Festival Director Niamh Murphy writes for Culture about this year's eagerly anticipated Dublin Live Art Festival (DLAF), which runs from 17-20 August.
Since it’s beginning in 2012, Dublin Live Art Festival (DLAF) has consistantly proven that live performance art doesn’t have to be an esoteric artform only experienced and appreciated by navel-gazing art college types, but instead can connect with and inspire ordinary people, who may have never heard of this slippery and somethimes undefinable form of expression.
By taking live art out of the ivory tower of the gallery space and placing it on the streets of Dublin, as well as unexpected venues like an eighteenth century neo-classical folly, DLAF has democratised live art and shown that openminded Dubliners are more than willing to engage with live art.
Each year DLAF has not only supported and promoted Irish live art, but has also brought some of the biggest names in the live art world to share their work with enthusiatic Dublin audiences. This year’s theme is Come Together, and the programme focuses on artists who use their work as a form of resistance, whether that be around ideas of eco-terrorism, LGBTI rights, the refugee crisis or chronic illness. The personal is political.
Reverend Billy Talen and The Stop Shopping Choir, a group of anti-consumerist gospel singers and Earth loving urban activists from New York, will be performing on the last day of DLAF17 alongside some of our best homegrown performers. Although the performance will be a joy filled celebration of unity through song, the underlying message drawing attention to the damage being done to our planet - and it’s effects on future generations - can not be ignored.
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In the summer of 2014, Umama Hamido travelled from her home city Beirut to the Bekaa Valley, visiting villages on the borders of Lebanon and Syria. HIND shows a landscape and the ordinary lives of the people who inhabit it. Umama will take her audience on a journey and give a new insight into the serenity and beauty of this place of limbo and it’s inhabitants as well as the reality of tensions, poverty, fear and imminent danger.
Martin O’Brien suffers from cystic fibrosis and his practice uses physical endurance, hardship and pain based practices to challenge common representations of illness and examine what it means to be born with a life-threatening disease. This is the first time his challenging work is being shown in Ireland - It’s good to breathe in (this Dublin air) promises to be an unforgettable experience for all who experience it.
Exploring the world of queer digital representation through disco, movement and cooked chicken, Robert Hesp’s piece Hard C*ckpromises to be an intriguing look at this dark, mysterious but comical land. Drawing inspiration from subjects as diverse as Ulysses, autobiography and multiplicity, Gareth Cutter’s LOAD is a steady gaze into the darker realms of penetrability, pleasure and risk, before giving masculinity a shove down the rabbit holes of its orifices and discovering a Wonderland of new identities at the bottom.
In a world where we can increasingly feel powerless and unable to turn the tide of rising hatred and bigotry, as demonstrated by the results of the American election, Brexit and the rise of right wing politics in Europe, this year’s DLAF17 artists show that protest and activism can take many forms and that through unity and shared experience we can fight back and sometimes, if we come together, we can win.
Dublin Live Art Festival 2017 – Come Together will take place in The Complex, Dublin 7, from 17-20 August - find out more here.
