The Dublin Fringe’s 2024 festival has officially wrapped, concluding with an award ceremony on Sunday, September 21. The Maestro & The Mosquita took home the coveted prize for Best Production, while LGBTQ+ artists and plays were crowned winners of several of the other 18 categories.
The awards were decided by a panel of 15 judges, who deliberated over the 75 events that took place across the festival’s 30th birthday celebration. The queer productions and performers that were successful in their categories include:
Best Performer
Marty Breen, creator and star of the explosive drag cabaret BITCH, was awarded Best Performer alongside Chicken’s Eva O’Connor.
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Best Ensemble
Illness as Metaphor by Dead Centre took home this prize, which they share with anseo’s Let’s Try Swingin’. The former is adapted from the 1978 book by bisexual writer Susan Sontag, and deals with the stigmatising language surrounding illness.
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Judge’s Choice Award for compassionate engagement in multidisciplinary art
This award went to First Trimester by Krishna Istha. The interactive show saw the performer aim to find the “perfect” sperm donor while exploring human connection, parenthood and what it means to make a family as a transgender person.
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First Fortnight
Created to recognise productions that challenge prejudice and stigma around mental health, this award was presented to SHAME SHOW by Colm McCready and Fergus Wachala-Kelly. The show is described as “a lip-syncing, talent-searching, Joe McElderry-ing comedy of catastrophic proportions,” that deals particularly with gay shame in Northern Ireland.
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The Listowel Residency: The George Fitzmaurice Award
This prize connects an experimental artist to St John’s Theatre in Listowel, providing them with a two-week residency and €1,500 bursary. The winner for this year is Bill Harris for Accessor, an audio-based ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ game set in Dublin’s streets and establishments.
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Next Stage wild card
With this award, Dublin Fringe gives one person involved in the festival a bursary that enables them to participate in Next Stage, an artist-development programme run by Dublin Theatre Festival and Theatre Forum. This year, the prize went to Alice Quinn Banville for their work in Monsters by Venus Patel.
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Radical Spirit
BITCH’s Marty Breen took home their second award of the night with this category, recognised as an Irish artist who is dedicated to making bold, contemporary work, embodying the radical nature of Fringe.
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For the full list of Dublin Fringe Festival 2024 award winners and nominees, click here.
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