From Dakota: An Audience Crushed Under Emotional Weight.

Your head must be wrapped in cling film if you haven't noticed the Fringe Festival coming into colourful effect during the week with lantren art dotting the city. On Friday I managed to blag two tickets for Colin Gee's solo performance and video installation 'From Dakota.' This work focusses on Doug, a poor rural truck driver just released from jail after being done for drug trafficing. Trapped between the material ambitions he wishes on his family and their desire for improving family relationships, he is desperate to raise cash to extract them from the isolated dust patch they call home and takes one last job in illegally transporting immigants.

Having gotten over his addiction to speed, his journey takes on a monumental significance. He is delusionally haunted by memories of missing his daughters growing up due to his work ethic. The roadside stragglers he gives lifts to along the way focus his mind and he realises he leaves home because home itself makes him homesick. With the road as his home he puts an increased distance between himself and his family, this one last job will provide the means to end all that. But as it goes dramatically wrong, Doug is led to a bewildering emotional breakdown in the thumping sun.

At this point Colin Gee stumbles on stage as the lolling half hour drama that was the video installation ends. A former clown with the Cirque Soliel, there's an undoubted tint of mime in his solo performance. Unfortunately his excellent acting does little to comfort an audience that ends up buried in the overly wrought emotional weight of a man muttering the same several lines of dialogue repeatedly for half an hour. This final descent into tripe could have been limited to five minutes and contained all the punch needed in a far more restrained fashion. Taking place in the lounge of the Mill Theatre in Dundrum, an uncomfortable twitchiness took hold of the audience as phones were checked for times with the most courteous levels of subtelty manageable.

Colin Gee's play ran in the Lounge in the Mill Theatre until the 16th of September. If you missed it consider it a saving grace that means you won't freak out and absolve yourself of all desire to visit the theatre again.

Dorfmeister: Is this really what you call the shit?

Meanwhile down at that posh crannog we like to call the Spiegeltent. A serious cock up by security led to a queue of people developing outside who were being refused entry despite having tickets to the Dorfmeister gig. Spying an opportunity for a blag, three of us joined the throng and added our own complaint to the chorus of annoyance before eventually being let in. It seems the cock up was down to the Fringe Fest rather than any attempt at unscrupulous over selling from Remedy. The gig itself seriously sucked and was totally lacking in 'oompf' with a clinical delivery of a rather smooth set of house that brought images of sleazy wine bars hurtling towards the fore front of my mind. That this was clearly lapped up by a sweaty crowd was truly beyond me.

Fucking Weirdos and Stoner Dirge.

On Saturday it was down to a Hivemind gig in the Hub to finally check out the much mooted Party Weirdo. With the Dublin underground Indie scene so small, it'd be easy for the various creatives to hype each other up through the net but Party Weirdo deserve the praise they are getting at this early stage. An odd multi-instrumental barrage of quite and loud, they pay homage to the musical weight of riot grrl before rushing the barricades of experimentation in creating a very classical NY sound that should answer the needs of Dublins art-punks for some time to come. Even the great Estel sounded quite lost after them, wheter this was because they opted to play a piece of 19 minute stoner rock dirge, complete with church bells or because I've seen them all too much before is a point up for grabs.

You can check out Party Weirdo at the next Skinny Wolves night in the Hub on 28th of September, where they will be playing alongside xBxRx from the Kill Rockstars label. Also on the bill are Ten Past Seven and Retards.

Hystereo: They Call It Acii!

With a failed attempt to get tickets for Roni Size, leaving me a broken man I bet a retreat back into the Hub where unbeknownest to me Acii Disco took off. In looking back it was probably the jammiest fuck up of a night yet, with my 8e giving me a chance to throw a gawk back towards one of the highlights of the Electric Picnic, Hystereo right after seeing Party Weirdo. Delivering some seriously heavy chops of tech -houseto an absolutely mad for it crowd, you'd be crazy to miss out on catching these guys before they inevitably fuck off to Berlin to join the other stalwarts of this scene. Dublin we have never had it so good, someone in the club described how the Acii Disco night was just like Backlash on Thursdays. I've generally avoided much of the whole Bodytonic related scene, eyeying it up as a more successful but recognisable house beast with all the burgy as fuck connotations that emerge when you take a once popular form and hand it over to nerdy middle class whites in Dublin. However, it may well be time to dip the feet in even if its well over a year late.

Hystereo will be playing the Spiegaltent on Friday, September 23rd alongside Betamax format, Porntramua and others. Entrance will cost you an unkindly fee, so sell your childern for meat now.

Labels: Acii Disco, Art, Dublin, Fringefest, Party Wierdo