Dublin Fringe Festival 2026: The Act Of Existing

The Act of Existing by Croí Glan. Image uncredited

**

Choreography gives way to durational performance art in Croí Glan's The Act of Existing, choreographed by Philip Connaughton. Its advertised fifty minutes running well over seventy. It's not the vomiting, the spewing, the spitting, or the drooling that's the problem. We've seen all that before. It's not even its playful cursing at the audience or watching the cast waterboarding each other with milk. No, the problem is its cynical manipulation to make the audience seem like they're doing something they're never authentically doing. Its faux premise of independent choice nothing more than a game rigged to specific rules, pre-determined choices and certain outcomes, despite claims to the contrary.

Less 120 Days of Sodom so much as one hundred and twenty minutes too long, The Act of Existing commences with a human klaxon. The Ben Bob rapid rotation warning you to flee the building, if only you knew it. Yet as the Fringe programme never hints at what follows, and as it's Croí Glan and Connaughton, you play along at the expense of trust. The audience responding to various choices presented by performers Bobby Byrne and Ben Sullivan. Spin or run? Solo or something else? Wear this or that item of clothing selected from two dishevelled piles. Some poorly choreographed recoils, a Buffalo Bill pose (think Silence of the Lambs not Wild West), and a red dress rendition of The Cowboy Junkies' Witches hint at something to come. Instead, it flips into raised hands allowing the audience to stop what's happening onstage or allow it to continue. Never knowing the follow-on action, informed choice gives way to an uninformed guess as repeated sequences of slapping, spitting and so on begin to loop. Change selected most often when performers appear in physical discomfort. The audience, still voyeurs, now doms issuing blind prompts to two compliant submissives who choose what they'll change to. Usually change is for the worse, culminating in several artificial tirades on how the audience could have chosen something better and on the low standards of what passes for entertainment. The Act of Existing consciously aware it proves the latter point.

Never seriously challenging systems of seeing or engagement, or of the body as a site of intertextual representation, The Act of Existing over-relies on physical abuse that more amuses than intrigues. Not so much turning objects of vision into subjects of vision as straitjacketing the observer into a streamlined engagement under the illusion of greater agency. Yet like the projected image of an ugly, big-eared dog, it's stuck. You could leave, but it's mildly humorous, the provocations tame, and you keep hoping it's going to surprise, delight or go somewhere interesting. Like a slapstick version of The Stanford Prison Experiment, when the lights finally come up it feels like a reprieve. The most prominent bruises likely to be those of the audience punching themselves after realising they could have picked something else in the Fringe to go and see.

The Act of Existing by Croí Glan, choreographed by Philip Connaughton, presented by Croí Glan, runs as part of Dublin Fringe Festival 2026 at Project Arts Centre till Sept 11;

30th September at Backstage Theatre Longford

7th November, Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre for Uillinn Dance Season

For more information visit Dublin Fringe Festival 2026