‘Most adventurous festival ever’ to draw huge crowds Leeside

TENS of thousands of visitors are expected in Leeside over the next fortnight as the Cork Midsummer Festival gets under way with dance, music, theatre and art on show until the festivities conclude on June 27.

Entertainment over the weekend included the first leg of the Street Performance World Championships at Fitzgerald Park, and the Heineken Midsummer Nights providing the best in music and comedy nightly in The Pavilion and The Crane Lane Theatre.

The festival attracts up to 100,000 visitors coming to see a selection of the 60-plus events that feature more than 300 artists from Ireland and abroad, and is worth €10 million to the local economy.

Festival director William Galinsky said the response to this year’s programme has been very positive.

“It’s our most adventurous festival ever and the more radical the offering the more tickets are selling for it. We decided to create a programme of the most dangerous and challenging work we could find, that really spoke to the here and now and it is so exciting to see the audience response to this.”

Selected highlights for the first week alone include: a visual art project that is asking the city to pull itself out of the doom and gloom by refraining from using the word Recession; Mike Daisey with the first of his three politically-charged monologues; controversial contemporary dancer Jerome Bel with the European smash, The Show Must Go On, and theatre company Corcadorca with their promenade performance of Plasticine.

In a quirky event the festival organisers are having nine-year-old children cut hair as part of the Haircuts by Children programme.

The programme is part of a playful examination of the impact of giving children further citizenship rights.

Ever championing participatory theatre, the festival will present the Irish premiere of Rimini Protokoll’s interactive gaming performance, Best Before, where the audience shapes the action, game controller in hand.

The festival will also host a Professionals Symposium: Has Culture Failed Ireland, presenting a forum for Irish theatre makers to meet a with international practitioners and organisers.

The Pavilion will be presenting nightly gigs throughout the festival, including Julie Feeney, Mick Flannery, Don Letts and Talvin Singh & Nalidri Kumar, as well as hosting the free nightly festival club from 11pm. See corkmidsummer.com for more.