Emergenza is the world's biggest festival for unsigned bands, with an average of 6,000 bands participating every year in 200 different cities all over the world. Every year the national finalists gets to spend three days in Germany at the Taubertal Open Air festival, where the world final takes place, with an average of 30,000 people showing up over the weekend. This is where, every year, the best band wins a professional production for their first album and where plenty of other musicians are rewarder for their skills with prizes from the festival's sponsors.

 

First hosted in 1992, Ireland’s most established new band showcase has provided a live platform for scores of up and coming Irish acts over the years. Recent acts to have featured include Fight Like Apes, Declan O’Rourke, Halves and Delorentos to name but a few. Ronan Yourell from Dublin band Delorentos said of the tour “It was an important step in the development of our band as we gained invaluable experience through the gigs and also met some really cool people!” A number of artists will be chosen from the tour to perform in a ‘Best of Showcase’ gig which will take place in Dublin venue The Academy on May 1st.

 

Best known as the hilarious and outrageous Jake Steven's from Naked Camera, PJ has been wowing crowds all over the Ireland, and released his first DVD ‘Take After Yourself and Be Smile' in 2007 and now currently on release is his new DVD "Just Jokes". PJ tears through his hilarious live set with his customary manic energy. No one show is ever the same. His numerous TV appearances include The Tubridy Show, Podge and Rodge, The Miriam O'Callaghan show and 1 to remember with Brian Kennedy.

 

 

MCD's blurb: "This blissfully funny show follows the incredible adventures of our handsome hero Richard Hannay, complete with stiff upper lip, British gung-ho and pencil moustache as he encounters dastardly murders, double-crossing secret agents, and, of course, devastatingly beautiful women. Irish audiences will have their own opportunity to see the West End’s longest-running comedy "

 

 

Between Metaphor and Object features a range of works from the IMMA Collection, primarily sculptures and installation works from the 1990s. It provides perspectives on the diversity of practice that is represented in the IMMA Collection from this period, explores its particularities, and considers them in the context of international trends of the decade. The title of the exhibition references perceived polarities in art since the 1960s and also proposes the idea of the continuous flux visited upon artworks in the mind of the viewer between symbolism and objecthood. Notably the exhibition incorporates a number of pieces from the Weltkunst Collection, which is on loan to IMMA since 1994. This significant collection of British sculpture and drawings of the 1980s and ‘90s will return to the Weltkunst Foundation in 2010 and the exhibition acknowledges the generous loan of these works.

 

History is just buried truth; all that we are left with is a fiction based on something someone once sang. A darkly comic tale of three murderers and what they found on the night they broke out of jail. From an idea by Alice Bourke comes Coconut Raft, a new play with live music, written and performed by unlikely collaborators Seán Carpio, Bobby McGlynn and Bryan Quinn.

 

Nobody has ever seen a living dinosaur, but scientists can give us a good idea of what they looked like and how they moved. We often imagine dinosaurs as colossal flesh-eating beasts that lived on our planet for an incredible 160 million years. Some were indeed gigantic, but many were only as heavy as a Labrador dog and many were vegetarian! Did you know that the Ornithomimus could run faster than an Olympic sprinter? See how the sociable Triceratops lived in herds, caring for and protecting their young. Meet Dilophosaurus, a relative of the first dinosaur found in Scotland. Come face to face with the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex, one of the fiercest land predators ever known. This massive animatronic model, 4 metres tall and 7 metres long, is so lifelike you’ll think it’s the real thing! Walk past the head of a hungry Tyrannosaurus and watch as his terrifying jaws go SNAP!

 

World music tunes.

 

 

 

First hosted in 1992, Ireland's most established new band showcase has provided a live platform for scores of up and coming Irish acts over the years. Recent acts to have featured include Fight Like Apes, Declan O'Rourke, Halves and Delorentos to name but a few.

 

This play established Brian Friel's reputation as a world-class writer in 1964, and became the toast of Broadway in 1966. A timeless study of youth, old age and the chasm that divides them, the play is that rare thing: a popular masterpiece.

 

Freelance photographer Hazel’s first solo show, specially commissioned by The Mill. From live music to fashion shoots, Hazel’s energetic work captures the essence of the moment, creating scenes of high drama juxtaposed with her stylized compositions and settings.

 

ngie McLaughlin, a Scot transferred to Dublin via San Francisco, meets Gary Fitzpatrick (Great Western Squares, Pincher Martin, Ciunas) through a mutual friend. He agrees to bring her to an open mike night in a pub, the host doesn't show up, and the bar owner asks the two to takeover. After a few weeks of terrible poets and singers the pair decide to change the open mike policy and build a band instead to indulge in their passion for all things with lyrics, regardless of genre. After two years of carefully being unaware of what they were doing, The Sick and Indigent Song Club had grown to a multi-instrumental six-piece band.

 

Includes light lunch. Emer O'Kelly of the Sunday Independent wrote: "a heart-searing, heart-searching piece of work, provoking tears and haunting the soul. If it doesn't live in dramatic memory, we have neither folk memory nor capacity for pity..... Harding's performance is nothing short of glorious -- a piece of sustained dramatic economy that is performance art of soaring, incandescent strength. Every gesture tells, every step is measured, every pause significant, every subtle change of tone adding to a threnody for a dying soul.....If audiences are not hanging out of the rafters in future venues, there is no soul for drama in Ireland."

 

 

This is an experimental exhibition which attempts to addresses the question of what happens when artworks become part of a collection and are subsequently shown in many different contexts. Working from a potential list of works, the artworks will be changed during the course of the exhibition, with removal of artworks generating absences which call to mind gaps in our memory and point to the partially hidden nature of Museum collections. Additions of works will draw out new and perhaps unexpected associations, and new narratives will emerge within the overall structure of the exhibition. Other strategies such as repositioning works within the exhibition will be used to alter the pace of the exhibition. A list of these potential works will not be disclosed in advance.

 

 

 

‘It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood’ Over 400 years after it was written, Shakespeare’s dark depiction of ambition, guilt and murder continues to send a shiver down the spine. Macbeth’s sword is still wet with blood when he returns victorious from battle, a loyal servant to his King and a hero amongst his comrades. But when three weird sisters cross his path with mysterious prophecies, Shakespeare’s fearsome tragic hero comes face to face with his most fierce opponent yet – his destiny. Swayed by promises of greatness and the demands of a power-hungry wife, Macbeth swathes his way to power – and moral decay. Rooted in the Irish landscape at the time of Cromwell, this muscular new production from director Jimmy Fay (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Playboy of the Western World, Ages of the Moon) lays bare the darkest side of human nature. Macbeth continues our commitment to presenting the work of William Shakespeare and follows our productions of Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and The Comedy of Errors. We are delighted that Aidan Kelly will play Macbeth and Eileen Walsh will play Lady Macbeth in this thrilling new production.

 

Weaving The Cry is based on Riders to the Sea by J.M. Synge