First Fortnight festival puts the art of mental health in focus

The First Fortnight Mental Health Art & Culture Festival has announced the programme for their 2025 edition, with over 60 events taking place nationwide from January 5th – 14th.

First Fortnight challenges mental health prejudice and stigma through arts and cultural action, programming events that create spaces for conversations around mental health with their annual festival every January - venues include theatres, beaches, music venues, and cafés nationwide.

This year's First Fortnight programme includes a series of especially comissioned works; composer, musical director, and musician Norah Walsh has composed a new choral piece, inspired by the vision and aims of First Fortnight - to end the stigma associated with mental ill health.

Using community engagement, Walsh worked with choirs from counties Down, Dublin, Kildare and Kerry to create the new work, engaging a collective community of over 200 people nationwide.

The piece will premiere at St. Patrick Cathedral, Dublin Thursday January 16th as part of The Art Of Mental Health, a 'joy-filled event' celebrating the positive mental effects of group singing.

Elsewhere, Palestinian native Amir Sabra explores themes of resilience and connectivity in a unique improvisational dance performance entitled Within This Party, while singer Mary Coughlan and poet Paula Meehan will steer a special evening of music and poetry at Whelan’s Live, in celebration of Nollaig na mBan.

Au Revoir Tristesse, is a new music commission by celebrated artists Joe Chester and Steve Wickham, in a music programme that also includes live concerts from Emma Langford, rising star Luke Clerkin and Megan O’Neill.

Performance-wise, Smock Alley Theatre will play host to SHAME SHOW, winner of the First Fortnight award at this year’s Dublin Fringe Festival, alongside Jenny MacDonald’s Tightrope Walker, and Peter Gowan's new play Declan’s Got Talent.

The festival also revisits the works of one of a giant of Irish poetry in A Mindfulness Tour of Seamus Heaney.

Screenings include The No Show, filmed over two years by artists Catherine O’Halloran and Grace Dyas, and telling the origin story of trauma experienced by working-class families by going back six generations to the Famine, as well as the IFTA Award-winning feature documentary The Days of Trees, Duncan Cowle’s Silent Men, and a pair of acclaimed films by director Ross Kirwan, Don’t Forget To Remember and Love Yourself Today.

The popular Therapy Sessions and Dublin Story Slam events return to the First Fortnight programme, while Where's Your Head At? by photographer Emily Quinn captures thirty people offering their takes on the topic 'How I mind, my mind’.

"We are on a mission to challenge the stigma of mental health and we do this through platforming artists who tell us their stories, our stories, and open up conversations, says First Fortnight CEO Maria Fleming. "Change is possible, change for the better is possible - come with us and be part of that positive change."

The First Fortnight Mental Health Art & Culture Festival runs from January 5th – 14th 2025 - find out more here.