The Dublin Theatre Festival starts tomorrow, and the Culture Night is running on Friday, so here are a couple of events that may be of interest to you.

First up, Daft.ie in conjunction with the Theatre Festival are bringing Playhouse Animation to the Liberty Hall. The animations will run daily from dusk till dawn, 24th September to 11th October, and you can also design an animation yourself to go on the building! You can watch the behind the scene video here, or the following video taken during a test run last month to get a sense of what’s going on.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaRKFffT3kA[/youtube]

(It reminds me of the interactive Crown Fountain at Millenium Park in Chicago, minus the fountain.) ;-)

Now, onto Friday and Culture Night. As previously mentioned, some events require a reservation ahead, and the Irish Baroque Orchestra Chamber Soloists will be performing using 18th century musical instruments (oh yes, they don’t just play Baroque music, they’re trying to keep the sound as authentic as possible!) pieces by some of the greatest composers of the era including Handel, Tartini, Vivaldi and Schmelzer.

It will be held at Walton’s Music Store, 69 South Great George’s Street, Dublin 2. The event starts at 6.30pm and the performance time is 1 hour. Places are limited. To reserve your place for this special intimate performance, please send your name and address with Baroque Tickets in the subject line to info@dublincitybid.ie and don’t forget to specify the number of attendees as well.

Have fun!

The next 7 weeks will be buzzing with numerous festivals going on in the city. We are all going to be spoilt for choice – and possibly also go broke from paying for tickets to all the tempting offerings. But, there are still some events which are free, and some which are free but ticket-requiring.

The only key is, if tickets are required (be it free events or not), get them as soon as possible because once they’re gone, they’re gone!

(Scroll over the banners to get to the relevant festival homepages)

There you have it, the major events that will keep you entertain (and out of trouble?) between now and early October.

A couple of things to note. The festivals that boast some free events are those during the Heritage Week, the Festival of World Cultures and DLR Mountains to Sea Book Festival. For the Fringe Festival, there are several workshops which are ticketed at €30 each, places are limited and can only be booked either in person at the box office or by phone.

Something for the Tweeps : @HeritageWeek, @FoWC, @dublinfringe, @DubTheatreFest and last but not least, @DUBMetblogs.

Just a quick heads-up for any theatre lover out there. The Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival is back, and will be running from 25 September to 12 October this year.

There are several performances that caught my attention, including Mozart’s The Magic Flute but in South African way, Barabbas’ Circus (this reminds me of The 7 Fingers’ Traces from last year, but more colourful and I suspect equally entertaining), and Kafka’s Metamorphosis which looks to be spectacular as the show collaborates with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

I understood from a couple of friends that the booking system went a bit crazy last week shortly after the online booking opened. A trip to the box office to clarify things up (i.e. to check if booking actually went through or not etc) ended up taking over an hour as there was quite a large number of people who were there after encountering the same issues with online booking, on top of normal theatre goers who were trying to purchase tickets directly.

It was frustrating and therefore I had opted to steer clear for a few days before making my move. Let’s hope all these are now sorted. At the very least, by the time I try to get my tickets. ;-)