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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

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Comments (2 of 2)

Yeah

by Derek S

Sun Oct 30, 2005 01:05

I think this is such a geat idea.
I'd love to bing my 11 year old sister to this., but goin in town AFTER 8pm with her would never happen...
Whats up with the time???

Your little sister might not find this entertaining :)

by Coilín - Narrative Arts Club

Sun Oct 30, 2005 02:20

Thanks for your comments, Derek.

But it looks as if you've missed the point. This show is intended for adults - the same kind of crowd that might go to a comedy club or to one of the movies or plays on show in the city centre at that time of evening.

Please read this bit again:
"... the club will break with the dusty old cliches that haunt Irish and international storytelling. ... 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."

If you want to bring your little sister to a show where some of the stories presented might deal with war, drugs and sex, then you might have to bring her into town after 8 pm. And if you don't want to bring her to a show that deals with all the same stuff as the movies, then you might not want to bring her to the Narrative Arts Club. She might find some of the performances disturbing, incomprehensible or plain boring - just as she might find a movie like Trainspotting disturbing, Fight Club incomprehensible and Citizen Kane utterly boring.

Now, I can't exclude the possibility that she may enjoy it after all, but don't say nobody told you.

As the press release states, some of Shonaleigh's stories deal with love and lust. Sis might not understand her erotic innuendo.

My own repertoire of stories about war and peace includes a story called Bigots! where I recount how I traded sectarian insults with a loyalist and a republican in Belfast, and abused my status as a doctor to gain revenge. I wouldn't expect an 11-year old to penetrate the layers of irony in this.

Tony Ferns is putting on an excerpt from a one-man drama intended for adults, and I have given Ciarán MacMathúna, a professional comedian, another open-stage op.

For more discussion of what modern storytelling might be, please see the following item posted on Indymedia recently:
Narrative Arts Club to be founded in Dublin
http://tinyurl.com/8lsny

I hope you will come to the show, but please leave your preconceptions at the door. :)

Best,
Coilín.

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

Comments (2 of 2)