The Heart Room Experience

Concept by Outlandish Theatre

Created and performed by James Hosty

Dramaturgy by Maud Hendricks

Creative Production by Bernie O’Reilly

Outreach Artist Fióna Bolger

Poster and Logo Design by Luna Hosty

Outlandish Theatre is one of Ireland’s key participatory theatre platforms. We co-create important theatre and performance projects through community collaboration which places the individual central to their own representation. Outlandish Theatre operates from a belief in cultural democracy and genuine social engagement, using experimental and participatory processes to connect to people who may have no history of cultural engagement. We invest in long term partnerships with local communities, actively inviting inter-generational diverse community participants as vital co-creators in the experimental process. Outlandish Theatre is rooted in Open Theatre Practice (OTP), where performance research into our everyday lived experience takes place. Participants are invited to experiment in performance making within a structured methodology. The findings contribute to the arts ecology in today’s world. OTP and our direct engagement with institutions and organisations in arts, health and community contexts, lead the way to artist led master projects. The master projects and OTP interconnect symbiotically. Our long-term objective is to develop and create new audiences and creators through participation and exchange within local to global contexts.

Maud Hendricks is Artistic Director of Outlandish Theatre, first company in residence at the Coombe Hospital, in Dublin 8. Maud creates new experimental and socially engaged arts projects within a community, arts and health context, using theatre conventions in non-traditional places to explore what self-representation means in today’s society.

Maud is a performer, performance maker, writer and director inspired by the absurdist every day, who questions human/nature and creates performance experiments with people in spaces applying theatre conventions freely. Inspired by the Sublime, the live and recorded performance body speaks inter-media non-sense in a world in the final stages of the Anthropocene.

James is a dance artist and collaborative movement facilitator and advisor who works between the disciplines of dance/corporal expression, sound and image. He is inspired by the late ceramic artist Maureen Hosty for non-functional functioning objects, Jacques Brel for his words-on-page-to-character-to-stage journey, Sindy Sherman for autonomy and survival in the studio space. He solo creates sound and film scapes responding to the moment, environment, painting spaces with body, light and sound. James has experience in working in collaborative socially engaged arts and health practice in France in a psychiatric day care Centre Hospitalier in Pézenas in collaboration with Sylvie Baudier.

Funded by The Arts Council and Dublin City Council

Supported by The Coombe Hospital

Presented as part of First Fortnight Festival