Downtown: Cork Midsummer Festival highlights 

Over the 10 days of the Cork Midsummer Festival, there are over 40 events, concerts, plays, and art installations all over the city. Some on a large outdoor scale, others for one person to partake in at a time and plenty in between.

A few highlights running throughout the festival include Helios, a dazzling new 6m sculpture by world-renowned UK artist Luke Jerram, hanging in St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral, with each centimenre representing 2,300km of the real Sun’s surface, with a soundtrack of live NASA recordings of our solar system’s power source. It will be open on the summer solstice, June 21, from dawn until dusk — 4.30am to 10.30pm. 

The Theatre For One booth will return to Emmet Place with six different five-minute plays, performed by one actor for one audience member at a time. These uniquely intimate theatre experiences have been written by local writers, Cónal Creedan, Katie Holly, John McCarthy, Michael John McCarthy, Gina Moxley, and Louise O’Neill.

With an eye towards younger audiences, Cork Midsummer Festival are presenting Playspace, a playful and participatory project in conjunction with Cork Child Friendly City, a series of small, safe, and joyful spaces for children to play in, co-designed prototype play pods that are welcoming and inspiring, imagined for, and by, the kids of Cork City.

Some of the outdoor events that catch the eye include Storm In A Bathtub on Sunday, June 15. Cork Community Art Link promises “the most colourful, chaotic, and joy-filled parade of the year” when they bring over 120 eccentric makers and performers on a fantastical voyage through Cork’s city streets, with dazzling floats, wild contraptions, and stunning costumes in this unmissable celebration of Midsummer for revellers of all ages.

On Saturday, June 21, there will be a YouthQuake takeover of Fitzgerald’s Park, an inclusive youth event that celebrates belonging, gathering, and the expression of their generation. A sensation of delicious street food, diverse culture, games, and summer spraoi will feature energetic performances from Sauti Studios, Cork Migrant Centre Youth, YMCA Ireland, Music Generation Cork City, The Kabin Studio, and many other youth performers with surprise special guests.

On the last day of the festival, Sunday, June 22, from 12pm to 9pm, the entire city will be celebrating a cultural Night Market. Patrick Street will become a part street party, part performance and part market; a bustling space to explore, taste, and discover from stalls from local makers, artists, and producers, plus street food, sweet treats, and pop-up performers. Ticket details and further information at www.corkmidsummer.com

Of course the backbone of Cork Midsummer Festival’s programme has always been theatre and performance, and one of the Irish plays this year has the eye-catching title of The Black Wolfe Tone, a fast-paced new play covering themes such as identity, masculinity, and intergenerational trauma.

The writer and performer, Kwaku Fortune, says the title is key.

“It comes from the character trying to define his own personality,” Mr Fortune says. “I tried to write something that’s not just a straight biography, it’s a piece of theatre that’s entertaining. The guy’s name is Kevin; it’s not me. But it does contain my stories, dramatised and heightened. It’s very clear that he, like me, has an Irish dad and an African mother, so it’s my dad, but it’s also the ‘Irish dad’ character.

“I also wanted to talk about mental health, not to judge what’s right or wrong, but more about what I went through, and how mania is a positive thing in one way, and dangerous in another. I’m not a therapist. I’m not there to fix anyone. The story is what’s important.”

Performing in part of a festival gives Kwaku an additional impetus. “There’s a different energy. You’re hitting the ground running; it really drives you. There’s a good sense of camaraderie with the other performers, catching each other’s shows and there’s always a good buzz around the city.”

Another performer who knows Cork Midsummer Festival’s atmosphere well is Amanda Coogan, who is performing in Caught In The Furze.

“This is my third year in a row,” Ms Coogan says. “In 2023 I was in the Crawford with Cork Deaf Community Choir, and we made a sign-language version of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Last year, I made a bigger piece, called Possession. It was an opera in The Granary with Linda Buckley.

“These were gorgeous group pieces,” Amanda says. “This year, I’m doing a durational-endurance, solo live performance. I’m making a 35-hour live exhibition, a seven-day performance within an immersive installation of furze (gorse) bushes. I’m making it for a week with my own body, with my own creativity. That’s all I will do. I’ll eat, I’ll sleep, I’ll make live performances. I’m very much aware of the audience and very much gathering them in to the energy and the spirit of it. The piece of work is in flux. It’ll be different on the Saturday when I start, and it’ll be different the next day, and it will be radically different on the Saturday when I finish.”

Amanda continued to compliment the festival. “There’s so much different, rich work this year. Come see me, then hop over to Eileen Walsh in The Second Woman and then The Everyman for Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone, which sounds so exciting. It feeds you for the rest of the year — in the depths of winter, you’re going, ‘Remember that Midsummer Festival experience?’ Everyone brings their A-game to a festival.”

The Australian experimental theatre collective Pony Cam are coming to the festival with their show, Burnout Paradise. They have built up quite a reputation for playing with established theatre conventions, finding humour and communal connection where possible. Dominic Weintraub, one of the five members of Pony Cam, explains the idea for this production. He says: “We were making two shows and presenting a third show at the same time. Then, Melbourne Fringe Festival reached out to us, saying ‘You guys should absolutely pitch something for our festival... applications close tonight’.”

Claire Bird, one of the other members of the company, says, “I’m pretty sick of doing shows that destroy my ability to have any kind of good habits in my life. What if we do a show where we get fit during the show? So we started trying to make a show on treadmills.

“Then, the theme and the world and the silliness formed out of that, with the starting point just being, ‘We’re really exhausted, how can we try to show ourselves more self-care?’”

Hugo Williams, who is also in the show, continued on the theme of Pony Cam trying to find a creative way for them to work as a collective. He says: “Initially, we knew it can be inefficient and messy and tiring; you actually get to see all the messiness and incompleteness we are trying to interrogate. Audiences are really attracted to that, because it contains multitudes of things that are not clean, are not refined, and have the possibility to break down at any moment. A metaphor that people, when they watch this show, relate to their own life.”

Performance times and ticket information for these shows can be found at www.corkmidsummer.com