Cork’s Quarter Block event set to be a great party

Eoghan O’Sullivan reports on next week’s Quarter Block Party which takes place at various venues around North and South Main Streets

A HISTORIC section of Cork will become the centre of the city’s entertainment world next weekend as music, art and theatre performances take over on North and South Main streets.

Quarter Block Party will be held in various venues, from a barbershop to a pizza parlour, and the lineup certainly is eclectic.

Expect a street game about human computer interaction taking place in a charity shop (Interference in Gorta), a performance about prostitution by someone in a specially made dress that you can sit under (Lady Grew, aka Kate McGrew from Connected, outside the Gate Cinema), as well as music in the likes of BDSM bar and Plugd record shop.

Initially, the organisers thought of taking a different street in Cork each day before boiling it down to North and South Main Streets.

“It’s just a weird and wonderful street, with loads of odd places. It’s an area that has been overlooked a little bit, people kind of forget about it,” says Aisling O’Riordan, one of the organisers who is also involved in the regular Quarter arts events at Triskel.

“There’s a real sense of community there, which is what we found when we started talking to people about it.”

Fellow organiser Eszter Nemethi says there’s a disconnect between the ordinary person on the streets and the arts, underlining her point with an anecdote about someone living next to the Triskel without realising it was an arts centre. “He might go because he might turn that corner,” she says, “but can we find these people, because we presume they don’t care but actually they don’t even know.”

Quarter Block Party is taking the arts to the streets. Some acts came down for a day to “engage with the street”, Nemethi says, before they went away and built a performance based on that experience, with the organisers trying to match the ideas to each shop.

“We wanted it to be something you engage in but which is immediately fun for the person that’s involved,” says Caoilian Sherlock.

The trio say they were conscious that a lot of theatre can be sad and depressing, but they wanted the performances to be fun.“We were conscious to programme things that have that same energy we think of with a music festival,” says Nemethi.

The pop-up performances during the day are free, in keeping with the idea of a block party, though some of the acts in the evening, like O Emperor playing a set of new songs, are ticketed. “If we could’ve made this free I totally would’ve made it free,” says Sherlock who used to work in Cork venue the Pavilion, which closed down last summer (it’s since reopened).

On booking the music for next weekend, O’Riordan says: “We thought about going after international acts but there’s so much good stuff happening in Ireland at the moment.”

Altered Hours, for example, are doing a special “cosmic vibe” set in Cork Vision Centre. “Everyone’s taking it as a challenge and approaching it like it’s something different,” says O’Riordan. “It’s not just another stop on their tour. It’s like they’re actually thinking about it in a, ‘what can we get from this?’”

The trio are already planning the next Quarter Block Party.

“We’ve also had to think about it when we’re talking to shops, that this isn’t something that’s a flash in the pan, that we’re trying to take advantage of them,” says Sherlock.

“It’s more like, if people work together, then we can really create something that’s really special, that won’t be known for North Main Street but for the whole city.”

Quarter Block Party takes place from Feb 6-8. Tickets from Eventbrite.ie and Plugd Records. More information at www.quarterblockparty.com