Dublin's fringe festival: the last blast

A review of the Dublin Fringe Festival

Funk

Smuel Beckett Theatre

**

Back in the 1980s, I used to sit under a duvet eating ice cream, watching Fame, and wishing I was a little more energetic.

I remember being partly thrilled and partly repelled by the shiny, exuberance of the students from the New York City High School for the Performing Arts, and they way in which they felt compelled to break into dance at the drop of a hat. There’s something similar going on in Funk.

The Dylan Quinn Dance Theatre has brought six dancers together from six, unspecified, European countries.

We are shepherded around the place, asked to stand, sit, shuffle forward, and move backwards as shockingly healthy bodies are shaken around us.

They are good dancers, and some of the moves have me smiling and clapping, but there is no narrative and the funk music soundtrack, at first pleasantly groovy, becomes a little wearing as the hour drags on.

I become gripped with the fear we will be asked to participate in the finale.

“Maybe if we exude enough menace they won’t come near us,” my friend offers hopefully. That tactic did not work, though it did herald the end of the show.

Until Saturday

– Gemma Tipton

The Healthy Lovely Ladies Exercise Studio for Maximum Sex Attraction

Fumbally Court Studio

**

The Healthy Lovely Ladies Exercise Studio for Maximum Sex Attraction is surely one of the longest show titles in the Fringe. Half the calories of the session are burned simply trying to say the name.

It reflects, however, the fun group of lovely ladies that is The Fumballinas (pictured below) who dance, sing, pout, pose and ultimately transmutate using the Whale for Wellness technique they espouse.

Seemingly this practice to induce “deep pudendum release” includes group activities such as chanting the letters of the word whale and pretending our fingers are fins. At one point one of the Lycra-clad ladies says, “If you are cynical, do it ironically,” unwittingly pointing out the exact problem. It was hard to know if this was an earnest or ironic piece.

The Fumballinas were best when they sang and danced together in acts of riotous feminism but the show, as a whole, was as rambling as the title.

Until Saturday

– Meadhbh McHugh

Siuvenir

The New Theatre

****

Inspired by À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, Marcel Proust’s magnum opus on memory, society and sexuality, while nodding at everyone from Shakespeare to Walter Benjamin to Charlie Kaufman, this solo performance by Bush Moukarzel is so cluttered with ideas, arch humour and erudition, it seems almost impossible to contain.

Props erupt from innumerable, wittily labelled boxes (“Madeleines”, “Health”, “Theatre, The”), a chalk- board issues one fretting command (“Make the show”) and when the compelling Moukarzel opens Proust’s book, its pages flake away like a drift of snow.

Pursuing a restless, giddying technique not dissimilar to Pan Pan’s, director Ben Kidd ruptures stage conventions, appropriately mingles biography and fiction and never resists a metatheatrical gag.

It’s fun, if sometimes fatiguing, yet Moukarzel retains a narrative through-line from Proust with plenty of artfully lifted text.

Long after the short performance finished, its meanings were still unfurling, the substance behind its comedy gradually revealed. He certainly gives you something to remember him by. Proust (below) would approve.

Until Saturday

– Peter Crawley

I am Martin Sharry

Black Box at Smock Alley

***

There’s something intriguingly remote about Martin Sharry. His voice is low and unmodulated, his words thick with novelistic detail, his delivery stilted. This biographical solo performance uses similarly dispassionate devices – found objects, photographs, recited texts, a microphone downstage left – for a description of remote lives.

Beginning with his grandfather, the first Martin Sharry, who made his home on Inis Oírr, and moving to his uncle, also Martin, isolated by troubled mental health, the performance is guided by a consideration of his inheritance from both men.

Brought up in Ballymun, Sharry feels removed from the customs and Irish language of the Aran Islands. And there’s something universally poignant in such erosion. Often, though, his performance becomes choked with verbiage, long recitations from books of his grandfather’s, or a schizoid monologue where no director has been retained to distinguish between signal and noise. Asking us, at one point, to consider the artificial neatness of narrative and the characteristics of “outsider art”, he may hint that we employ similar criteria here. Not everyone will indulge him, but outsiders don’t play by the rules.

Until Saturday

– Peter Crawley

(The Making of) Frogs After Arisophones

Project Arts Centre - Cube

***

There’s something infectious about performers taking pleasure in what they do. Their enjoyment spreads irresistibly to the audience. And so it is with The Frogs. Amid chaos and confusion they unravel their colourful set and costumes to bring Aristophanes’ comedy about playwriting to the stage, building it up as we go along.

Dionysus and Xanthius are here set up as a Laurel and Hardy dynamic-duo whose journey to hell leads them to encounter queer and terrible characters. They are assisted by their rather forgetful stage manager who adds a touch of exciting uncertainty.

The piece is punctuated by videos. An important aspect is that the cast have learning disabilities and disadvantages, which the confessional video segments deal with head-on, as the performers explain their need and love of the theatre with admirable chutzpah. Perhaps most striking is the quality of movement some performers exhibit as they dance. They demonstrate a raw and enviable appreciation of music.This is not the journey to hell that Aristophanes wrote, the intent is not to learn or overcome obstacles, but to sink into the pleasure of the journey, like a hot bath.

Until Saturday

– Roisín Agnew

The Oh Fuck Moment

Filmbase

****

If you blanch at the prospect of participatory theatre which mines embarrassing mistakes for material, you might want to avoid this two-handed show, even though you are its target audience.

Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe gather their audience around a conference table littered with crumpled Post-its and, after a suitably toe-curling anecdote illustrating the eponymous concept, invite their guests to share some similar personal experiences.

This is no gratuitous exercise in humiliation, however, rather a plea for such errors to be seen as an essential part of being human, an evolutionary trait which no amount of regulatory systems are able to overcome.

Interspersing the audience interaction with lyrical musings and illustratory anecdotes – from the catastrophic and stomach-churningly tragic-comic to the personally affecting – Walker and Thorpe conjure up an imaginative seminar which provokes reflection, thoughtfulness and laughter.

Persons of a sensitive disposition be warned, however, you’ll never look at a hockey stick in the same way again.

Until Saturday

– Mick Heaney

Saint

The Cube, Project Arts Centre

****

The Irish people have a great knack for castigation. This current recession has been pinned on Europe, the IMF, the bankers along with the politicos. As well it should be.

But there is one important donkey who needs to stick its arse out in that particular blame game: the Irish people themselves.

This bat shit banana’s production from Fibin Teo puts the greed of the nation front and centre in a sublime satire of our financial foibles.

Devised as an experiment to prove how accessible the Irish language is, Saint features two actors who had no Gaeilge at the start of the process.

They use masks, puppets and electronic gizmos – as well as exaggerated characterisation, emphasised repetition and a clownish use of props to massage the cúpla focail they picked up in rehearsals into meaning.

And it’s very much a mission accomplished as their fluency in the physical language of the stage is joyously comprehended by all.

The characters are symbolic of the “more, more, more” mentality that gripped every aspect of our culture and the irreverent imagery, while silly, is sharp as a tack.

Until Saturday

– Caomhan Keane

The Last Ten Years

St Patrick's Cathedral

****

“We create the problems so we can sell you the solutions. It’s our job.” In the intimate setting of a side chapel, within the majestic and glorious St Patrick’s, some gutsy theatre is created. The raw materials: 11 real people, who have each clearly lived a life, and the alchemy of singer-songwriter Seán Millar. The result is some strong truths, and a compelling piece of politically engaged art.

The Rade (Recovery through Art, Drama and Education) performers are disciplined and dignified, with strong stage presence. Initially besuited and bespectacled, they address the audience directly, and sing a series of sometimes affecting, sometimes powerful, songs accompanied by Millar, and occasional, apposite slide projections.

The message draws connections; this is a whole-world view rather than people’s personal stories. It concerns the billion-dollar international pharmaceutical drug business and the impoverished Afghani poppy farmers. The legal drugs business that has become more powerful than states. A “war on [illegal] drugs” that make money for elites who have a vested interest in it never ending. The Mexican drug cartel billionaire’s gracias amigos to the US whose criminalisation policies have made him rich. If demand dried up, the Afghani economic disaster would have Irish famine proportions.

This is impressive musical theatre, created by people directly affected by the issues it addresses so forcefully. So, while the vision is bleak, its expression is uplifting. It’s dismaying is that Rade is threatened by cuts.

Until Saturday

– Deirdre Falvey

My Fair Moment

4 Whitefriars, Aungier's St

**

My Fair Mot offers up a language lesson as a theatrical experience. The collaboration between a local community group and Eleonore Nicolas invites the audience to a classroom setting for a “dialogue in real time” and an education in “Dublinese”.

Taught by two Dublin schoolboys, and a trio of teens in drag, we are advised at the start that there is no script and there have been no rehearsals.

Prompted only by oversized flashcards on the walls, the young-fella teachers guide us through the idiosyncrasies of their idiom.

The difference, however, is less lexical than phonetic: bird/burd, orange/oringe, strawberries/strawbreeze.

The difficulty with My Fair Mot, lies not with the aim of the piece but with its execution. The boys are brilliant – only massive – with a natural flair for improvisation, and they seemed to gain enormous confidence from taking command of a group of adults. However, on the other side of the blackboard there is a real sense of discomfort.

By not providing any dramaturgical structure to the performers, they are objectified like animals at the circus. Even the best of intentions can sometimes misfire.

Until Saturday

– Sara Keating

Codes

The Lir

****

The dancing body and its interaction with digital technology has provided rich collaborative pickings and Dublin-based MIDASpaces is the latest group to investigate the interaction of bytes and neurons.

Codes is slickly produced and refreshingly confident in execution, but it presents rather than interrogates the relationship between the living, breathing body and the increasingly digitised world that surrounds it.

It’s a complex relationship and technology has changed not only how we interact with fellow humans, but in how we conceptualise our world.

Throughout Codes, dancer Emma O’Kane maintained her role, epitomising organic human flow through movements that followed natural impulses.

In contrast Róisín Laffan’s mechanical jerkiness appeared seductive to Rob O’Shea, eliciting a reaction that typifies our uncertain relationship with technology.

Although Codes didn’t exploit the considerable sum of individual talents on stage and behind the scenes, the newly formed MIDASpaces is an exciting development in the fertile common ground between dance, music and technology.

Ends Saturday

– Michael Seaver