[dropcap]I[/dropcap]reland loves festivals. Music festivals, food festivals, literary festivals, and, of course, theatre festivals. The busiest time in the Irish theatre calendar is between September and October when a battalion of productions go up in both the Dublin Fringe and Dublin Theatre Festivals. In the past few years, however, shorter, more specific, and highly curated festivals have emerged. One such event in April was Live Collision 2014, which brought international and home-grown live performance artists to Dublin for four days. It wouldn’t be fair to label this as a theatre festival, so it would be best think of Live Collision in in terms of the byline in this year’s program, “We Are Live | We Are Live Art.” Performances included a durational piece by Irish performance artist Amanda Coogan, a multimedia and physical work by dancer Anna Furse, and an in development piece as part of a larger work called This Is My Body by Irish theatre artist Veronica Dyas.

This Is My Body presented perhaps the most discernable Live Art/Theatre crossover, as made by an artist whose theatre work includes confessional style and live performance elements. Dyas’s succinct piece reads as a dark rumination  on the state of Ireland’s self: its financial self, its traumatic self, and even its physical and sexual self. This all may sound quite broad for a thirty minute solo presentation, but in This Is My Body, Dyas is not broad, but coldly, startlingly, specific. The show commences with eerie voiceovers of worrying financial statistics. Immediately Dyas reminds us of the Ireland we don’t like to talk about; the effects of Celtic Tiger greed and the near irreparable damage to the housing market that torments Irish families. The skill in Dyas’s piece, however, much like that of Live Collision, is that while these messages may be potent, they are layered in rich theatre craft. A key element to This Is My Body is the extraordinary live action projection of a grainy but discernibly nude Dyas walking across the stage and exposing her body. After the immersive atmosphere of difficult truths and a dark, entrancing aesthetic sets in, the penny starts to drop that Dyas is drawing a significant parallel between Ireland’s body and her own. They have shared wounds and scars that won’t be going away without understanding them. It’s a vulnerable and moving metaphor that, despite its sadness, results in an empowering passion to move forward.

While This Is My Body was only one of many works in the diverse Live Collision program, it demonstrates that a new space for live performance is emerging on the independent theatre stage. Dyas’s performance probably would not have landed as well in a “theatre festival,” but in its more open ended context of “Live Art,” This Is My Body is free to ask sharper and more immediate questions.  Ireland may love festivals, but it may need to start having a more open mind with the kind of programs it produces, even if “live” doesn’t mean fun. Having a fluid yet direct open platform for a performance remains key to presenting alternative work, and Live Collision seems to have provided just that. The program’s criteria seemed to simply be any live performance that did not fall under a particular category or craft, and it is this notion of “Live Art” that seemed to open up its scope as a “kaleidoscopic adventure,” as their website reads, rather than a typical festival. As the newly christened Tiger Dublin Fringe approaches, it will be worth watching whether or not the growth of such festivals like Live Collision has influenced this year’s program, the first for new artistic director Kris Nelson.  More importantly, it will be worth seeing if the artists in our upcoming “theatre” festivals even make the distinction between “Live Art” and their work – here’s hoping they won’t.

(Image: When We Were Birds.  Image credit: Ivor Houlker)