Dublin Fringe Festival

If it’s September it must be Fringe time, and sure enough the Absolut Dublin Fringe Festival is just around the corner, 16 days of madness – how about an escaped Zoo, men in Pajamas, 50 naked women and a dancing minotaur for starters – running from Sept 11-26. Theatre, dance, comedy, visual & performance art, and the Absolut Fringe Factory, home to a scintillating music programme including wildly entertaining American performers Taylor Mac and YouTube sensation Miranda Sings; an eclectic Irish Music weekend which featuring Fringe favourite Camille O’Sullivan, a Pocket Jazz festival and Four on the Fringe of Folk; and an Icelandic Weekend of Music featuring Amiina, Ólöf Arnalds and FM Belfast.

Galway’s Macnas are back in town for the opening weekend with a large scale and typically flamboyant outdoor spectacle. Comedy headliners the Pajama Men are in for the duration with their high energy Last Stand to Reason, a hurricane of off-the-wall physical and verbal comedy. On the theatre front, a new show from Siren Productions gives us a contemporary and visceral take on a timeless classic, a new translation by Scottish poet Robin Robertson of Euripides’ Medea, directed by Selina Cartmell. There’s 3 new shows from ambitious young collective Theatreclub, and Ponydance will be out and about with their new show Anybody Waitin’? The Company take on the mammoth task of looking at Joyce’s Ulysses as a template for Irish identity in As you are now so once were we.

The Show In A Bag project features some of Ireland’s best loved actors performing new works created especially for them by playwright Gavin Kostick. In the dance strand there’s Muirne Bloomer & Emma O’Kane’s The Ballet Ruse, Emma Martin’s Listowel Syndrome and double bills from the likes of Fidget Feet. In Berlin Love Tour, Playgroup bring you on a guided tour of Berlin – on the streets of Dublin, and Delicious O’Grady brings you a story of love, loss and potatoes in a one-man tragicomedy set in the time of the Famine.

International work includes the bizarre sounding JERK, a reconstruction of the horrific crimes and murders of young boys in 1970’s Texas using glove puppets. Nic Green’s Trilogy, a runaway hit at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, is a celebration/interrogation of the joys and complexities of being a woman today, the first part ending with a high energy naked dance performed by some 50 volunteers.

Check it all out@ www.fringefest.com