A look inside life in the high-rises of Ballymun or a night in pyjamas with a bunch of strangers - it's all in the name of live art at the Fringe Festival for Peter Crawley
In media artist Mike Stubbs's phrase, live art, a hybrid form somewhere between the theatre and the art gallery, "doesn't hang on walls easily and falls off plinths". Still, for all its performance experiments, live art must still warrant a certain etiquette. Surely, for instance, it would be impolite to fall asleep during it? Apparently not. Heike Schmidt's entrancing Bed & Breakfast invited us to spend the night in a hostel, where we pyjama-clad spectators peered out from under our duvets, minds hovering in that liminal space between sleep and wakefulness, as two German performers sang us to sleep with international lullabies.
It was disarming and hypnotic, graceful and startling, as Heike Schmidt moved serenely through the room performing songs, familiar and strange, over the restful strains of Franziskus Rohmert's cello. At times Schmidt sang warmly to individual slumberers, or ruptured the tranquillity with sudden starts: an unsettling Grimm's fairytale, an Emily Dickinson poem, an unexpected thump and feral chant. Waking us at 6.30am with a dissonant composition torn from newspaper headlines - "Tourist shot dead!" - they invited us all, strangers no more, to sit down to breakfast, to share our recollections of childhood lullabies. Weird, perhaps, but quite wonderful, too.
Edge 21's Who I Become was, in effect, a very wittily produced and edited radio documentary featuring mysterious and captivating personal portraits, played to an audience reclining on yoga mats with the lights out. ("Secret People. Hidden Lives. Total Darkness." ran its tagline.) Daubed with quirky sound effects, the recorded interviews allowed its subjects to reveal themselves gradually, with commentary etched in the margins. Miss Teen Dublin's insights into the boredom and responsibilities of modelling ("You have to smile a lot and be friendly") are interspersed with meowing cats, for example. But while Maria O'Leary and Annemarie Curran's production was amusing and involving, there was no sense of it requiring a live context. In the pitch-black basement of Filmbase, the communality of an audience was effectively erased. One would have enjoyed it as much were it broadcast into the comfort of your kitchen or the cocoon of your car.
Gary Coyle's mordant and morbid presentation in the same space was more recognisably a piece of live art, bearing the sutures between an exhibition and performance. Better known as a visual artist and photographer, Coyle presented his account of a life in Dún Laoghaire where the blankness of suburban experience was measured out in death and decay. "I was no more than five," he begins, "yet it is one of my earliest childhood memories."
From this first account of two children drowned in a duck pond, through to the casualties of the city's heroin problem, Coyle matches his dark monologue with striking photographic projections. Violent slashes of colour cut through background murk, just as Coyle recalls the emergence of punk ripping through the architectural ennui of Dún Laoghaire Shopping Centre. Coyle may resolve his piece with a litany of death fantasies ("Sometimes it would be a most welcome relief.") and though his demise is sardonically envisaged - blowing his brains out, contracting SARS, swallowing a wasp - it's the sort of self-indulgence that only the most comfortable and pampered fatalists can afford.
There's no easy way to get from the sea front of Dún Laoghaire to the high-rises of Ballymun. With the astonishing Tumbledowntown, though, community youth group Performance Lab reanimated one of the abandoned flats for a haunting, site-specific performance. Small audiences clustered into the concrete stairwells, cramped halls and sparse rooms while the flat unravelled its history like layers of peeling wallpaper.
As former inhabitants materialised around us, their moments frozen in time, the short scenes were by turns threatening, humorous, poignant and profoundly moving. Demonstrating some of the finest performances of this or any other festival, the delivery of the brilliant ensemble was more devastating for its controlled understatement. When Mandy Sullivan coolly relates the violent break-up of her parents' marriage, she switches on the radio and continues through the contrapuntal chatter. The quiet intensity of Nicola Parsons homecoming monologue is underscored by the steady emotive surge of a boiling kettle.
Whether or not it could be considered live art is an irrelevance. One of the most engaging pieces across any performance platform, it provided a startling view of community and common experience. The site may soon be rubble, but the success of director Louise Lowe and her cast can never be demolished. It remains, forever, a towering achievement.
