You may have noticed something odd about O’Connell Street. Something a bit off about the statues: red eyes, little Dracula capes. It can only be Bram Stoker Festival 2014 time!
The Performance Coporation aka Big House have been given the reins of the Bram Stoker Festival this year – and are goth-ing it up!
Film premières focus on the Goth music movement of the 1980s with Beautiful Noise and The Cure in Orange, the Abbey Theatre’s on-site costume store is providing capes for the unmissable Shapeshifters Ball by Body&Soul at IMMA in association with Bram Stoker Festival. There’s an unusually anarchic literary event with the Literary Death Match on Saturday night. And go under the city with Gothic Underground… There are whispers of a mysterious tunnel under the Phoenix Park, but some of us have heard more than we dare let on… Is it real? Where does it go? Now is your chance to find out the truth… With music by Tom Lane and directed by Maeve Stone, this unique performance rattles under the city for one night only.
The Zombie V Goth Dance-Off has recruited dancers online to work with Megan Kennedy of junk ensemble. Dressed in their finest bloody threads and having to chosen to dance with the goths or walk among the dead. This will be a dance off unlike anything seen before. And possibly the most demented feature of all – fall with style across the city centre: The Vampwire is a golden ticket offering – register here for the chance of a free caped flight. The Vampwire is a real and slightly scary opportunity to make like a Count transformed into a bat and zip over the city. Suitable for most ages (if not all constitutions) tickets for Dublin’s first city-centre zip wire are free, but in high-demand, and golden tickets will be allocated by ballot.
The opening film première is the extraordinary Curse of Styria featuring Stephen Rea and Eleanor Tomlinson. Directors Mauricio Chernovetzky & Mark Devendorf will be in attendance at this “suspenseful, secretive, sexy and sinister” film. Inspired by Carmilla, the seminal 19th Century vampire novella by Dublin writer Sheridan LeFanu, this film plunges the viewer into a haunted world of fantasy & obsession. Near Gone is a beautiful show which just won a Total Theatre Award in Edinburgh. Two performers have a difficult story to tell… Delivered in English and Bulgarian, with pounding gypsy-inspired music, this beautiful performance fills an empty space with two performers, hundreds of fresh flowers and a storm of emotion. And The Performance Corporation (proper) is reprising The Judge’s House for Marsh’s Library – already fully booked already, but there may be returns on the door.
The closing event is an encounter with the extraordinary Macnas, who take to the streets of Dublin as mercurial tailors with a glee for stitching laughter to darkness, summoning monsters and marvels from drains, lanes and street corners. Creatures, characters, contortions dissolve and are remade and revealed.
Full details on www.bramstokerfestival.com
Talking Movies 