TD 1
It’s Brave. It’s Wild. It’s Bold – and it’s happe
ning from September 6th-21st right across the city in a variety of shapes and forms… That’s right. Dublin Fringe Festival is back, and its 2025 iteration promises to raise the bar even further than before. WORDS Emer Tyrrell rom well-loved comics and queer cabaret to live visual art displays and work that grapples with everything from motherhood to club culture to climate change, there’s a perfect offering for every kind of art lover and joy seeker in this year’s programme. I sat down with the newly appointed Festival Director – but longtime aficionado of the trade – Bee Sparks to find out just what the team have in store for us this year. Dublin Fringe is “unusual in being a fully curated fringe,” she explains. Some work gets programmed by way of invitation from the festival, while the majority secures a place through the annual call-out for submissions. This year’s curatorial call-out to artists pivoted around ideas of “urgent pleasure” and “care”, Sparks furthers. “Everybody at the moment is really in need of joy, but also in need of, kind of ‘ethical joy’, if that’s a fair way to phrase that? You know, the idea that there’s space for joy in resistance, joy in protest, joy in community… So, we wanted to combine those ideas of care and joy and explore how we can be active and ethical in our joy seeking.” The truly special thing about an interdisciplinary arts festival like Dublin Fringe Festival is the sheer breadth of experiences it offers. “You could plan a full day and see live art, see comedy, see something that feels like it’s really asking big questions about the world, and then go to a cabaret show and dance until one in the morning,” Sparks points out, adding that this is an experience you just “don’t get in a lot of cultural offerings.” A priority for Sparks as Artistic Director this year, has been maintaining this range programmatically, as well as artistically, so “that there’s things you can do from home, there’s big fun nights out and there is work asking those big questions,” to ensure the programme has as many points of access as possible. e Festival Change As part of this, the festival will offer a number free, outdoor and unticketed pieces of work. One such is a live mural painting by eight artists from Minaw Collective – an allfemale street art collective – in the outdoor courtyard of The Digital Hub on September 6th. The mural will then be available to view for the duration of the festival. Another is ‘Performing Memory’, a large-scale dance piece about grief and mourning brought to life by Coiscéim Dance Theatre on September 19th and 20th & 21st, in Fairview Park and Wood Quay Amphitheatre respectively. Another production, Holdings, will offer a remote art experience that can be enjoyed from the comfort of your home. This piece includes a mail-out and a phone call element, and pokes out ideas of data collection and security, and what it really means to own a home. This experience is available from September 5th-September 12th. 21