2022: A Year in Review

As we set out of offices and get ready to lock up the office for a couple of weeks, we wanted to look back at what has been an amazingly busy and exciting year for us at Dublin Fringe Festival.

The 2022 edition of the festival saw 567 performances take place in 32 venues across Dublin City, welcoming more than 32,000 audience members to 54 world premieres in a programme of 65 shows put together by more than 500 artists and championed by 150 volunteers! Beginning with the smash-hit celebration WAKE by thisispopbaby and ending with Remnant Ecologies by Jony Easterby lighting up the Botanic Gardens, it was a festival to remember.

Weft resulted in 4 exciting multidisciplinary performances as part of this year’s festival. Seeing Hive City Legacy: Dublin Chapter, Spear, Filmore! and The Perfect Immigrant come to life in venues across the city, and welcoming our Weft Audience Club to festival events was a fantastic culmination of an 18 month project we’re very proud of and we hope goes on to have a meaningful legacy. Our trailblazing project partners Hot Brown Honey, Origins Eile and Carys D. Coburn made this work possible. We worked with an incredible network of artists and partners as part of Weft and we will continue this work in the years to come.

Over 12 months, we have welcomed more than 5000 artists through FRINGE LAB. Over the year the studios have played host to a selection of brand-new artists and industry leaders. We piloted the Break New Ground Bursary for artists working towards a Dublin Fringe Festival debut, initiated our new artist-led Supper Clubs and saw the return of our scratch night FRINGE FUSE. We had online and in-person activities, providing targeted mentorship opportunities, our monthly coffee morning Elevenses and presenting a series of skills development workshops with national and international mentors. We hosted six fantastic Resident Artists: Ciara Ní É, Tolü McKay, Iseult Deane, Dagogo Hart, Dara Hoban and Ian Toner and national artist residencies with Artist at Work.

We even found time for innovation, bringing to life the Make Space For Art Fund to support projects made for non-traditional performance spaces in Dublin, writing a new 5 year strategy for the organisation and introducing two new Associate Artist positions to our year round team. We’ve been busy!

There is so much to come, starting early in the new year as we open festival applications as usual in January but for now we’re off to rest and recharge.

Have a wonderful break – see you next year!