringe Festival. Who or what does Goan want to mobilise under the banner of ‘citizenship’? “It’s about showing up, to be quite blunt about it,” she says. “With regard to entertainment, it’s very easy now for people to sit at home and watch things on their laptop, without getting out of bed.
“All of the art that we present at the Fringe is exciting, vital, urgent and new, and it demands you to show up and take part in it. And being part of it will change you. I know it will. I talk to people about this every year and I know that experience of participation can be really profound. And that leads to a broader sense of participating in the society that we live in.”
All of Goan’s programmes in recent years have asserted similar calls for discussion. This year, a series of talks on Irish society and culture, convened by The Trailblazery, is prominent in the festival.
“I am one of those slightly delusional people that absolutely believes that art is a really powerful tool for social change,” says Goan. “I fundamentally believe that. Why else would we bother, to be honest? Nobody who works in the arts in Ireland is in it for the money. That’s not to say that everything we’re presenting is inherently political. It isn’t. But a lot of the work we have been presenting over the past five years has been lifting a mirror to society in a way that challenges our society and our history.
“If we’re not talking about the society we’re living in, and challenging what’s going on, particularly at such a difficult time, then I think it’s ‘game over’.”
- - www.fringefest.com.
The Ponybois (pictured), bring their new, all-dancing, gender-bending show, How To Be A Lad(y), to the Fringe; and, right, Paper Dolls’s new show is Bunk, a tribute to the up-down bed.
Work at this year’s Fringe spans the spectrum of the performing arts. The 100 events encompass dance and circus, music and comedy, and, of course, contemporary theatre.
ANU Productions and Hot For Theatre are just two companies returning to the Fringe Festival, having made their breakthrough here, before going on to national and international prominence.
ANU’s artistic director, Louise Lowe, is the country’s leading light in site-specific theatre, and her work has electrified the Dublin Theatre Festival in recent years. At this year’s Fringe, Lowe is presenting Thirteen, a 13-day-long series of shows inspired by the anniversary of the Dublin Lockout.
The various pieces merge performance with art, installation and digital technology. Tickets are free-of-charge and most of them have been gobbled up. However, additional events will be announced via Twitter, over the course of the festival.
Having travelled the world with her hit play, I Heart Alice Heart I, Amy Conroy’s new play for Hot For Theatre is Break, which eavesdrops on the teachers in a school staff-room.
Bush Moukarzel’s Lippy and Ruth Lehane’s Ruth 66 are new works by two of the most feted performers from last year’s Fringe.
Also returning from 2012 is pioneering Irish aerial-circus outfit, PaperDolls, who stole the coveted Spirit of the Fringe prize last time out. Their new show, Bunk, is a tribute to that most sacred of things — the bed.
Contemporary dance duo, Fitzgerald and Stapleton’s new show, Wage, promises to be a provocative confrontation with issues of gender division and wage inequality. In a splendid little conceit, female audience members can avail of a cheaper ticket, in light of the 13.9% gender pay gap in Ireland.
Mice Will Play is fiddle-player Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, percussionist Nic Gareiss, and members of the wonderful WillFredd Theatre. They promise to “investigate the role of mice in traditional music, science and in our daily lives”. A Fringe Festival show par excellence, then.
Dublin band, Le Galaxie, will bring their genre-melting delirium to Meeting House Square for a 3D concert, no less.
Elsewhere, Irish comedians, David O’Doherty and Aisling Bea, are presenting new wares, while Maeve Higgins is premiering her debut play, Moving City.
The honest-to-God, old-fashioned, traditional play is a lesser-spotted beast at Fringe, but they still persist. One to watch out for, certainly, is Distance From The Event, a new comic sci-fi detective drama by the hugely imaginative Irish company, Collapsing Horse. Returning for its fourth year, the Show in a Bag format will also present four new plays, in Bewleys Café, over the course of the festival. Meanwhile, following rave reviews west of the Shannon, Galway company, Blue Teapot bring Sanctuary, a play that deals with sexuality and disability, to Dublin for the first time.
In addition to Irish work, there are a number of appetising international shows.
Belgian company, Campo, are working with 50 Dublin GAA fans to create football opera, Fair Balls T’Yis. Elsewhere, Scottish live artist, Nic Green, returns to the Fringe with Fatherland, a show about identity and belonging, in which Green chases down her bloodline.
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