Flikkers - Come as you were, Events in MAY 2022
A series of events remembering and celebrating the Flikkers Disco era at the Hirschfield Centre and the generation who were there.
Flikkers mid 1980’s logo, designer Michael Carmody
Curated and produced by artist FRANCIS FAY and activist Tonie Walsh. Project advisors Tonie Walsh and Julianne O’Malley. Curatorial support Monica Flynn (Visual Art Curator, Bealtaine Festival).
FRANCIS FAY has been busy lately. Not only is he an internationally renowned Irish Artist and Live Performance Artist, he is co-founder and performer at LIVESTOCK (performance art platform), and most recently he has been working with Age and Opportunity’s Bealtaine Festival 2022 to bring us Come As You Were.
Flikkers - Come As You Were is series of events which will run in Dublin May 2022 celebrating and remembering the Flikkers Disco era at the infamous Hirschfield Centre, Dublin in the early to mid 1980’s.
Program of Events:
Subversive Signs
Thursday 12th May 2022
1:15pm FREE, Booking Essential
In Person Discussion
Location: Gallery of Photgraphy, Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, D02 X406
Journalist, activist and former Flikkers DJ Tonie Walsh, in conversation with Brendan Maher researcher and curator of the LGBT+ strand of PROTEST! This in-person discussion will draw on Tonie’s cherished and rare vinyl collection and the coded language and visuals of album artwork and cloud flyers from the 1980’s queer music scene.
This event is presented in association with the Gallery of Photography of Ireland
Fabulous Flikkers
Launch Thursday 12th May, 6pm
Opens Friday 13th 12pm -5pm
Runs Monday to Friday 12pm -5pm, 13th to 28th May
In Person Exhibition
Location: Outhouse, LGBT Community Resource Centre, 105 Capel Street, Dublin D01 R290
An exhibition at the Outhouse LGBT Community Resource Centre, on Capel Street, Dublin 1. Showcasing Flikker’s club ephemera and photographs from the donations of those who attended during the early to mid 1980’s. These items will be displayed alongside material and memorabilia from the personal archive of journalist, activist and DJ Tonie Walsh.
This event is presented in partnership with Outhouse
Flikkers - Queer Spaces, Queer Utopias
Friday 13th May, 6pm - 7.30pm
In Person & Online Panel Discussion, & Book Sale
FREE, booking required for in person event BOOK HERE
Location: Project Arts Centre, 39 Essex Street East, Temple Bar, D02 RD45
Chaired by Hannah Tiernan researcher, writer, visual artist and Assistant Editor GCN with contributors: David Carroll – Irish Research Council PhD Scholar, Queering the Groove; Orla Egan founder of Loafers Discotheque Cork and Cork LGBT Archive; Prof. Maurice Devlin Head of Dept. of Applied Sociology, Maynooth (former Flikkers DJ); Luiz Wellington member of the Gloria Gay Men’s Choir and Eileen Leahy, Lecturer, TCD (former member of the Shamcocks, Drag King group).
The panel will discuss the importance of vibrant spaces such as Flikkers and other community-led social spaces within the history of LGBTQ+ activism and socialisation. To quote Maurice Devlin, from the publication Fabulous Flikkers 2002, ‘Exuberance in the face of oppression is profoundly political!’
Prior to the panel discussion there will be a screening of Caroline Campbell’s film Our Love is History (2013), which revisits the politics of the Hirschfeld Centre disco. Following the discussion there will also be the opportunity to purchase signed copies of Orla Egan’s new book.
This event is presented by the Bealtaine Festival in association with Projects Arts Centre and GCN.
Flikkers: The Flashback Ball
Friday 20th May
Tea Dance, DJ Sets & Record sale 6pm - 9pm
FREE, booking essential Eventbrite BOOK HERE
In Person Perfomance & Club
Location: IMMA, The People’s Pavilion, Military Road, Dublin D08 FW31
Hosted by IMMA, this warm uop DJ Set and Record Sale at the People’s Pavilion is an invitation to experience the TEA DANCE of the queer 1980’s disco era. This event is part of Flikker's - Come As You Were, the Age & Opportunity Bealtaine Festival Commission for 2022.
Flikkers invites older LGBTQ+ people and their community to DANCE and CELEBRATE this seminal period of social and cultural activism.
The Tea Dance warm up at IMMA will feature sets by original Flikkers DJ Gerry Moore. It will revisit the Hirschfield Centre era of 1980’s disco as a prelude to the Club Event which will run from 10pm in The Cellar Bar, The Church, Mary Street (more on that below).
Tonie Walsh will also hold a record sale from his personal collection of vinyl records.
The events of Flikkers: The Flashback Ball are presented in association with hosts IMMA and The Cellar Bar, The Church, Mary Street. Funded by the Arts Council and Dublin City Council.
Flikkers: The Flashback Ball (Club Event)
Friday 20th May
10pm to late
€10 Admission
In Person Club
Location: The Cellar Bar, The Church, Mary Street, Dublin D01 YX64
This live event is a tribute to the 1980s LGBTQ+ dance scene in Dublin. Arriving from the warm up TEA DANCE at IMMA, continue to celebrate with the older LGBTQ+ community the disco era of Flickkers at the Hirschfield Centre. DJs from Flikkers disco will entertain until late into the evening, featuring DJs Tone Walsh, Brendan O’Byrne and Queens of comedy The Wild Geeze.
The events of Flikkers: The Flashback Ball are presented in association with hosts IMMA and The Cellar Bar, The Church, Mary Street. Funded by the Arts Council and Dublin City Council.
More on Francis Fay
Francis Fay is an Irish artist active on the domestic scene since 2012, and whose performance and curatorial projects have been presented nationwide at galleries, theatres, libraries and public spaces.
Recent projects include 'Your Self-Made Super Human', his 2019 performance at Wexford Arts Centre. Francis's video trilogy, 'Queering the Landscape', developed at a Tyrone Guthrie Centre residency, premiered the same year at the 'Diffraction' screening,126 Gallery, Galway. In 2016, he was commissioned by Arts Council Ireland to perform at historic Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin in 'Future Histories', a response to the 1916 Rising.
Co-founder and curator of http://livestock-art.com/, a platform building audiences and promoting Irish performance art, Francis was also co-director of the Dublin Live Art Festival 2015. He gives annual performance arts workshops to graduates of Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art and Design.
The themes of his photographic montages include self portraiture and cityscapes, specifically that of the Dublin imaginary.
“Using his body as a conduit for communion, Fay aims to reframe physical presence, offering rhizomatic reflections of the self that humbly navigate subject and environment. His practice incorporates a process of embodied knowing, exploring connection to and reclamation of the self, both in the physical reality and from/through the virtual. Each piece, though unique in tone, is honest, undeniably true to his demeanour. As a performer, Fay’s physical language is chameleonic, shifting between investigative narratives of humour, love, longing, pain and absence with confident ease.”