There is a real panoply of work within the 2010 Festival – beautiful and bold, wondrous and wild, smart and funny. Over the course of Dublin Dance Festival’s 6th edition, you can see 24 artists/companies from 9 countries over 15 days in 8 Dublin city venues. All are Irish premieres. More information here: www.dublindancefestival.ie. Box office opens on April 1st at +353 (0)1 672 8815.

 

Dublin Dance Festival and the Abbey Theatre are delighted to co-present Jean Butler in an engaging new work by Tere O’Connor. Jean asked Tere to create this solo for her, one which departs from her long history and training in Irish Dance. Entitled DAY, the piece explores the ways we come to know a person beyond the narrative of his/ her life. It questions how much we can really know someone and if our projections constitute our knowing more than the actual truth. Tere O’Connor’s work Rammed Earth was seen at DDF 2008, the same year that Jean Butler remounted her first contemporary solo, does she take sugar?, for the Festival.

 

 

Following a hugely successful season in the Gaiety Theatre in May 2009, where it received an almost unbroken run of standing ovations, and a West End Premiere, Lane Productions are delighted to announce that THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION will return to the Gaiety Theatre by popular demand for a limited run.

 

A newly commissioned solo exhibition that explores the complex and historical world of spectatorship. Adopting the early special effects technique of matte painting, Sander uses and quotes the visual intricacies associated with illusion, while critically examining the personal motivation of consumers who participate in spectator industries. Tourism, audiences, the traveller and the curious are all characters who take time out of everyday life and pay to see things. The gallery will be transformed into a single, circular screen, providing a constantly changing and looping landscape. Sander contrasts the simplicity of matte painting with the complexity of the current economic unknowns that form the background to many of our lives.

 

 

Drawings and paintings from Ukraine. Ukraine defines itself by opposition to its bordering states. It is not Russia, not Poland, not Tatar… It views its Soviet past as another country, yet the past is omnipresent: the border is porous. To the outsider Ukraine is also a fantastically beautiful space where the borders between the structures of civilisation – houses, tower blocks, railways – are constantly being assailed by nature. Everywhere there is green.

 

At two years of age, Ireland’s youngest swimming hope takes a lesson from his mother Madge, a swimming coach. Will the water be to David’s liking? Life passes and things change. David teaches Madge a dance. Changing rooms and changing roles. Dance and swimming will unite them onstage for the very first time. DDF is delighted to present this intimate new work in progress from David Bolger, Artistic Director of CoisCéim Dance Theatre. His work has received numerous international awards and has achieved critical acclaim. Madge Bolger has always had a keen interest in dance and last year performed in La Vie en Rose as part of the Bealtaine Festival. A young woman stands in front of us in a short, multicoloured dress. She finds inadequacies in herself, which she constantly attempts to overcome in order to find the freedom to which she aspires. Gribaudi takes an ironic view of the female condition through both the rigidity and fluidity of her body, arriving at a distant femininity and a joyous recognition of her own physical reality. This work by Silvia Gribaudi won the 2009 Giovane Danza D’Autore Veneto competition.

 

 

Faithless are a British electronica band consisting of Maxi Jazz, Sister Bliss and Rollo. The group is best known for their dance songs ("Insomnia", "God Is a DJ" and "We Come 1"). Faithless have recorded several albums offering a wide variety and blend of styles. During their career they have sold over 12 million records worldwide.

 

 

 

 

Ladlane formed in 2004 in Dublin. The band features Eugene Quinn from Templeogue, Dublin on guitar/banjo/vocals, Ray Dempsey from Ballyduff, Co. Waterford on accordion and Colm Keane from somewhere in north county Dublin on fiddle/vocals.

 

Mark Knopfler is a guitarist, singer, songwriter and bandleader. His group, Dire Straits, was form in London in 1977 and went on to become an international success after the release of its debut album in 1978.

 

Run in the Samuel Beckett Theatre within Trinity College. An accumulation of simple, yet ritualised movement sequences builds an increasingly poignant contrast between Hoghe and 12 young cast members, from Ireland and abroad, who join him on stage for Young People, Old Voices. Hoghe confronts elements of their lives with ‘old voices’ – juxtaposing songs by singers such as Jacques Brel, Billie Holiday and Etta James nearing the end of their careers with the boisterous, every-day activities of the young cast members. As the collage of youthful playing around builds, Hoghe’s solemn performance quality and physicality become ever more striking. A duet between Hoghe and frequent co-performer Lorenzo de Brabandere to The Rite of Spring provides an atmospheric, energetic and musical counterpoint to the displays of youthful abandonment in the work’s other sections.

 

There are influences that we carry in our bodies, in the way we move, that come from other people, places and events. This is true whether we are dancing, watching others perform or just being. In this new work, commissioned by Dublin Dance Festival, choreographer Liz Roche is creating a tapestry of movement meanings that reflect on the performer’s embodied connections between primary and secondary sources of inspiration. With a characteristically intimate yet agile movement palette, Roche and her dancers strive to bring these embodied connections, histories and perspectives to the fore. Presented as part of Dublin Dance Festival 2010.

 

 

 

Presented by Hamlet Sweeney.

 

Jonathan Ansell, who won the heart of the nation as lead vocalist in X-Factor runners-up G4, has been cast in his musical debut, starring in Bill Kenwright’s production of Jim Steinman and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Whistle Down The Wind. The musical shows how powerful love can be when the innocence of childhood collides with the cynicism of the adult world. In a stunning combination of multi-award-winning songs, powerful all new staging and epic storytelling, Whistle Down the Wind is a record breaking theatrical sensation that is both mesmerising and moving.

 

Price includes light lunch. TOM HICKEY is one of Ireland's best-loved and most distinctive actors. A founder member of the Focus Theatre, he has been a regular on the stages of The Abbey and The Gate for many years, creating some of the major roles in Irish drama. MICHAEL HARDING received the Stewart Parker Award for new writing in 1990 and he has continued, ever since, to be lauded for his work both as a playwright and novelist. His plays have been produced by The Abbey Theatre, as well as internationally, and he was elected a member of Aosdana in 2000. Michael writes a column for the Irish Times every Friday - Displaced in Mullingar - chronicling small town life in the Irish Midlands.