Dublin Theatre Festival artistic director Róise Goan reckons that “attending the Theatre is a really exciting rehearsal for a more interesting life”. We sat down with her ahead of this year’s Festival to expand on that theory.
Dublin Theatre Festival returns September 24th with more than twenty shows over eighteen days. This year’s programme covers a breadth of genres and subjects, with both Irish and international work selected by artistic director Róise Goan.
Speaking about the festival, Goan comments on the responsibility that she felt when putting together the programme. “I would be very conscious in my role that Dublin Theatre Festival is the premier platform for the presentation of international theatre on the island of Ireland,” she says.
Expanding on this idea, Goan talks about the need for the Festival to serve the audience, and that she selects works with the audience in mind, while also balancing the need to accurately portray “the story of what’s happening in international theatre to an audience in Dublin right now”.
The Artistic Director understands that theatre can be a hard sell to people who don’t have much experience with it and may have the wrong impression of what theatre is and what it can be.
“I think we have this idea often in the media that theatre is a place where you see old Shakespeare plays with actors in ridiculous costumes, but actually theatre as an art form is very porous, is very broad, and contains a lot of work that’s on the cutting edge and is very much not a play,” Goan says.
This year’s festival includes many world premieres, as well as international shows making their Irish premiere, serving as a cultural exchange of sorts, with many shows produced by international companies.
“We bring the best of international theatre that Irish audiences have never seen, and then we also bring new Irish work to both a local and an international audience. And that’s the kind of thing: it’s the best of the world to Dublin, and the best of Dublin to the world,” says Goan.
Goan lists some “really exciting” Irish work premiering at this year’s festival, which include Heroes of Tomorrow by the Brokentalkers theatre company, XNTHONY LTD’s Lourdes! The Musical, as well as ZINC, a co-production between the Irish Dead Centre and Belgian Théâtre De Liege.
For Goan, a part of her job is to find the connections between the audience and the work. Using Heroes of Tomorrow as an example, Goan says it is a show for people who are into news podcasts. Heroes of Tomorrow also highlights the communal aspect that is so important to live theatre; without the existence of the fourth wall, everyone is keenly aware that they are all in the same room together.
Goan describes Lourdes! The Musical as “playing with the cultural tropes of the story of Saint Bernadette and Lourdes, but also ideas of what pilgrimage is,” also describing it as a “really great night out”.
Goan notes that a show like Lourdes! The Musical plays on the conversation between the old and the new; another example of this is Let Me In, by playwright Esosa Ighodaro, which uses the story of the three little pigs to tell a story about modern-day Dublin.
Blind Boy’s Animals, on the other hand, brings forth “the kind of new mythologies that are being created”, as he draws on the absurdist Irish writing that has influenced his own short stories.
“It also includes the kind of persona of Blind Boy and how we, how we read and understand him as a kind of mysterious masked figure in, in kind of contemporary Irish society,” Goan says.
One notable aspect of this year’s festival is the Festival Forum, a series of talks discussing themes relevant to the work performed on stage. These talks include On Bodies & Borders, (dis)Ordered Publics, and Body Horror.
“Body horror is a big one for us this year with the presentation mostly of Florentina Holzinger’s TANZ,” says Goan. “Florentina Holzinger is one of the most famous artists in the world right now and this is the first time her work has been presented in Ireland. Her work is very spectacular. It’s very visually arresting.”
“She is using this trope of beauty and majesty but also the grossness and possibility for horror in the human body and particularly in the female body. I find it really interesting that so many of the most exciting artists working across disciplines are using horror.”
Goan notes that, again, in TANZ, the conversation between the old and the new is very much in play, with the body horror structured around a ballet lesson.
“I think often artists who are making contemporary theatre work use that kind of metatextuality or that idea of like the stories we know, the stories we all know and kind of how we can play with the things that we already know to create new meanings and new stories,” Goan says.
Bringing together theatre from around the world, ZINC is an Irish/Belgian co-production performed in multiple languages, including English, Irish, Flemish, French, German and Luxembourgish, with English captions. ZINC is an adaptation of a book by David Van Reybrouck.
“This is another one for people who are interested in the news or interested in geopolitics, like at this moment in time, where there’s a war happening, and ultimately that war comes down to access to and control of natural resources that are finite and depleting,” Goan says.
ZINC tells the story of a town that is now located in Belgium that changed borders five times in the early 20th century. The reason for this was because of a valuable zinc mine that was located there.
“The show explores the life of this one person and the idea of changing citizenship and changing borders, and how that impacts the body and the human experience. And I think that’s absolutely relevant and urgent to the world we’re living in now,” Goan says.
“There is a sense of it being something that’s kind of historical, but also very much about the things that are happening right now.”
An important feature of the festival is accessible performances, including Irish Sign Language interpretation, captions, and audio description. One show that particularly shows off this aspect of the festival comes from Dublin Theatre of the Deaf, working with Amanda Cogan, Lianne Quigley and Alvean Jones.
“They’re presenting a kind of installation performance of Dignity by Teresa Deavy, a really famous Irish playwright, who’s kind of lost to history. In the 1930s, she was the most prolific playwright whose work was being presented at the Abbey Theatre.”
Deavey went on to write radio plays. Goan notes that this presents an interesting tension within Deavey’s work, which is explored in this production of Dignity.
“The play explores this tension of what it means to have your work shared in a medium that you can’t yourself access. The show is this immersive performance, uses her text Dignity, which is a radio play she wrote, but places in this context of both the radio studio and the audiology lab, which are spaces that have completely different functions, but actually look and have a lot of the same instruments and look quite similar,” Goan says.
“That’s really interesting, I think, for a show that offers one kind of experience for a deaf audience and a different kind of experience for a hearing audience and understands that we can never really have the same kind of experience, but each can equally be valid.”
The festival also includes two operas at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of presentation. Colm Tobin’s contemporary opera The Testament of Mary is described by Goan as “a straight opera.”
“The Testament of Mary, which Colm has written the libretto with a composer, Tarek O’Regan is a kind of a retelling of the story of Jesus Christ from the perspective of his mother, and kind of challenges the creation of the foundational narrative of the four Gospels by, by placing the story through the lens of his mother.”
Contrasted with this is Hysterically Shopping!to Some Sort of End… “a contemporary experimental music theatre work that’s about a woman who falls in love with a cash register”.
“It’s about this culture of overconsumption and buying things so that we can feel better, and digital saturation that results in this kind of need to be satisfied by that kind of dopamine hit of when your basket becomes something you’ve bought,” Goan says.
Goan also said it was important to encourage people to step outside their comfort zone by including challenging work in the festival, as well as international work people might not usually see in Ireland.
“I think that the international programme we have this year is exceptional. They’re really amazing shows, but they ask a lot of the audience. A show like the Brotherhood is incredibly rewarding, but not necessarily for the faint hearted,” Goan says.
“It’s so exciting for us to be able to bring an artist like Carolina Bianchi to Dublin. And with her work that really takes up a kind of intellectual and emotional space that is so daring and audacious, and really, really pays off for the experience of the audience who go on that journey with her.”
Goan understands that a work like this is not going to be for everyone, as it goes into some pretty challenging ideas about life and art.
“I think that in this show, she’s specifically talking about how the Brotherhood colludes in art. It’s about system design, and about patterns, and about how we end up doing the same thing over and over again and how we might break free,” Goan says.
“Ultimately, I think it’s an extremely hopeful work, and a work that really rewards an audience who are willing to go on a somewhat, at times shocking, but very rewarding journey. So that’s my hot tip.”
Goan notes, however, that not every international show is quite so challenging, and there are plenty of shows there for people looking for something overly complex, pointing to MAMI from Albanian-born Mario Banushi, which she describes as “a purely delightful, extraordinary experience” that is “absolutely gorgeous.”
The festival also includes shows that Goan refers to as “great nights out”, including the previously mentioned Lourdes! The Musical and Mami, as well as RADIO BETTE, a show inspired by a rehearsal recording of a Bette Davis radio broadcast, from US theatre company The Goat Exchange.
“There’s something there for everyone,” Goan says, but still encourages people to take a chance and go a bit outside of their comfort zone. “The best things in life are always a little bit scary. That’s the thing I would say. Do we want to be bored? No.”
Goan has noticed that people do not necessarily want to watch things that might be challenging, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic, with people who don’t want to go out of their way to take a risk on something.
“People are like, ‘I can’t cope with watching anything challenging. And I understand that. But also, we’re alive.” Goan views theatre as the perfect place to explore challenging ideas, and uncomfortable feelings. “When you’re sitting in a room in a theatre, you’re safe. A thing that might be a little bit edgy, or uncomfortable, or challenging, it’s not happening to you,” Goan says.
“I come back to the oldest of the oldest philosophers, Aristotle who basically said that the reason theatre is useful is because it helps us rehearse our emotions. The things that are happening on stage are not happening to us.”
“But actually, by experiencing them and witnessing them, we can practice resilience. We can practice and rehearse our own emotions and our own emotional responses in a way that’s safe, because the bad thing is not, or the scary thing, or the exciting thing, or the lovely thing isn’t happening to us, it’s happening in front of us.”
Words: Adam Jackson
Feature Image: The Brotherhood – CADELA FORÇA TRILOGY – Chapter II – Mayra Azzi
Dublin Theatre Festival runs from September 24th to October 11th.
Tickets and info: dublintheatrefestival.ie
