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Limerick Fringe Festival 2017

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Limerick Fringe Festival is a showcase for your talent and offers a platform to try out new work, increase your audiences, gain reputation and enhance your own professionalism.

Limerick Fringe Festival 2017

Limerick Fringe festival is a new vibrant, multi-genre performance based event hosted in Limerick.

In 2017 Limerick Fringe festival will run from March 30 until April 1. The festival looks to support artists and producers to promote new, vibrant and daring arts to a wider audience utilising non-traditional spaces.


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limerick fringe festival

Limerick Fringe festival is a new vibrant, multi-genre performance based event hosted in Limerick.

Limerick Fringe festival supports homegrown creativity and welcomes national and international acts with open arms. Limerick Fringe is a showcase for your talent and offers a platform to try out new work, increase your audiences, gain reputation and enhance your own professionalism. It allows you to meet and build relationships with like-minded arts professionals and have fun along the way.

 Simon Thompson, a well-known actor and director, had been touring with the third part of his popular Clown Noir trilogy which took him to numerous Fringe events across the UK last summer.

“When I returned to Limerick I had a think about what I had just experienced and started chatting with my partner Eva. We both agreed that Limerick was perfectly placed to host a Fringe experience of a similar scale,” Simon said.

“The vibe of those Fringe events was very artist-focused. They were friendly events. You found yourself engaging with other artists, sharing experiences and skills.

“It felt like it was a community of artists coming together in a fun, accessible environment. But most importantly it was accessible to audiences,” Simon adds.

Simon was unsure of the project at the beginning and began to ask himself “People are curious, but are they curious enough to spend their money? Do they want to see something non-traditional in a traditional space?”

Eva and Simon discussed it and then opened the discussion to a wider group of friends. The Fringe group also comprises Gearóid O’hAllmhurain who works as the technical manager at Dance Limerick, Shane Vaughan who is well-known locally as the driver of the popular Stanzas poetry group and freelance illustrator and designer Rosanne Hayes.

Once the team was complete it didn’t take long for a decision to be made to simply roll with the idea.

In creating Limerick Fringe, the organising team didn’t try to reinvent the wheel.

“We took a model that has been proven to work – the Canadian Fringe model. This model takes open submissions after which a team then score each submission individually and from those scores comes a programme of events,” Simon notes.

Therefore, it is important to note that Limerick Fringe is not a curated festival. In fact, ‘festival’ is a term the guys are keen to avoid.

The entries in this year’s event include local Limerick acts, other Irish-based performers and acts from the UK, Canada, Australia.

“In fact, almost one-third of the entire event line-up is UK based, a testament to the networking opportunities offered at the UK Fringe events Simon attended last year.”

The programme is split up into eight main event categories: Cabaret, Comedy, Dance & Physical Theatre, Kids and Youth, Spoken Word, Music, Theatre and Workshops. All performers are asked ‘to dream wild, to propose mad and daring collaborations’.

The Limerick Fringe team plan to use year one as a steep learning curve and then ultimately grow year on year. The

limerick fringe festival

The venues for the featured events will include Dolan’s Warehouse and Dolan’s Upstairs

venues for the featured events will include Dolan’s Warehouse and Dolan’s Upstairs, No.1 Pery Square, the rooms of Shannon Rowing Club, upstairs at the Locke Bar and Mothers Mac’s pub. These are not your typical ‘arty’ venues.

“Quite often you hear of people whose perceptions of theatre or the arts of a stiff, shirt and tie-wearing brigade, our goal is to break down the barriers to entry certain prospective audiences have and to introduce them to a new world that will hopefully create a new hobby that can last a lifetime.”

 

To Learn more about the Limerick Fringe Festival 2017 click HERE

To check out Dolan’s Warehouse line up for the festival click HERE

 

Richard is a presenter, producer, songwriter and actor. He was named the Limerick Person of the Year (2011) and won an online award at the Metro Éireann Media and Multicultural Awards (2011) for promoting multi-culturalism online. Richard says that the ilovelimerick.com concept is very much a community driven project that aims to document life in Limerick. So, that in 20 years time people can look back and remember the events that were making the headlines.