Curatorial Call Out 2021: Superflux

The turntable is playing monoculture, and it’s time to change the record. Disrupters and romantics, firebrands and savants, ground-breakers and gas bitches, long-form thinkers and internet impresarios, culchie queens and inner city queers, magic-makers and art-dorks, provocateurs and paint-splattered princettes, mothers of invention, back-alley banshees, and the sharpest tools in the box; Dublin Fringe Festival is yours, whenever you’re ready to press play. 

We’re living in superflux, a rushing spiral of chance and change. Listen closely. It’s an abundance, an overspill, an endless surging flow of possibility. The floor is pulsing, futures are unfurling, we’ve never felt this way before. Give in to the pull. Held between stillness and chaos, the next is out of reach and all there is is now. We need artists to stand in the centre of the spin and sing. 

In your visions, we find an equilibrium, a space between the beloved and the undiscovered. Here, we can repair, prepare and play. Reality is flexing on us. Risk taking is required to find a new direction. It’s the perfect moment for new voices and new artists to cut through the noise. Introduce yourself, we want to hear from you. We’re ready to listen.

Shift our paradigm behind the bikesheds. Share your strange encounters and your most revelatory discoveries. Embrace the unreality - languish in the awkward and revel in the surreal. We want to disagree, to have juicy conversations that keep us up at night, to feel the sting of recognition for a place we’ve never been. 

Steep us in joy. Embolden us with wonder and let comedy eat the darkness. Take silliness seriously, treat mess as mandatory and pleasure as a principle. Set up a peep-show in our kitchen, open trapdoors in our floorboards, ask us to dance. Bring back the thrill of happenstance, the ripple of shared laughter, the grip of anticipation before the drop. We can’t wait to lose control - and there’s no one we’d rather get lost with than you. 

We will always be drawn to the things that draw us together. We want to overload on intimacy: the jagged and the soft of it. We want the kind of experience you have to detox from afterwards: bring us your grubbiest fantasies, your edgiest jokes, sharing with strangers and glitter-caked shower drains. Luxuriate in the beauty you find in the quiet: the collective settle as the lights dim, the percussive shifts of a dancer in their virtuosic flow, the dangerous closeness of whispered secrets after-dark. We’ve been homesick for our favourite venues, missing our hometowns while we’re in them. Reunite us.

In this state of flow, we are earthed by togetherness. Give us a reason to be back in the room. Send us dispatches from the superflux with artworks that are:

- Wild Let’s overdo it. The spirit of the dancefloor, perfect mayhem and untamed escapades.

- Beautiful We’re longing to feast our eyes. Give us the sensorial, the lush, the vivid. 

- Radical Genre-defying, game-changing approaches to art-making. Be at the vanguard of formal innovation.

- Kind Centre care in your practise. Shake up convention - shift schedules, open doors, consider your audiences.

- Undiscovered Harness the unknown and hold us in thrall to it. Shock yourself. 

- Eternal Resist the zeitgeist. Go further. Tend to the inextinguishable.

This September, the festival will be a playground for possibility. We want to run ourselves ragged, chasing after your big ideas until the sun comes up. Let's spin stories, catch the undercurrent, hop the fence, edge our chalk on the ground. Let’s see-saw together on the edge of the future.

              - Ruth McGowan, Festival Director and Bee Sparks, Artistic Projects Manager

For information on applying to Dublin Fringe Festival 2021, click here.