With incredible performances including Retro(per)spective, Shorty and COWARDS, here are some of our top picks for Live Collision International Festival 2017.

Live Collision International Festival 2017 is a curated programme of work with the value of artists and audiences, and the processes in which they converge, held central to the festival.

Live Collision prioritises the artistic rigour and trajectory of artists and their work over time (days, months, years and decades) while celebrating the moments live performance becomes realised in various shapes and forms.

The people behind Live Collision are keen for audiences to witness and meet live performance from a number of points across time, proximity and art-form.

This year’s festival presents some of the most daring and beautiful work for our time. For this year’s festival we will once again present seminal national and international artists with works never before shown in Ireland. With an inter-generational approach and continuous investigation around how and why we make live work.

Below are some of our top picks for the festival.

1. Retro(per)spective

Legendary artists Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw (Split Britches of US & UK fame) will present Retro(per)spective a medley of Split Britches performances that have made the politics of gender and sexuality and the humour of human relations accessible to all ages and persuasions for the last 36 years, from 1980 to 2016.

Here’s a little more info about the performance from the official Split Britches website:

“Split Britches was founded 34 years ago by Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and Deb Margolin in New York City. Since 1980 we have transformed the landscape of queer performance with our vaudevillian satirical gender-bending performance. Split Britches creates new forms by exploiting old conventions. It borrows from classical texts and popular myths, but its true sources are the details of everyday life. The work is personal, bordering on the private. It relies on moments rather than plot, relationships rather than story. It is about a community of outsiders, queers, eccentrics – feminist because it encourages the imaginative potential in everyone, and lesbian because it takes the presence of a lesbian on stage as a given.”

 

Retro(per)spective is a Split Britches greatest hits album for those who remember the 1980’s and a Split Britches primer for those who may have missed it! Retro(per)spective provides a humorous slant on love, life, work and play, featuring much-loved moments from old and new shows.

Featuring extracts from Upwardly Mobile Home (1984), Dress Suits to Hire (1987), Anniversary Waltz (1990), Belle Reprieve (1990), Lesbians Who Kill (1992), Faith and Dancing (1996), Salad of the Bad Cafe (1999), and Miss America (2008).

Place: Project Arts Centre, Cube
Date: Sat 22 Apr
Time: 8pm
Tickets: €16 / €14 concession

Buy tickets for Retro(per)spective show here.

2. Shorty

Hester Chillingworth, with whom we caught up with in advance of the performance tonight, presents ‘Shorty’.

Your child could do better.
A little less chatter and experimentation would improve things enormously.
As would standing in the right line and using the right loos.
Your child has the potential to be an asset to the group but needs to learn to put things away and seems not to understand the consequences of failure.
Your child is like a cheap rubber ball – neither here nor there, neither this nor that, hard to control and causing problems, blurring lines and asking difficult bloody questions.
Please see me.

Shorty is a deconstructed drag-child, who frays at the edges and plays at the edges. And almost falls apart.

This show looks at the position of the non-binary child, and the relationship with the mind when the body is under attack. It champions the not-quite, the slight and the awkward. Shorty brings a spare change of clothes to most places, and usually has to use them.

Place: Project Arts Centre, Cube
Date: Thurs 20 Apr
Time: 8pm
Tickets: €16 / €14 concession

Buy tickets for Shorty here.

3. YAYAYA AYAYAY

Ultimate Dance and Robbie Thomson present YAYAYA AYAYAY

Ultra-terrestrial temporary dance proclaiming the historic chant: tnahc cirotsih eht gnimialcorp ecnad yraropmet lairtserret-artlU

A vision of a giant or an alien with a message; Ultimate Dancer and Robbie Thomson bring discoveries from the dark places. Expect a neo-ancient display of natural-high inducing lights, sounds and trippy ritual dances.

Place: Project Arts Centre, Cube
Date: Fri 21 Apr
Time: 8pm
Tickets: €16 / €14 concession

Buy tickets for YAYAYA AYAYAY here.

4. COWARDS

Amanda Coogan presents COWARDS

A woman, the artist, lifts her dress over her head.
She becomes tangled in the fabric,
caught in the moment of taking it off.

She is joined by another woman.
She lifts her dress over her head.
She becomes tangled in the fabric,
caught in the moment of taking it off.

They are joined by another woman.
She lifts the dress over her head.
She becomes entangled, caught in the moment,
Another woman joins them, and another, and another,
and an inexhaustible other.

Place: Project Arts Centre, Cube
Date: Sat 22 Apr
Time: 2pm – 6pm (this is a durational work over this time frame, beginning every half hour)
Tickets: Free

More info about COWARDS here.

5. BITE SIZE // SCRATCH

BITE SIZE // SCRATCH is a curated fast and furious look at the current new blood / next generation artists who are making dynamic new work in Ireland. Irish artists and companies have limited opportunities to *Scratch live work, and Irish audiences have limited opportunities to engage in live processes ahead of final works. Therefore, Live Collision has curated a selection of companies to present germs of ideas / works in progress as part of BITE SIZE // SCRATCH.

Artists: Colm Summers and Felicity, Sian Ni Mhuiri and Vicki Sutherland, Ann Marie O’Connor

Place: Project Arts Centre, Cube
Date: Thurs 20 Apr
Time: 9.30pm
Tickets: €10

Buy tickets for BITE SIZE // SCRATCH here.