Our final show on Saturday.
After a 5 day jaunt in Cork, we’re back in HQ after an amazing few days at Solstice.
From Tuesday until Sunday morning, we were knee deep in one of the best arts events in Ireland. Nothing could quell the buzz in Cork. Certainly not Biblical floods, no siree. We opened Phantasm at midnight on Thursday June 28th and performed the show again on Saturday at 4.30. Both shows received nice crowds, laughs, we got some lovely feedback and it’s all going to go towards rebuilding Phantasm for it’s next run. Yup, we’ll be making an announcement about some more dates soon… watch this space and any other spaces we may inhabit.
Colin O’Brien points at us. That’s us!
For a company of up and coming pups (we’re fairly tired of ‘young, emerging’) the Solstice experience is invaluable and we couldn’t recommend it enough for other companies of up and coming pups and individual lone wolf pup types. 5 days to show your work off, watch other people’s work, network, shmooze, talk shop, hug strangers, see the sights and sounds of Cork and eat, drink and be merry. What’s not to love? The craic from the 2011 event where we performed Smitten was definitely surpassed this year and everyone was up for it. The Solstice Seven as we christened ourselves (Colin O’Brien, Hazel Doyle, John Kennedy, John Morton, Ken McGuire, Niamh Moyles and David Thompson, all anticipating newspaper coverage or court cases) got to see an absolute fuck tonne of great work all the while not darkening a bed until the wee hours of the morn. It’s a Cork Midsummer Festival thing, definitely.
Enjoying our artist packs in The Elysian.
We got to see an awful lot of shows this year and our favourites were the amazing spectacle that was Sweet Pang Is Innocent by Lady Grew, Come As Soon As You Hear‘s POP (most fun you’ll have in a theatre all year) and the poetic I Am Martin Sharry by yes, Martin Sharry! We also really enjoyed (and debated furiously) Squat by Oonagh Murphy and Louise Melinn and Circa Still, Rupture Now by Lithium. When you see this range of work there’s no doubt that the next generation of Irish theatre makers are making diverse, exciting work and we’re delighted to be part of that. They’re also great craic under one roof at 5am when improvising musical instruments.
Many taxi windows were fingered.
We want to take this opportunity to thank the curators of Solstice who have done an amazing job of creating this event. They have been so good to us and so hospitable during our two trips down. We only hope that they’re already hatching plans for next years event. So Dawn MacAllister, Shirley Somers, Eszter Nemethi and Ruairí Donovan: thank you! We’d also like to thank Lucie Ryan Donnelly and her tech crew for all their help and niceness. We need to stress how nice everyone was. It’s important that nice people get credited for their niceness.
We’re looking forward to seeing what the Solstice team will be cooking up in the future but for now, we’re immediately ploughing back into Night Of The Living Dead. All of the Solstice peeps will hopefully come on down and let us be the nice hosts in a couple of weeks. We also need to catch up on about a week of sleep too. Yawn… right, back to work.
