Ciudades Paralelas

Various venues, Cork Various times Until Jul 1 €10/€8 (€60/€48 for all 8) 021-4215159 corkmidsummer.com

Cities, however different they appear, all follow similar patterns: civic centres and business districts, residential areas and industrial zones, monuments and cultural centres all stitched together with transport lines. “Functional spaces”, as the theatre makers Lola Arias and Stefan Kaegi call them, but their co-curated project Ciudades Paralelas (Parallel Cities) really addresses them as spaces for work and play.

Inviting eight international artists to chose a location in the city and work with its inhabitants to transform it, the project has modestly changed people’s experience of their cities in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Zurich – and now, in a coup for Cork Midsummer Festival, in Cork.

Part documentary, part installation, part backstage tour, the separate pieces bring audiences to meet the workers of a factory, follow a singing choir through a courthouse, see a performance in a shopping centre, peep through the windows of a house, discover prepared texts in a library, meet the maids who work in a hotel, read imaginative commentary about passengers waiting at a train station, and watch the city, under instruction, from a rooftop (left).

Formally adventurous, artistically intriguing and subtly political, Ciudades Paralelas is a gift to the city, one that makes you see things differently.

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