Question of Taste: Bryan Quinn, host of Cork circus event Pitch'd

The host of the Pitch’d Festival Gala at the Everyman includes Fleabag, Michael Keegan-Dolan and a sliotar in Lesotho 

Bryan Quinn hosts the Pitch’d Festival Gala at the Everyman in Cork.

Bryan Quinn is a trained clown, and will host the Pitch’d Festival Gala at the Everyman in Cork on Sunday, September 18. The Gala will feature  international and national circus acts as part of Pitch’d Circus and Street Arts Festival   (Sept  9-25).

He also appears in upcoming RTÉ series, The Dry. 

• See https://circusfactorycork.com/pitchdfestival/

Best recent book you've read:

The Gruffalo. Even though I’ve read it to my daughter several hundred times (deffo getting her a different book for Christmas). 

Best recent film:

Bobby Fingers - Drunk Mel Gibson Arrest diorama

Best recent show you’ve seen:

Michael Keegan-Dolan's How To Be A Dancer in Seventy-two Thousand Easy Lessons.

Best piece of music you’ve been listening to lately (new or old):

Cat Power - The Greatest (live on Jools Holland).

First ever piece of music or art that really moved you:

The seven of us would be bet into the Hillman Hunter in the late 1970s, driving to Glengarriff, and Mam would tell us stories of Cuchulainn and The Children of Lir. That moved us, to temporarily pause all fratricidal activities.

The best circus-type performance you've ever seen (if you had to pick one!): 

Sergei Ignatov and Michael Moschen who I saw perform in Paris in 2001.

TV viewing:

I haven’t owned a TV since 1998 but my favourite shows are Fleabag, True Detective (S1), and The Wire.

Radio listening and/or podcasts:

Cathal Murray, Cian Ó Cíobháin, and Dermot Whelan on the wireless. Smartless (Kristen Wiig episode) as a podcast. 

You're curating your dream festival – which three artists are on the bill, living or dead? 

Maria Bamford, Mitch Hedberg, Buster Keaton.

Your best celebrity encounter:

While in Africa, I once hit a sliotar into the king of Lesotho’s back garden. The soldiers at the front gate jokingly told me the sliotar was now the property of the Basuthu kingdom. I never met the king, but i still consider it a celebrity encounter.

You can portal back to any cultural event or music era – where, when, and why?

I want you to take me back to a time when Bill Burr was actually funny. 

In your own life, have you been doing anything in particular in relation to climate change, biodiversity, etc?

I don’t eat as many of my friends as I used to; mostly just the cold-blooded ones who swim in the sea. I buy organic yokes. I applaud farming that features soil creation rather than soil erosion.  I continue to be heart-scalded by intelligent people who think climate science is a football team that you can be for or against.