Finding his feet on the Fringe

Location, location - and movement. These are the keys to finding new audiences and making the Dublin Fringe Festival, launched last night, impossible for the city to ignore, festival director Vallejo Gantner tells Louise East.

Vellejo Gantner may be thousands of miles from home, but the Australian director of the ESB Dublin Fringe Festival says he hasn't had time to feel homesick. Since he arrived in Ireland in March, he has had to sift through a couple of hundred show proposals, go to the theatre five nights a week, and deal with more than 200 e-mails a day, in an attempt to fill the capable shoes of former director Ali Curran. He had just four months to put together a festival programme which brings together 80 different productions, showing at numerous locations throughout the city over three weeks from September 23rd.

It's a daunting enough task for someone familiar with Ireland's theatre scene; for an outsider, it would seem less an obstacle course than a survival course. But Gantner is upbeat.

"I came here without a point of view, and that's been amazingly liberating," he says.

He's cheerfully aware that he may lack an element of quality control. "I could look at a proposal in Melbourne and know immediately who was behind it and what their work was like, and I don't have that ability here. But they way I look at it, the Fringe is about going out on a limb. That limb might well break, but that's as it should be."

In fact, all those weeks of theatre viewing have paid off, and Gantner has a reassuring fluency when talking about local actors and companies.

The weather has been another hurdle. Irish festival directors are traditionally wary of shows that might be ruled out by rain and gales, but Gantner's previous experience is firmly rooted in outdoor events. Both his parents and a grandfather were actors, and although Gantner shied away from acting he couldn't escape a passion for directing and producing, despite taking a law degree at Melbourne's Monash University. A founder member of Australia's Hirano Production Company, he was responsible for bringing "really physical, dark and industrial" versions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest to festivals around Asia. Later, he became artistic associate of the Melbourne International Festival, in charge of programming outdoor and free events.

Pointing out that Melbourne's weather in October can be as changeable and foul as Ireland's, Gantner prefers to talk about the importance of turning the whole of Dublin, indoors and out, into a stage during the Fringe. "I've really encouraged companies to look at the sites they're putting their work into, and tried to develop the use of very specific sites," he says.

It's a policy that has worked successfully at the Fringe before, with audiences still talking about Corn Exchange's Car Show and last year's Wash-O-Rama staged in a Georges Street launderette. This year, there will be productions in disused laneways, in the public toilets in St Stephen's Green, in a bar, in the National Gallery, and in an 11th-century subterranean space. "I'm interested in places in the city we don't even see, because they're ugly or have certain connotations," says Gantner.

"In Dublin, those would be alleyways, old parking lots, and even the Liffey, which, it seems to me, Dubliners don't really engage with."

Weaving it into the fabric of the city is also a way of ensuring that everyone knows a festival is taking place. "Dublin is like Melbourne in that way. It's a sophisticated city with lots going on year-round. It's quite hard to create a presence so that people who are on their way to work in the morning can't help but notice that something's going on."

Using innovative venues is a great way of finding an audience that may never book a theatre ticket, "and they're often the most interesting audiences. Their reaction can be very refreshing. Of course it might be 'this is total wank', but at least that's an honest reaction."

But Gantner is equally concerned that regular theatre-goers experience moments of epiphany too. "The danger with theatre is that people who go to the theatre typically don't do it just once," he says. "As audience members we can become very complacent; we know what to expect. A company has to create an experience that's not just a cerebral one, in which you walk into a theatre, walk out again, talk about it in the lobby for five minutes and go home. We need theatre that you're still thinking about the next day, that makes the audience think: 'I'm never going to look at that place, or idea or question, in the same way again.' "

Gantner's own passion is for theatre in which physical movement is as important as text, and in which collaboration and devised work supplants the more traditional structure of writer, director and cast.

"The majority of my favourite pieces of theatre from the last 10 years have been created by people who, if you had to classify them, would be called choreographers," he says. "They seem to be the people who are really engaging with a text and bringing the spoken word into performance in a very creative way. Theatre directors, not just here, but everywhere, are really struggling to create a physical presence on stage."

Physical theatre is not a theatrical form with which most Irish audiences are overly familiar. Gantner describes his first impression of Irish theatre as one in which "literary, text-dominated theatre is predominant; many of the ways in which people hybridise theatre elsewhere just isn't happening here".

He is excited by Loose Canon's work and the Fringe's performance art platform curated by Oscar McLennan and Anne Seagrave. In keeping with his belief that the Fringe should expose audiences and practitioners to unfamiliar forms, he's also bringing over plenty of international acts, including Dislocate, the aerial, acrobatic Australian theatre company; Spanish choreographer Sol Picó and a piece combining high-tech video and lo-tech music from previous Fringe favourites métro-boulot-dodo.

In the longer term, Gantner has a more pragmatic and potentially more dynamic programme in mind. Concerned that flying a company in for a week imparts a "lecturing tone that isn't appropriate", as well as being limited by resources, he wants instead to "match-make" foreign practitioners with local companies, with the aim of creating pieces for next year's festival.

In addition, he's determined to seek out artists from within Ireland's many new communities. "I know from my time working in restaurants in Melbourne that the guy washing dishes beside you might be a professor of music in Beijing," he says. "I don't think there's any great value in writing a two-hour play about racism and browbeating your audience. A much more interesting way is to look at how theatre works in Nigeria or Asia and bring what they understand of music or dance or theatre together with Irish ideas on those disciplines. The play can be about whatever you like after that."

For Gantner, this kind of encounter is exactly what defines the Fringe, rather than it being a place for theatre that doesn't have enough pocket money to join the grown-up theatre festival, or a "second-best" for actors and directors who haven't made the main stage.

"The Fringe's role is to enable artists and audiences to take a risk," he says. "We're not here to help people do what they do for the rest of the year, and we're not here just to promote theatre done on the cheap. The Fringe should be a fertile ground for creative people of all disciplines who want to push the envelope a bit, knowing that they'll have a certain level of support with marketing, and a built-in audience."

He might be a new boy, but Gantner is neither apologetic nor shy. "The Fringe Festival needs to continue asking questions. It's not there to answer questions, or even to define what theatre is, or what dance is. It's there to ask questions and, if we're lucky, we'll get the answers on the stages of the main festival in five years time."

The Dublin Fringe Festival runs from September 23rd to October 12th (booking at 1850-3746443 or www.fringefest.com).

ESB/Dublin Fringe Festival  - ones to watch

Risk Reduction by Dislocate: The Fringe's first fling is courtesy of this Australian company who take the acrobatics out of the circus and put them into the theatre. Telescoping three days into 65 minutes, Risk Reduction takes a surreal look at the already surreal world of marketing.

- September 23rd to 27th, Samuel Beckett Centre

Garvey & Superpant$ by The National Theatre of the United States of America: It doesn't get much more select than this - a specially assembled 25-seater vaudeville theatre all the way from a basement in New York. - October 6th to 12th, SS Michael and John (former Viking Adventure Centre)

The Duchess of Malfi by Loose Canon: A new production from the Irish masters of collaborative theatre (and last year's Best Production award winners) is always a treat, but particularly when it's John Webster's satisfying 17th-century tale of the triumph of revenge. - October 7th to 12th,

SS Michael and John

Lessness by Gare St Lazare Players: Fresh from the Royal National Theatre in London, the always mesmerising Olwen Fouéré is Beckett's voice in the dark in one of two productions from this Paris-based Irish company.

- October 7th to 12th,  SS Michael and John
Ladies and Gents by Semper Fi: Two simultaneous productions are staged for two separate audiences in the ladies and gents toilets in Stephen's Green. Then it's time to swap and see what the other half gets up to. Irish company Semper Fi are also offering Within 24 Hours of Dance, a project which aims to create, rehearse and perform four new dance works in the space of 24 hours. - Ladies and Gents: September 23rd to October 12th, Stephen's Green Toilets; Within 24 Hours of Dance: September 29th, Project Space Upstairs
Fuzion by Kompany Malakhi: Fusing hip-hop, jazz, African dance and martial arts, four young dancers are joined by four musicians to explore friendship and the art of sharing a space. - October 10th to 12th, Draíocht

Blownup by métro-boulot-dodo: The classic Antonioni film, Blow Up, is suffused with video, music and a dose of theatricality to become Blownup. A world première from the English company, métro-boulot-dodo, who won themselves a following during last year's Fringe. - September 30th to October 3rd, Project Cube

I Don't Want To Play House by Playbox: Fresh from appearing in the hit play, Stolen, Tammy Anderson, a Palawa aboriginal woman from Tasmania brings her one-woman, one-guitarist show to the Fringe. - October 7th to 12th, Project Cube

Hullabaloo by Catapult Dance Company: They brought you Wash-O-Rama in a laundrette last year, and this year they're going to dance for you in a bar. Silence is not essential. - September 23rd to 28th, GUBU Bar, Capel Street

A Monarch in Hollywood by DK Productions: The chance to see one of the end results of the SEEDS initiative, a scheme to foster new writing that saw playwright Aidan Harney matched with a mentor, Wilson Milam, from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre. - September 23rd to October 12th, Teacher's Club, Parnell Square

Besamé el Cactus by Sol Picó: The Barcelona dance artist, last seen in Ireland in 1999 with Love is Fastic, tiptoes through a stage of cacti in an attempt not to get hurt. - September 27th to 28th, Project Space Upstairs

Ride by The Other Tongue: It could happen to anyone: a man and a woman wake up next to each other the morning after the night before. Stars Todd MacDonald of Neighbours in production that was a huge hit in Edinburgh. - September 23rd to 28th, Players Theatre, Trinity College

Also look out for...

Shift: Keep your eyes peeled for a series of projects by six artists, inspired by and situated in laneways, dead ends and the banks of the River Liffey.

Aerowaves: A platform of new work from European choreographers, including pieces from Russia, Estonia and Austria. - October 25th to 26th,

Project Space Upstairs

Fringe Cabaret at the Cobalt Café, North Great Georges Street, including Camille O'Sullivan (September 23rd to 28th) and Maria Tecce (September 30th to October 5th).
Get Up Live art showcase curated by performance artists Anne Seagrave and Oscar McLennan. - October 2nd and 5th, SS Michael and John