Illustration by Alice Wilson

Dismay set over Dublin last month as the folks behind 10 Days In Dublin announced that the festival would not be going ahead this year. The festival’s director, Dan Bergin, told tn2, “It would be wrong of me to say that finances had nothing to do with it, but also wrong of me to say that money was the only reason.” Most were surprised at the news, considering the apparently roaring success of the previous runs, with events like Turning Down Sex’s Mutant Debs and Rachel Shearer’s All Talk generating a buzz that lasted long after 2013’s week-and-a-half long programme. The beauty of 10 Days was its loyalty to the all-inclusive fringe festival definition; welcoming anyone with a good idea and providing access to some of the best spaces around town for an incredible wealth of original material across every genre. The organisers took pride in rejecting a curatorial model in which judges select what they deem to be “interesting” or “good”, instead allowing the audience to decide for themselves what they thought of the all-encompassing snapshot of contemporary arts in Ireland that 10 Days offered. Last July, Dubliners could choose from up to 25 theatre shows on a single day of any style or subject matter imaginable, not to mention what was on offer in comedy, film, visual art, music, and spoken word. No small portion of these were produced by students of Trinity.

With DU Players putting on upwards of 30 plays in any 24-week academic year, it’s natural enough that this creative output would spill out all over the rest of the capital when term finished, and it seemed like 10 Days In Dublin was the perfect receptacle for this. Open to anything, the festival offered students an opportunity to take their first steps outside of the drama society, or to revise successful shows for a wider audience than their collegiate peers — Ricky McCormack brought his gripping rendition of Shopping and Fucking to enjoy another sell-out run at Smock Alley Theatre in July after premiering it in the Samuel Beckett Theatre in 2012. Gatherings like PETTYCASH’s SWEATBOX did a fantastic job of bringing together all the creative types around town and showcased the extraordinary amount of young talent coming from Trinity, the city, and all over Ireland. With the country’s only open-format festival gone, the question is: where will this energy go?

 “If you’ve got an artsy bone in your body you can give a submission to Body & Soul a shot in exchange for a free ticket to a celestial soirée in the woods”

 The answer seems to lie in the growing amount of short-burst mini-festivals and occasions that are popping up at the hands of those who would have entered performances into the 10 Days programmes of yesteryear, now curating their own work under specific themes and aims. THEATREclub are a young collective at the forefront of this mode of performance and have recently occupied the Project Arts Centre for a 3 day “public conversation”on addiction. While you won’t find a conventional play on their most recent bill, THEATREclub host a semi-regular festival of new drama, the most recent boldly titled THE THEATRE MACHINE TURNS YOU ON. Sorcha Kenny’s DOLLS and Madonna by Meadbh Haicéid both found homes here before going on to show at the 2013 Dublin Fringe Festival. They’re known for leaning on the “live art” side of theatre performance and have put on a hefty amount of “happenings” since their foundation in 2008, pertaining mostly to community development issues.

 Looking forward to late April we’ve got a newer but perhaps more regular platform of performance art taking over the city. Live Collision began as a segment of the Dublin Fringe Festival programme but is now entering its second year as a fully fledged festival of its own. Like THEATREclub, Live Collision do a lot of work alongside their annual event as a producing template, supporting experimental multidisciplinary art. They’ll concentrate their programme for 23-26 April on alternative experiences of live performance but their overall message is quite broad: 2014’s mission statement is to showcase art, questioning “our obligations to act on our political and cultural beliefs”. This year’s highlights include interactive multimedia performance, live action public artwork, sculpture, and film.

Live Collision’s programme boasts several artists who are renowned in their fields, and one of their main events is a theatrical piece made in collaboration with and about the memories of two retired ballet dancers. The festival is an exciting concept that will rattle the Dublin arts scene’s cage and promises to, above all, push boundaries, but there is less of an emphasis on emerging Irish talent in this international festival than in other summer revelries.

One place you’re guaranteed to find a heap of fresh homegrown entertainment and quite a few familiar faces is in the walled gardens of Ballinlough Castle during the summer solstice. If you’ve got an artsy bone in your body you can give a submission to Body & Soul a shot in exchange for a free ticket to a celestial soirée in the woods. Unlike a lot of festivals’ non-music stages, B&S has a great daytime vibe that attracts loads of merrymakers to afternoon spoken word and theatrics at dusk. The same can be said of its bigger sister that closes the summer, Electric Picnic, and of the biennial BIG HOUSE festival in Kildare. To perform at events like these you’ve got to be imaginative and adaptable, and this kind of festival circuit isn’t suitable for every theatre maker.

While the Irish summer festival circuit offers opportunities to perform in a wide array of atmospheres, the closure of 10 Days In Dublin does mean that the country is now without any large event that will not mould the submissions they seek to fit certain themes or styles, or even preconceived notions of what makes a submission a “worthy” piece of work. The onus is once again on performers to develop their work to suit other people’s artistic goals, or to go out on their own and establish an altogether new platform for their work like THEATREclub has done. Dan Bergin has said, “I still believe that an open-format festival is badly needed in Ireland, and that such a format can work and be a tremendous success if properly run.” Although finance was not the sole reason Bergin’s team will no longer provide for this, the Arts Council’s funding policy definitely does not work to benefit huge one-off festivals like 10 Days. Apart from the Big Five (The Abbey Theatre, Dublin Theatre Festival, The Gate Theatre, Druid, and Rough Magic), companies are only funded on a project-to-project basis, thus decreasing the likelihood for sustainability in the sector. Mini-festivals and new kinds of “happenings” continue to pop up all around Ireland thanks to groups who maintain a quiet but constant presence in the arts scene. However, a successor to 10 Days In Dublin seems both of vital importance but also of scant probability in the near future. Unfortunately a festival of this kind would only count as a single “project” throughout the year, despite its enormous contribution to the development of hundreds of Irish artists each year.