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Dublin Fringe Festival 2018

Chris ORourke

Get Your Fringe On

The 24th Dublin Fringe Festival hits Dublin for two glorious weeks from September 8 to September 23. And there’s a distinctly Fringe-y energy about this years festival. Under the guidance of its new artistic director, Ruth McGowan, DFF 2018 delivers 80 first time events, featuring familiar as well as first time companies, displaying the best of both home grown talent and international acts. With 544 performances running from noon to night throughout the Festival, spread across 26 venues, there’s certainly something for everyone to enjoy.

Broadly divided into eight categories, this years festival programme features:

  • Parties, Club Nights & Gigs: Throbbing dancefloors and hot gigs to send you home starry-eyed. Fringe is championing Club Culture as an essential part of the cultural fabric of our city.

  • Inventors & Mavericks: Works that defy categorisation: live art, dance, theatre, music and genre-bending performance.

  • 13 Good Plays: New writing from playwrights you need to know.

  • Punchlines: Uproarious stand-up, improv and musical comedy that will leave you begging for more.

  • Young Radicals: Five cool shows for those on the right side of adulthood as our Fringe for Young Audiences strand returns for a second time in association with Collapsing Horse.

  • Sharpened Senses: Tune in and reach out with intimate sound art, live art and visual art.

  • Bodies in Time: Feats of dance, circus, performance and physical theatre.

With such a diverse and eclectic range, any suggested highlights is bound to fall short. With that in mind, the following mix represents just a small sample of what’s on offer this year:

  • Soho Theatre and Fishamble present Drip Feed by Karen Cogan, a fast-paced blistering new play about sexuality, the messiness of being youngish, female and queer in 1990s Ireland.

  • SHAME by Pom Boyd and Sean Millar offers a highly entertaining and cathartic new show which invites you to witness a sacred punk theatrical ritual through song. Give up the exhausting pretense and wear your crippling shame on your sleeve.

  • The Fattest Dancer at St. Bernadette’s from The Breadline Collective tells the story of Julian’y as he divulges how he should have been a star, flanked by some of the sassiest 10 years olds in Dublin 1.

  • Unwoman Part III by leading feminist theatre company THE RABBLE (Australia) and trailblazing Irish artist, Maeve Stone, staring Olwen Fouere as a post-menopausal woman who carries her unborn child, subject to constant physical labour.

  • There’s laugh a minute comedy from Deirdre O’Kane’s A Line of O’Kane, Abie Philban Bowan with Don’t Kiss Me I’m Irish. We’re Probably Related, as well as Fringe favourites Foil Arms & Hog with their brand new show Craicling.

  • The Sound of Phoenix by Shanna May Breen, which takes us on a site-specific travelling soundscape of the Phoenix Park

  • The Money by Kaleider Productions (UK), a cross between a game and a theatrical performance.

  • Trial of the Centurys by The Mess Around & Popical Island is a courtroom musical from the fun-loving popstar twins Trevor and Elliot Century (AKA ‘Trelliot’) and Bobby Aherne who take you on a bizarre, toe-tapping adventure about fame, family, friendship and aliens.

  • As part of NEIGHBOURS at Project Arts Centre, and presented by Mermaid Arts Centre, A Holy Show by Janet Moran is a new comedy about the 1981 hijacking of an Aer Lingus plane by an ex-Trappist with a burning desire to know the third secret of Fátima.

  • MADHOUSE by Una McKevitt and PJ Gallagher is based on the true life story of comedian PJ Gallagher and stars telly’s favourite funny lady Katherine Lynch.

  • Hookers Do It Standing Up by Lady Grew. Perhaps failing in prostitution she may seek refuge as a stand-up comic.

  • Kiss Kiss Slap Slap by Chaos Factory, an exciting new company making their debut, and Fringe debut, in a production exploring the Ireland we live in.

  • Confirmation is a poignant pop concert from the award-winning creative teamX+Co about looking for confirmation and wondering if we can ever find it. Fringe favourite, Xnthony, returns with this musical memoir about growing up in Roscommon.

  • Sarah Gordon and Alice Malseed with their new play BILLY (developed at Scene & Heard 2018), a disbelieving look at the weird ways we try to order our lives with the newest space-saving solution.

  • Cock Cock, Who’s There? by Samira Elagoz, a 26 year old documentary maker, reconstructing the raw aftermath of a sexual assault in her award-winning performance about violence and intimacy.

  • Astronaut by Joe Wright, a spoken-word multimedia theatre piece inspired by the Apollo House occupation in 2016.

  • Everything Can Be Dismantled by Joan Somers Donnelly and Donncha MacCoil is an interactive fantasy about the politics of housing and the spaces we live in now and the spaces we desire.

  • Owing To The Failure Of by Zoë Comyns is an audio experiment for podcast lovers. Comyns is radio producer who finds 100-year-old Marconi Code books in a junk shop, starts to read the code lists obsessively and twist them into her own life story mimicking a live podcast.

  • CAGED by Femme Bizarre examines feminine behavior through the decades.They put themselves through the ringer with aerial stunts, high-octane voguing, explosive vocals and spoken word.

Dance at DFF 2018 includes some genuinely exciting world premieres:

  • NÄHER... CLOSER, NEARER, SOONER from Liz Roche Company in a co-production with Goethe-Institut. Choreographer Liz Roche with a cast of 20 performers, along with theatre maker Shane O’Reilly, create a site-specific dance piece to mark the opening of the newly refurbished Goethe-Institut.

  • Assisted Solo by Company Philip Connaughton and his long-time collaborator Lucia Kickham, along with French dance artist Magali Caillet. A moving performance accompanied by video footage of Madeleine, Philip’s mother, who suffers from advanced dementia.

  • Liv Donoghue’s first large-scale choreography project, AFTER, using live-stream film, physicality and performance to investigate our very human fear of endings and the rise of the right wing.

  • FABLE by Human Collective is a virtuosic street dance show that tells five cautionary tales. Choreographed by Matt Szczerek this highly physical dance show dissects modern life, revealing the disease that sits just under the skin.

“This programme is pulsing with energy, adventure and joy. It’s a festival of firsts – each of the 80 events are brand new and happening in Dublin for the very first time at Fringe. We’re introducing the essential voices you need to hear from – I can’t wait for you to meet them.”

Ruth McGowan, Dublin Fringe Festival’s Artistic Director

And you shouldn’t wait to meet them either. Or risk missing them. So starting putting your schedule together for what is shaping up to be an exciting and energetic Fringe. Box Office is now open.

DUBLIN FRINGE FESTIVAL 2018 runs city-wide from September 8 – 23. All 2018 Fringe events are now on sale now at fringefest.com or 1850 FRINGE (1850 374 643).

For more information, including programme, visit Dublin Fringe Festival

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© 2020 Chris O'Rourke

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