The Festival in figures

The Festival in figures

The programme for the 2011 Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival can be overwhelming at first glance. So how can you best parse the magnitude of this year’s offerings, keep score of how Ireland is engaging with the world, identify the brochure's most frequently used superlatives and appreciate just how hard Anu Productions are working? Why, in stats, of course. Here ITM spells it out for you.


Number of days: 20

Number of Productions: 28

Number of Performances: 564

Number of Performances by ANU Productions: 240

ANU.jpg

Number of International productions: 12

Number of Irish productions: 16

Number of those Irish productions with international co-producers: 3 (Juno and the Paycock, The Blue Boy, Rian)

WorldClass.jpg

Biggest number of international co-producers: 6 (with support from two more organisations) for Brokentalkers’ The Blue Boy

Number of site-specific performances: 6

Number of Irish works created by former participants of The Next Stage: 6

Number of productions carrying audience warnings: 7 (See Below)

WarningSign.jpg

Oddest warning: “This event is of a participatory nature.”

Words that leap out at you once you laboriously feed all the brochure blurb into an online word cloud generator: “World”, “Theatre” and one enormous “Festival”.

Wordle: TheUlsterBankDublinTheatreFestivalZeppelin

Number of productions inspired by Chekhov or Shakespeare: 4

Number of productions of the actual work of Chekhov or Shakespeare: 0

 

 

3 Comments

Gravatar
Chris McCormack says Wed, 27 July 2011 22:29
Fantastic! I can't quite believe that ANU are doing THAT many performances? Also, which show is ''of a participatory nature"?
Gravatar
Peter Crawley says Thu, 28 July 2011 15:28
It doesn't look plausible, does it? And the truth is that ANU aren't doing THAT many performances - they're actually doing more.

I didn't include previews in my count, which would bring the tally up to 264!

Here's how it breaks down. ANU have two productions at this year's Festival, Laundry and World's End Lane. Laundry is performed every half hour for five hours for 15 days (17 if you include the previews), which makes 180 performances (204 with the previews). World's End Lane involves a much more modest 60 performances (it has no previews).

And the show "of a participatory nature"? Well, there are two: Laundry and World's End Lane.
Gravatar
Conall Ó Riain says Wed, 17 August 2011 15:37
Interesting to see the figures like that - assumed there was a catch to the ANU performances, but apparently not!

Great to see former Next Stage participants coming through the ranks, as well.

The word cloud is actually quite a nice image, too!

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