Midsummer must-sees

Dance, theatre, music, comedy, controversy – this year’s Cork Midsummer Festival looks like living up to its reputation for experiment and variety

WHERE DO YOU start looking with an arts festival programme? Particularly one with as much verve, youthful energy and cross-genre innovation as the Cork Midsummer Festival? Music and comedy gigs sit alongside experimental theatre and dance, outdoor events such as the Street Performance World Championships and the Feasta food fest.

To encourage audience experimentation as well, the festival is offering a five-for-€55 ticket deal for many shows. Here are half-a-dozen of the most interesting events to start you off:

FML (F**k My Life)

A new production for Cork Midsummer Festival by Belgian director Pol Heyvaert, who designed White Starand directed Aalst, both of which featured in the Dublin Theatre Festival. For this eye-opening piece of verbatim theatre, he works with 15 young people from Cork, who tell audiences their confessions and lies, pains and pleasures. They reflect where they are now, and re-order the priorities of adults who remember where they were then.

Everyman Palace Theatre,

June 25-July 3

Plasticine

The innovative Irish company, Corcadorca, presents this vision of an urban Russian hell by playwright Vassily Sigarev. Amid drink, drugs and sex, Russian youth Maksim retreats into a plasticine world of his own creation. Not for the faint-hearted, this promenade production features a large non-professional cast for the Irish premiere of this award-winning play.

Savoy nightclub, Patrick Street, June 14-26, previews June 11-12

The Show Must Go On

An international cult figure in the dance scene, French choreographer/performer Jérôme Bel has appeared in Ireland twice before, the first time with a controversial show that dragged the International Dance Festival Ireland into the courts. The Bessie Award-winning show he brings to Ireland this year features 18 performers, 18 pop classics, a DJ – and the audience.

Cork Opera House, June 18-19

Best Before

German “post-dramatic” company Rimini Protokoll, internationally renowned for unique and quirky shows that put real people on the stage, has created a simulated city for this production, in which each audience member navigates an anonymous avatar in a virtual video game played out on stage.

Previous Rimini shows in Ireland got audiences into a freight lorry, showed them Dublin remotely via a call centre in India and put muezzins from Cairo on an Irish stage.

Stack Theatre, Cork School of Music, June 23-26

Echoa

This exuberant family show by French company Arcosm makes use of xylophones, a marimba and drums, making music through their dance, and dance to their music. Infused with a gleeful sense of physical comedy, the performers are known for riveting that most critical of audiences: kids.

Cork Opera House, June 26-27

Philip Glass: An Evening of Chamber Music

The legendary contemporary composer and performer, together with musicians Wendy Sutter and Mick Rossi, presents a show focusing on Glass’s work as pianist and composer. A limited number of premium €100 tickets entitle buyers to a balcony seat and a post-show reception with the composer himself.

Cork City Hall, June 26