Essences of social change: City Fusion, interculturalism and the Dublin St. Patrick’s Day festival in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland

This article examines the Dublin St. Patrick’s Festival’s official intercultural parade performance group, City Fusion, through my perspective as a volunteer artist and group facilitator in 2009. By tracing City Fusion’s 2009 process from concept to performance, I critique the project’s reliance on performative ‘essences’ from various minority groups. These dramaturgical choices reveal City Fusion’s version of interculturalism as negotiated primarily by Irish(-born) artists and designers, resulting in a refusal to situate participants’ histories, issues and performance techniques in context. City Fusion’s blind spots ultimately reveal key challenges hindering dialogical theorizations of interculturalism in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.