Dublin Fringe Festival:Spontaneity was the key to the various live art and visual events at this year's Dublin Fringe Festival. It was not merely about artists attempting to surprise unsuspecting city-goers with random acts of performance (Lost Luggage, Somaticity), but about audience members being asked to participate in arbitrary acts of public mortification.
Between surrendering one's vanity to the whims of a scissors-wielding toddler (Haircuts by Children) to surrendering one's inhibitions to a stranger's embrace (DISCO-NNECT), this year's expanded Live Art programme was as much about challenging the audience to contribute to the performance as it was about individual acts of creativity.
It all began with Will St Ledger's Art Raid, an orchestrated burglary in which audience members were invited to attempt to steal a work of art from the gallery walls at The Hive. The idea seemed to be to test middle-class morality - to see what happens to our morals when crime is condoned. What happened was absolute chaos, exacerbated by an uncalled-for act of spontaneity that had given St Ledger some unexpected security problems before his audience had even arrived.
The exhibition rails had been stolen from the car park that morning as the artist was setting up, and the sensors he had designed to protect his artworks could not be installed. However, he had surely not expected the audience's voracious appetite for crime, either, and the gallery walls were stripped of everything - from the framed artworks to the health-and-safety signs - before the resident security guard (whose job, presumably, was to stop the stealing) had even noticed.
At The Personality Cafe, the act of surprise was the basis of the cafe's two-week programme of events; you paid €3 at the door, with no inkling of what to expect inside. Resident at the Filmbase Cafe for four hours every evening, The Personality Cafe offered a different experience on each visit, the cafe's personality sometimes transformed physically (the canteen blankness of Filmbase providing a perfect canvas - even a desperate candidate - for jazzing up) or by its staff (dressed and performing as a menagerie of mammals). However, the various artists most successfully de-familiarised the venue at a blindfolded tasting event, where the cafe's patrons could see neither their surroundings nor the artists entertaining them.
Maebh Cheasty's audio-detour DISCO-NNECT provided audience's with a different sort of surprise: it wasn't the audio-detour described in the Fringe programme at all, but an elaborate, chaotic party game for audience members, who were invited to hold hands and hug strangers, run riot through Temple Bar, do the Macarena in front of the Project, and hula-hoop to original rap songs performed by Cheasty. It is to the credit of the audience, as impulsive as Cheasty herself, that the evening worked well, although perhaps more as a social event than an artistic experience. It is to the credit of the charming Cheasty alone, however, that she pulled it off; in the hands of anyone else, it would have been an unmitigated disaster.
KuddelMuddel, the German collective noun for "knick-knacks"), was similarly reliant on a blend of personality and audience impulse for success. Comedian Priscilla Robinson invited audiences into her Pearse Street apartment for an intimate root through the privacies, the kuddel-muddel, of her life. Using a slide projector as a prompt, Robinson shared personal memories with the audience as if we were her best friends, telling us about her big fat Baptist childhood and her adolescence, which was spent in and out of therapy. The diverse geographical locations of her 13 therapists inspired a psychological map that was probably more illuminating than any brain scan. Robinson's material (herself) is certainly original; however, relying so much on empathetic contributions from the audience (any Baptists in the audience? Any junk-junkies? Any therapists? Any therapy addicts?) the comic energy always threatened to wane. However, Robinson's confidence should grow the more she performs. Perhaps KuddelMuddel is the ultimate therapy for the comedian.
In Fergal McCarthy's Memory Laboratory, meanwhile, the artist's personal memories were used to different therapeutic effect: as a way to help the artist deal with the limitations of his memory, but also as mnemonic, a way to help him remember. The exhibition was mounted inside a miniature marquee erected in the basement of Filmbase. Seven large, framed collages provided palimpsests of the ephemeral elements of the artist's mind: lists of words and their definitions, people he has met, favours bestowed upon him, books he has read, the maps of countries he has visited. The material provoked important questions in the viewer - what do we do with all the knowledge we accumulate? However, it provoked spontaneous recollections for the viewer too: empathetic remembrances of "last Friday night" and the first time you heard Joni Mitchell.
Generic1 was also all about words and their definitions. Performed in a mock-office environment by members of Default Productions, Generic1 was a linguistic duel, words being thrown across the room like weapons and then filed away over the course of a gruelling three-hour performance. With definitions coined from personal memories, popular film, and internet research, Generic1 was an exploration of the way words are given context by our experiences.
Organ City, meanwhile, was less than 30 minutes long, but just as gruelling. With atmospheric lighting, Jonathan Nagle's original sound design and spot-on split-second technical choreography, this was an intense interrogation of the idea of death as an extension, if not the ultimate embodiment, of life. The convoluted theories of Italian post-modernists Deleuze and Guattari, relayed to the audience on laptops, provided the impetus for the performance, but seemed an unnecessary and pretentious interpretative tool.
There's a lesson to be learnt there: plurality of meaning - the spontaneous creation of individual understanding - is always more invigorating for an audience than literal translation. As this year's live art programme made clear, unexpected impulses can yield the most exciting results.
... Sara Keating
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