Re/Minding Your Step

Poised for another phase of redevelopment, Dublin’s Docklands becomes a mise en scène in an initiative bringing together choreographers and urban planners (Photo: Marcel Bassachs).

What activates a space? For Italian translator and dance curator Giulia Galvana, it’s a single step. Her initiative Mind Your Step, a two-day event involving a performance trail and a symposium bringing together choreographers and urban planners, is based upon a singular principal: movement creates centres of activity. Now brought to Dublin in collaboration with dance managers Eleanor Creighton and Argyris Aryrou, its arrival is timely. With the Docklands poised for another phase of redevelopment, this provides an opportunity to explore how public spaces are explored and presented.

Exorcising Traumas at First Fortnight Festival

Eleanor Tiernan's National Therapy Project sets out to heal the Irish psyche by satirising past miseries. 

It speaks volumes that First Fortnight, an arts festival that runs the first two weeks of each year with the aim of challenging prejudice to psychological well-being, brings its audiences through the doors of St. Patrick's Hospital, the country's largest mental health provider. Passing staff, doctors and visitors bring the otherwise un-reminded reality of illness and recovery into view. It proves the length of which festival director J.P. Swaine and his team are willing to face stigma head on.