Happy 20th to the Tiger Dublin Fringe

This September sees the Tiger Dublin Fringe enter its 20th year, bringing us the best of both local and International acts.

The city’s biggest all-round festival, the Tiger Dublin Fringe, takes place from the 5th to the 20th of September. For the 20th edition, we will see 84 productions being held over just 16 days, in over 40 venues around the city.

Internationally renowned, the Festival seeks innovative and daring work that impacts, moves, and invigorates its audiences, and unlike many Fringe Festivals internationally, it is wholly curated to ensure that it remains a showcase for the best art, theatre, music and dance shows (amongst much else) touring both home and abroad. With a history of introducing artists who have gone on to become some of Ireland’s most well-known and respected acts, and with this year’s acts crossing the spectrums of dance, theatre, and music, to circus, comedy, alternative, and performance art, it’s exciting to see the new crop of talent and what they promise for the future of the arts in Ireland.

Theatre comes in the form of reimagined Greek tragedies (The Company’s The Rest Is Action, an adaption of The Oresteia, and Evan Webber and Frank Cox-O’Connell’s Ajax and Little Iliad, where the audience will play the part of the Chorus for two Athenian soldiers returning from war), explorations of identity and of disability, love, and of action.

Music will be made when Meeting House Square becomes the home for an exciting and extensive line-up of concerts which amongst many others will see performances from the likes of Jape, Inuit throat-singer Tanya Tagaq (who has collaborated with everyone from Björk to Mike Patton, and who will be performing with a live accompaniment to a silent screening of the controversial 1922 documentary Nanook of the North), as well as a much-fêted return from Camille O’Sullivan who comes back to her Fringe roots in a special show called 20 – INTIMATE AND LIVE, in honour of the festival’s 20th birthday.

Dance will see performances set in forests (Philip Connaughton’s TARDIGRADE) and collisions between choreographers and dead poets (Matjia Ferlin’s Sad Sam Lucky) amongst so many others, whilst the rest of the Festival’s line-up promises moving, comedic, and though-provoking works on Irishness, gender, and the Deaf community, with the odd joke about light bulbs and Enda Kenny.

The intent and scale of the Festival is evident from the opening-weekend activities which on Saturday 6th of September will see a free large-scale spectacle on the Samuel Beckett Bridge in the form of HARP / A River Cantata – a retelling of the myth of Dagda’s arrival to Ireland. Presented by Ulysses Opera Theatre, the show will combine a stunning lighting display with live choral work and musical performers. Above all else, this is an opening show that really promises to get you in the spirit of the Festival, and is something that no one should miss.

The Tiger Dublin Fringe Festival runs from September 5th-20th 2014. Tickets can be booked online now or are available from August 20th via phone on 1850 FRINGE (1850 375 643).