The best of both worlds

HAVING served as director of Project Arts Centre for ten years, Willie White took the reins of the Dublin Theatre Festival in late 2011. He didn’t have to travel very far. The festival offices are located just a few yards from the Project in Temple Bar. But conceptually, the distance between the two jobs is more of a jump.

The Project Arts Centre is a spiritual home for contemporary arts practice in Ireland. During White’s tenure, experimental theatre in Ireland finally came of age, with a raft of new companies and theatre-makers coming through, many of them benefiting from development structures that White had helped put in place.

By contrast, while the Dublin Theatre Festival has become an ever more welcoming arena for diverse theatre practices, the festival itself retains a strong continuity with the traditional modes of literary theatre. ne of the most appealing aspects of the Theatre Festival in recent years has been the way in which both the traditional and contemporary strands of theatre have sat side by side. White says that, far from being a straightforward advocate for contemporary practices, he is drawn to this mix.