CROSS // WAYS
TALLAGHT
30 SEPT
–03 OCT
2026
Rossnowlagh, selina-bonelli, 2023, Photo by Thomas Reul.
Waiting for Babett, Debbie Guinnane, 2015. Photo by Christina Georgiou.
I Cants, Jayne Cherry, 2019. Photo by Stuart Calvin.
About Cross // Ways Tallaght
Participating Artists: Selina Bonelli, Sandra Corrigan Breathnach, Jayne Cherry, Beth Greenhalgh, Debbie Guinnane, Marianne Marcote, Ciaran O'Keeffe, Megan Scott and Tess Wood.
With Livestock Xchange Participants: Karl Mooney, Cormac O’Connor, Róisín O'Rourke and Emma Thornton.
Cross//Ways Tallaght Performance Art Festival will take place from 30 September—03 October in Rua Red and at various sites across Tallaght. Following the journeys of Uprooting Tallaght, Re-rooting Tallaght, and Becoming Tallaght, the fourth edition of Rua Red’s Performance Art Festival turns towards the crossroads, not as a place of arrival or departure, but as a space of encounter.
Curated by Francis Fay and Olivia Hassett Cross//Ways Tallaght is an ambitious four-day Festival showcasing the work of nine performance artists, along with Xchange performance jam and culminating in an artists’ symposium. This year we are delighted to introduce the Livestock Xchange Mentorship Performance Programme, the programme supports emerging artists in the development and presentation of live performance with support from Katherine Nolan, Livestock Live Art and Paul Regan, Xchange.
Drawing on the Irish crossroads as a place of encounter, the festival transforms Tallaght into a living space of possibility. Rooted in local histories while looking towards new horizons, Cross//Ways Tallaght invites artists and audiences to pause, meet, listen, and consider not only which direction we take, but how we might travel together.
Performances
Remnants by Ciarán O'Keeffe
30.09.26
14:30—15:00
- Location
Rua Red Gallery One - About the Performance
If you look you can see the remnants of the roof of the original St. Maelruain’s Church clearly etched across the front of its remaining tower. Most of us simply walk on by, totally unawares. In this performance piece Ciarán sings, talks and moves through that idea of remnant, of what is left behind. From the enormous expanse of God and the universe, he threads his way to a small collection of personal memories of his mother. In an effort to restore their significance or at least to invite people to stop for a few moments, rather than just walk on by, totally unawares.
I am not afraid if you are with me by Jayne Cherry
30.09.26
15:30—16:30
Performance alongside artist film Hermostatis, screened throughout the festival.
- Location
Rua Red Gallery Two - About the Performance
"My body has been keeping stories and holding score for a long time.Of things that I felt I had moved on from long ago.It told me—in the language of illness and collapse. I am sifting through things that are older, that have been passed through the female line of those who came before me.These ladies were never given names for their grief that received no enquiry or compassion.Their needs were neatly folded and placed in a cupboard until they had time to see them. Which did not happen.I am turning towards what has been quietly waiting to be seen, working to reframe this inheritance at its rupture, using materials and my body."There is a laying to rest of fertility and how it was celebrated during Druidic times. Older women were not forgotten and were respected. This thought process has changed with each new era until there is now a negative connotation to maturation. Tallaght has strong roots in celebrating the old and the natural and how each milestone of our individual lives should be welcomed and shared with the community. This way we can all move together, without fear of the unknown.
Treo by Sandra Corrigan Breathnach
01.10.26
14:00—15:30
- Location
Rua Red Gallery One - About the Performance
Treo explores the paths that we take in life, these paths can be many, vary in direction and can have lasting consequences for our own lives and the lives of others, which can impact the world as a whole, directly or indirectly through the interconnected nature of all life here on earth.This piece recognises both the privilege and freedom of being able to make choices, together with the inability of choice at times and the gift that it is to be alive, to experience life together as we navigate our lives here on this planet.Within this piece Corrigan Breathnach will create a Performance Drawing usingdrawing sticks that she has made from willow she had grown and her own hair. With willow connected to emotional healing and hair to holding memory.
Jailbreak: Servy’s big day out by Megan Scott
01.10.26
13:30—14:30
- Location
Mr. Price, Airton Road → AWS Data Centre, Belgard Road - About the Performance
Jailbreak is a site-responsive interactive performance piece exploring themes of big data, AI, eco-tech and one soldier's experience on the wrong side of a war. Set against the looming but unassuming facade of Tallaght’s massive data centre, a structure designed to be forgotten and overlooked, the piece will invite the audience to the liminal backstreet of a corporate parking lot to turn this void into a stage for science fiction, surreal absurdist comedy, and existential horror.Using embodiment as a core method, Megan’s current work explores modern technomany, play and ritual, surreal storytelling and clowning as process. She looks at wetware, digital hauntings, and her own guilt at her occasional passive use of LLMs deep in the night, to stop a thought spiral or help her draft an email she’s been putting off for 2 years.
Why are you hiding that smile? by Tess Wood
01.10.26
15:00—16:00
- Location
Lidl, 24 Main Rd, Tallaght → St.Mary's Priory - About the Performance
"I’m curious about the idea of hiding: why do we hide, when do we reveal ourselves, and what parts of ourselves do we choose to reveal, to whom and when?I love that a building can be built around a practice that is in service of something larger than the self. I’m interested in the cloisters as a space where monks can walk, pray and be with their thoughts; turning things over again and again, considering wishes. Submerging themselves in contemplation. A historically male privilege. So what about other bodies in that space? What wishes can be cast? And how might this space help us to think about wishes, hiding and revealing? How can hiding help us contemplate? I’m keen to work with a few simple materials: the voice, movement and the body in relation to the architecture. Some text might emerge from the site. Maybe some digging could help… maybe I’ll have a shovel… I’ve also recently been thinking about how we might find new connection to our environments by allowing a little more of the animal in us to come through. I’m curious about what kind of animal might emerge from the cloisters. Bats perhaps?"
An Opening by Marianne Marcote
01.10.26
16:00—17:00
- Location
St. Mary's Priory - About the Performance
An Opening is an invitation to enter.
Enclosed behind the walls of the Priory is a garden not ordinarily open to the public—a world within the city, present yet unseen.
For a moment, the garden opens.
A gathering takes place between this living world and the bodies that arrive as witnesses.
There is no beginning.
There is no ending.
Only arrival. Presence.
Listening.
Leaving.
Rooted in butoh and embodiment, the performance unfolds as a ritual of attention. The garden becomes a threshold, where the boundaries between human and more-than-human, city and nature, body and environment begin to blur.
A place becomes briefly available.
A trace.
A disturbance.
An opening.
And perhaps—only perhaps—something shifts.
Cloud to Ground by Debbie Guinnane
02.10.26
Part I: Flaming Trees 12:00—12:30
Part II: Widemouthed Flowers 15:00—16:00
- Location
Part I: Rua Red Part II: St.Marys Priory - About the Performance
‘The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall.It is like a prayer to what is empty.And what is empty turns its face to usand whispers:“I am not empty, I am open.” (Vermeer, T. Tranströmer)For this performance there are two parts which may remain cyclical in your imagination. The title nods to the lightning strike that struck and split Maelruan’s Tree in the Priory garden into several parts, which took root and regrew, in 1797. Cloud to Ground is a creative morphogenesis contemplating through movement and material transformation the moment that lightning strike occurred and the trees’ re-emergence, and on the Céile Dé in the time of Máel-Ruain (and potential anchoresses). Both immediate expression and lifelong forms of devotion contain instances of both rupture and rapture that are generative and emergent, igniting emotional states that are conditions of heightened participation in becoming.
Noise From Over There by Beth Greenhalgh
02.10.26
13:00—14:00
- Location
Rua Red Gallery One - About the Performance
"I have a new job where we’ve been discussing time travel and listening to classic hits from the 80’s.Tallaght, I time travel back in my head and listen to voices visit and inform me of parts of it, I’m struck by the smell of biscuits and gravestones facing east. There's something in distance and thinking about a place. Taking these impressions of this place, finding meaning or small threads of connection. Communication through video captured on a phone, seconds swiftly brush the fence, electrical box, carpark.I’m investigating sounds, the small buzzes that places emit into their surroundings.I’ll likely have a cardboard box, some green chalk and small sculptures that represent insects.Watching David Attenborough the other day. There were these insects that made sounds, like synths or car horns.‘This is my leaf’ ‘meeeeeep meeep whooooo’ attracting mate ‘danger’ it bows its head and lifts its pincers.My works often take the form of spontaneous experiments with body, movement, sound and installation. Inner landscapes and intuitive explorations merge with physical places, while conscious and unconscious thoughts become patterns for investigation and discovery. Nothing is ever definite, but everything here happens with reason."
known unkowns by selina bonelli
02.10.26
13:00—14:00
- Location
Talbot's Leap - About the Performance
The landscape can be seen as a site of known unknowns where one can sense that stories lie unemerged, held and hidden within the system of imperialist violence. They are situated at lines that intersect and entangle with the current necropolitics—a politics of death—at play on both local and global scales.Known unknowns relate to unemerged stories of the past present and future held in the land.Conceptually linking the passage of the watercourse that once supplied the old mills in Tallaght, to the voracious needs of Amazon Data centre, the site of Talbot’s Leap becomes the door to questions about our complicity in consumption to the expense of others. This site then acts as an interlocutor and also a facilitator for future witnessing as we ask Talbot’s Leap, now already dry, what the future of climate catastrophe holds for us.
Tairseach, selina bonelli, 2022. Photo by Shiro Masuyama.
Unconcious Content, Beth Greenhalgh 2025. Photo by Pete Evans.
I Cants, Jayne Cherry, 209. Photo by Stuart Calvin.
Mentorship & Events
Livestock Xchange
Mentorship Performance Programme
30.09.26
11:30—13:30
- Location
Rua Red Gallery One - About the Programme
A collaboration between the performance art platforms Livestock and Xchange, the programme supports emerging artists in the development and presentation of live performance. Participating students and recent graduates of NCAD, TU Dublin, and IADT, will present a vibrant showcase of emerging performance. Artists Karl Mooney, Cormac O’Connor, Róisín O’Rourke, and Emma Thornton will present newly developed live performances. The event marks the culmination of their participation in a mentorship programme led by artists Katherine Nolan and Paul Regan.
Cross//Ways Panel Talk
03.10.26
12:00—14:00
- Location
Rua Red - About the Performance
To mark the final day of the programme, join us for a panel discussion with the curators of the Cross//Ways Tallaght Performance Art Festival, Francis Fay and Olivia Hassett, alongside festival rapatteur Clodagh Assata Boyce. Together, they will reflect on the week’s performances and explore the wider context of performance art in Ireland.
Xchange Performance Art
03.10.26
15:00—17:00
- Location
Rua Red - About the Performance
Xchange is an open and improvised group performance jam which takes place bimonthly at Rua Red.Inspired by the monthly meetings organised by Bbeyond and in response to the lack of similar opportunities to perform collaboratively and improvisationally in Dublin Xchange was founded by Olivia Hassett and Paul Regan. Xchange seeks to provide a platform to create live art and to explore encounters not only between those who take part but also those who witness. Our objective is to promote performance art in the local community and beyond as an unconventional and vital art form for the times we live in.
Jailbreak, Megan Scott, 2026.
listening between materials, selina bonelli, 2024. Photo by Thomas Reul.
Rewriting a Memory, Jayne Cherry, 2015. Photo by Stuart Calvin
Dance Alone, Ciarán O'Keefe, 2021. Photo by Louise Haugh.
Unconcious Content, Beth Greenhalgh, 2025. Photo by Pete Evans.
Monitor, Marianne Marcote and Paul Regan, 2026. Photo by Kristaps Dublans.
Waiting for Babette, Debbie Guinnane, 2015. Photo by Christina Georgiou.
Thorn III, Sandra Corrigan Breathnach, 2025. Photo by Sandra Corrigan Breathnach.
Gathering, Tess Wood, 2026. Photo by Peter Evans.
Featured Artists
Jayne Cherry is an artist living and working in the countryside of Co. Down Northern Ireland and was brought up with a deep respect for the ground we walk on and all who breath upon it, even those we cannot see. Having been a nurse and garden designer explains her penchant for spiky, uncomfortable forms which often include death and other references to our own mortality. These then contrast with rotund, touchable elements that she then 'stitches together' using skills which are new and old to her. Performance actions keep her attached to the realness of her existence and inform her sculptural and text work.
Ciarán O’Keeffe is a writer and spoken word performance artist. His work focuses on the personal, exploring love, loss and the possibilities of hope. 2026 highlights include the publication of his memoir notes on love and desire, a performative reading from notes at Carnegie Library, 2D work in Correspondences, The Curators Gallery, Paris, a lead role in the short Irish language film Idir Dhá Thrá, and performing as his alt-cabaret alter ego Smilin’ Kanker in Heartscrapes, St. Andrew’s Community Centre, Drag Night, Drop Dead Twice, and at the Project Arts Centre’s Open Day. His solo dance piece, Dance Alone , NCAD Gallery, 2021, was selected by Pallas Studios’ Periodical Review as one of the significant art works of 2021. In 2014, for his solo play, An Insignificant Man, he received a Best Performer Nomination at the Dublin Fringe Festival. As Smilin’ Kanker, he was crowned Alternative Miss Ireland, 2009.
Sandra Corrigan Breathnach is an Interdisciplinary artist and curator, working mainly in performance art, her practice includes elements of sculpture, drawing, photography, video and sound. Upcoming projects include, Tulach, Culture Night, 126 Gallery, Galway, 2026; Solas-Hikari, Live Art Ireland, Tipperary, 2026. Recent performances include, Éirí, MEM Festival, The Guggenheim, Bilbao, Spain, 2025; Bealach, Werft-Wind, MOSI, Braunschweig, Germany, 2025; Portal, R6 – Releasing and Healing, Kinematica Theatre, Ishinomaki, Japan, 2024; Twentyfour, Fukushima, Japan, 2024; Fluid, Beyond the Soul, Chino City, Japan, 2024; Within, PEPA, Est_Art Space, BMAV2024 Biennial, Madrid, 2024. Recent Projects include, Sound + Vision, The Nest, Sligo, 2026; The launch of (PiA) Performance Inter Action, 2026.
Megan is an multidisciplinary artist whose work engages the public through creating surrealist situational art. She works with electronics, digital media, print, video, sound and performance to create installations and interventions. Her work is often site-specific and influenced by technology, witchcraft, sketch comedy, clowning, and neurodivergency.
She is co-creator of Hi-Vis Witches, an art collective in the guise of an occult construction company, who run participatory performance events to highlight housing inequality, ecological justice and manifest collective spells through art, comedy, fabrication and ritual. Hi-Vis Witches have presented their work nationally, in Belfast, Louth and Dublin, most recently as part of Dublin Fringe Festival 2026. Megan is an active member of Dublin's vibrant improv theatre and alternative comedy scenes and festivals around Ireland.
Tess Wood is a multidisciplinary performance artist and movement practitioner working between Wales and London. Their practice explores relationships between bodies, landscapes and more-than-human worlds through movement, performance, sound and site-responsive research.Their work often begins with a particular place and asks how we might pay closer attention to the environments we inhabit. They are interested in the body as something porous, changeable and capable of relating to the world in unexpected ways.
Tess holds a First Class BA (Hons) in Sculpture & Environmental Art from Glasgow School of Art and is currently completing an MA in Creative Practice at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. Their work has been presented across Wales and the UK, with an ongoing interest in bringing experimental performance into conversation with different communities and places.
Marianne Araújo Marcote is a performance and theatre artist whose practice spans over 30 years and centres on the embodied connection between body, mind and spirit; between impulse and action; and on performance as a vehicle for the exploration and expression of Self.
Her current artistic work is informed by Butoh, somatics, and her practice as a transpersonal dramatherapist. Through these intersecting fields, she explores the role of presence and the impact of internal and external landscapes on both performer and viewer. Responding to impulse and site, moment to moment, her work is an ongoing search for existential meaning, deeper embodiment of Self, and a closer sense of connection. She approaches performance as a ritual act of transcendence and transformation—a vehicle through which to travel beyond, let go, and become.
Debbie Guinnane is an Irish visual artist whose work has been presented both nationally and internationally, including at SPILL Festival of Performance, National Theatre Studios, London; Arnolfini Arts Centre and Gallery, Bristol; Sculpture Workshop Reykjavik, Iceland; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; Baltic 39, Newcastle; Catalyst Arts, Belfast, and at the Interakcje Performance Festival, Poland. Her work is featured in the book Performance Art in Ireland: A History, edited by Áine Phillips.
Guinnane’s practice has been shaped extensively through immersive experiences living and working within rich, dynamic cities and cultures across the world, and wild and remote landscapes. Such depth and breath of immersiveness informs her understanding of the body as an instrument of perception, highly responsive to ritual, weather, landscape, rhythm, risk and change. Across her practice, Guinnane asks: how does attention translate into embodied knowledge? Knowledge acquired through presence, attunement, sensory attention and sustained encounter.
Beth Greenhalgh is a performance artist based in Wales, working across live art, sculpture, sound and installation. Her site-responsive practice explores place, ritual, popular culture, history and uncertainty through intuitive and experimental encounters between body, object and environment. Her work is often collaborative and open-ended, bringing artists and audiences together through shared processes of experimentation. Beth is Creative Director of tactileBOSCH, an artist-led organisation based in Cardiff, and in 2022 founded SGÔR, a collective dedicated to developing and supporting live art practices.
selina uses performance art to explore spaces that allow for marginalised voices, fragments and the imperceptible connections that conflict shatters, to emerge. They are particularly interested in how site responsive performance art can create spaces outside of language allowing expansive readings of barely perceived stories in and around conflict.
Through performance, sound and poetics they are developing a methodology of what witnessing can be within performance art practice to dys-cover, un-cover and re-cover the resonances trapped in ruins, utterances and hauntings.
selina is a founding member of SITE, a queer collaborative group making work in the public realm, a member of Live Art Ireland, PAE-Aktionslabor e.V. and an associate artist at Performance Space, UK. They are currently a PhD researcher at Ulster University, exploring how site responsive performance art and its methodologies can open up spaces for a shared withnessing between living and non living bodies and elements.
Paul Regan [b. Dublin 1970] has a background in painting and image making, holds a MA in Visual Arts Practices IADT Dublin. Recurring themes in his work pertain to faith, religion, ritual, cultural identity and misappropriation. In recent years, he has developed a live performance practice to expand on ideas of compulsive action through site-specific interventions and activism. He has presented and performed at several international platforms including Manifesta [Zurich], The Venice Biennale, Art Basel Miami, Documenta [Athens], Venice International Performance Art Week, PAB Open Bergen [NO], Performance Crossings Prague, Riga Sculpture Quadrennial, Performensk [Minsk], National Palace of Culture Sofia [BG], Akademie Schloss Solitude Stuttgart [DE]. He has been involved with Rua Red’s annual performance art festival programme, co-curating in 2024 and 2025 also has been involved with Live Art Ireland, having previously served on the board.
Katherine Nolan is an artist, lecturer, and curator. She works primarily in live and lens-based performance, investigating themes of gender and embodiment in live and digital spaces. Her recent project Fluid Flesh explored the maternal and the mortal through embodied experiences across performance, photography, and audio-visual installation.
She has performed extensively at international venues such as Supermarket Art Fair Stockholm, MeinBlau Projecktraum Berlin, Mobius Boston and Panoply Performance Lab New York. Other notable performances include a twelve-hour durational as part of Future Histories at Kilmainham Gaol (2016). Solo exhibitions include Fluid Flesh (2021) and The Mistress of the Mantle (2017) at MART Dublin. Recent group shows include The Irish Contemporaries (2023) at the Centre for Irish Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and Hold on Tight (2022) at The Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast.
She is currently a Lecturer in Creative Digital Media at Technological University Dublin and co-curator with Livestock: Performance Art Platform.
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 Livestock 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.
Olivia Hassett is a performance artist who frequently collaborates and engages in interdisciplinary projects. She earned an MFA from NCAD in 2012 and a BFA in 1997. Hassett regularly performs with Bbeyond in Belfast and co-founded Xchange, an open platform for collaboration among live art practitioners, dancers, poets, activists, and sound artists, alongside Paul Regan. She is also a founding member of several performance art collectives: Cerberus (with Rachel MacManus and Deej Fabyc), Synaptic Space (with Rachel MacManus), and pre form (with Alan Delmar, Debbie Guinnane, Alan Magee, Ciara McMahon, and Tanya O’Keeffe, 2012–2014). Notable interdisciplinary projects include Diaphony, a permanent sculpture at Tallaght University Hospital inspired by dermatology consultants during a two-year residency, and the Trinity College Trees collaborations and exhibitions with Professor David Taylor, David Hackett, and TCD microscopic lab staff in 2017 and 2019.
In addition to co-curating the Becoming Tallaght Performance Art Festival and Xchange event with Paul Regan this September, other upcoming events include Push/Pull, with Rachel MacManus as part of Synaptic Space for the Clifden Arts Festival, and preXchange group performance with Paul Regan and invited artists Lauren Kelly, Fenia Kotsopoulou, and Marian Marcote at Rua Red for Culture Night.
