Narrative Arts Club world premiere: Central Hotel, Dublin, 17 November

dublin | arts and media | event notice Wednesday October 26, 2005 03:29 by Coilín ÓhAiseadha - Narrative Arts Club 086 060 3818

New club will promote innovative, world-class entertainment for young urbanites

The world’s first Narrative Arts Club will launch in the Central Hotel, Exchequer Street, on 17 November. Opening night performers included Drut’syla Shonaleigh and dramatist-actor Tony Ferns.

The Narrative Arts Club was founded to promote new thinking in and about the art of storytelling. The club will provide an exciting and entertaining new forum for artists including screenwriters, actors, comedians and storytellers, to develop performances to enchant and intrigue inquisitive young urbanites.

To provide top-quality entertainment, the club will host some of the big names in international storytelling, and to promote a healthy interaction, the club will also invite practitioners of the other arts to prepare and present live performances. Novelists and screenwriters will be asked to throw away the script and embrace the intimate challenge of eye-contact theatre.

For our first night, we are presenting two world-class talents. Shonaleigh is a Drut’syla, a storyteller in the Yiddish tradition from Britain. With great charisma, sensuality and humour, she has been delighting international audiences with her stories for many years. She describes her show, Pandora’s box, as: “A labyrinth of stories - leave the path, step into the forest with stories of good and evil, love and lust, humour and hunger. Open the box if you dare.”

Tony Ferns is a professional actor who has worked for many years in the working-class heart of Dublin. The founder of the weekly Battle of the Axe, where singer-songwriters, comedians and other acts compete for the acclaim of the audience, Tony is at home at the cutting edge of the thriving live performance scene in the city centre. For the club’s premiere, he will perform an excerpt from his one-man drama, Articulated Nonsense.

Performers for two remaining open-stage opportunities are yet to be finalised.

By actively promoting innovation, the club will break with the dusty old cliches that haunt Irish and international storytelling. Storytelling is not exclusively rural, but vitally urban. It is not just traditional, but also modern and inventive. And it’s definitely not just for children. Storytelling can deal with all the most highly charged topics of film and other arts: love, war, drugs, prison, sex.

With its wooden floors, oil paintings and plush furnishings, the Library Bar extension, upstairs in the Central Hotel, provides the perfect ambience for the appreciation of narrative performance.

Doors open at 8 pm. Admission EUR 5. As the event is expected to sell out very rapidly, patrons are advised to book immediately to secure a seat.

For interviews, open-stage opportunities and bookings, please contact Coilín:
coilin AT aatchoo DOT com
086-060 3818