What’s on Wednesday: 12 Points, Hedda Gabler and Kathy Prendergast

PICK OF THE WEEK

12 Points Festival 2015
Poject Arts Centre, 15-18 April, 7.30pm
12points.ie

Every other year, the brilliant 12 Points festival leaves it’s Dublin home and goes walkabout to a different European city. Last year the festival took the town of Umea in northern Sweden by storm - which means this year it’s back at home base in the Project in Temple Bar.

Abandon all musical preconceptions, ye who enter, for 12 Points is where distinctions like style and genre evaporate in a puff of creative energy.

Europe’s young jazz musicians are a promiscuous bunch who are liable to draw on any source and turn it into any noise that pleases them. The idea of the festival is simple – 12 bands you’ve probably never heard of, from 12 European cities, each given strictly equal billing over four nights - representing the emerging trends in the musical style formerly known as jazz. This year, the acts hail from Gothenburg, Berlin, Dublin, Strasbourg, Budapest, Bern, Brussels and all points between.

By all means check out the website and see which acts you might particularly fancy. But the real point of a festival like 12 Points is to get with the concept and leap into the unknown. In fact, in many ways, it’s better not to know what to expect. Just get yourself a season ticket (for the absurdly low price of €50) and go every night with your ears wide open. Trust me.

THEATRE

Hedda Gabler
Abbey Theatre. Previews Apr 10-14 Opens Apr 15-May 16 7.30pm (Sat mat 2pm) €13-45
abbeytheatre.ie

It may not sound like an exciting proposition – the story of a woman who is bored to death – but Hedda Gabler has always been an explosive and shocking play. Ibsen's Nora may be similarly adored and suffocated in A Doll's House, but at least she manages to get out of the house. Hedda, a gun-possessing General's daughter and accomplished sociopath, would kill to feel alive. In this supple new version by Mark O'Rowe for director Annabelle Comyn, the tragedy is not so much hers, but ours: Hedda is the product, as Ibsen put it, of a society where "a woman cannot be herself". How much, you have to wonder, has changed?

ART

Kathy Prendergast: Or
Gibson Galleries, Cork Until June 13
crawfordartgallery.ie

This exhibition of new work by Prendergast incorporates an installation that extends more than 20 metres “exploring pertinent questions of our times, as offered by over 40 leading social thinkers and commentators”. Prendergast is ingenious, unpredictable and painstaking, as is Ingrid Swenson of Peer, London, an independent organisation that specialises in inventive art projects.