Dubliners are natural performers. It's something to do with the perma-grey colour of the city that encourages extroversion in individuals. It's not all entertaining, mind you. Streetshouters, bar-bores and poetic asspinchers are the price you have to pay for the odd piece of unearthed gold. It's inconsistent; you can't bank on it for nuttin'. You could kill a whole day waiting for some street urchin on horseback to drop a witticism and come away with nothing but "Ask me fart". But that's the way we roll here: brief summers and short bar openings. There is beauty, but is it ever over quickly.

On the Streets is the Fringe Festivals programme of events that attempts to encapsulate and respond to the ephemeral charisma of Dublin. It's got the loyal Fringe audience in mind but it's also constructed in such a way as to grab the public who might, when questioned what they think of theatre, reply, "Ask me fart."

The performances take place in parks and public places and they're mainly free, which is more than enough encouragement for a city where we're still burning fifty bucks on a night out, just complaining about it more. They're organised so tight as to appear almost random; sporadic performances popping up and catching the sort of people who could see themselves in drag far sooner than they could ever see themselves in a dance venue. Caught off guard, they are liable to get involved in the Fringe Festival whether they like it or not.

Transport Exceptionnels could be an homage to the construction workers and their machines that have been such a constant in the city over the past decade. A dance between one man and his digger, the dancer willing the machine, a seven-tonne, yellow beast with personality, to swoop and bow like a lion tamer. A car can be temperamental; can a JCB not suffer emotions too? Transport Exceptionnels forms one part of a trio of French performances curated by the Fringe called Equilibre (balance), important when you're being held in the air by a machine not known for its sensitivity. The remaining shows of the Equilibre series include an unpredictable tight rope ballet (Les Etoiles) and a man inside a cube filled with water, trying not to drown (NousTube # 2). Equilibre takes place in Grand Canal Square over the middle weekend of the festival, symbolic as it's also a piece of land built on balance and the hope that it won't go underwater.

Taking things to a way more intimate level, Blackbox is one of those shows where you can guarantee there'll be more people on stage than in the audience, but that's not a diss. The audience (of one) sits inside a black box with slats built into each wall; the performers then put on their show from the outside. The slats are controlled by the performers. As interesting as it might be for the one person trapped inside, anyone on South King Street that day will be presented with the way more interesting, ridiculous scene of a group of actors trying to get a warm response from an inanimate, black box. If the Parkour guys were there, they'd probably climb it.

Parkour? Remember that modern, urban sport invented by a group of French guys who lost the keys to their third-floor apartment one night? The Urban Playground will be doing public workshops and performances in four different areas around the city, no lies. Unlike the very private Pinocchio , which is a show set in a car for an audience of three. The car drives around both interacting with the city and ignoring it. At the end of the show, the driver dumps you out on the street somewhere with loose directions to get back to your loved ones. This show works particularly well for people who don't live in Dublin.

Residents of Dublin may be drawn to a show called Exposures. Calling it a show is right but not quite on the money; calling it a game is closer. Imagine you've lost your memory. Someone tells you a bit of background info about who you really were - a completely different person from who you actually are - and then you're launched on a mission to discover as much as possible about this person that you're pretending to be. The city is complicit. Shopkeepers, taxi drivers, people just passing by. You take photos as you go along and then in the true spirit of audience participation, your photos get to be part of a group exhibition at the end of the festival.

The On the Streets section of the Fringe Festival is a bit like the grandmother at the wedding trying to pull everyone off chairs to join in the dancing. It's gotten involved and it wants you to too, but there are some shows that let you be lazy. War of the Roses III and Bastien and Bastienne for example. Bastien and Bastienne is a flash mob opera, which means a Mozart score sung by three professionals and whoever else wanders into whichever park they've chosen on the day (skylarks and tone deaf welcome), and War of the Roses III is a large scale choreographed, and I stress choreographed, fight outside the Civic Offices.

Joyrides, dancing JCBs, Opera and fake blood by the gallon. If none of these things are to your taste, I hear the West is beautiful in September.

Conor Creighton