Ark! The Lark

You'd probably assume it came from the kids, all that positive energy, enthusiasm and anticipation you sense every time you walk into the Ark. But the other day the place was shuttered up, I walked around to the tradesmen's entrance and in on a few staff tinkering with new computers, and - womp! There it was again, and not a child in the house. Martin Drury would hardly want it said, but I suspect, after a couple of hours' wide-ranging, mind-buzzing, tangent-chasing chat with him, that a good bit of that energy is generated right here, in a little corner office tucked behind the second-floor gallery.

It turns out that Drury - the founder/director of this "children's cultural centre", a man who previously worked for the Arts Council for five years, a sophisticated man whose mastery of the vocabularies of artspeak and child psychology is impressive, to say the very least - has a remarkably clear and simple management ethos: "My model for this place is a good family-run hotel."

The model holds up as a metaphor, of course. Think of, say, Disney as Sheraton, turning out an endless succession of dependable cultural products for children, like so many identical bedrooms in a towering glass-and-steel hotel. Then there's the Ark, the cosy pensione with the quirky furniture and the deliciously rich menu...

And the quality of the staff, which Drury unhesitatingly cites as the thing about the Ark that gives him most pride. "They have a level of care, a sense of this being a job worth doing."

It's down, he says, "to the way we say `hello' when the children arrive and `goodbye' when they're leaving".

Drury has been padrone for the five years of the Ark's existence. For three-and-a-half years before that he directed the Ark project to fruition. That's kind of a long time, isn't it?

"Like everyone else I look at The Irish Times on Friday to see if the job of my life is coming up," he says. But when the conversation rolls back to the ideas that govern his work here, you get the feeling he might just be in the dream job already.

Certainly he won't entertain any suggestion that a mature talent is wasted on mere kids' stuff. "A seven-year-old is not one-quarter of a 28-year-old. That's my mantra - the staff are bored with it at this stage!" Sadly, he can't chant the perception into oblivion: "There's still part of the arts profession that sees work for and with children as a lesser or incomplete or junior version of what we do in the `serious' world."

Teachers, he suggests, also "suffer from the fact that they are working in the world of childhood". One response to these prejudices, he says, is a logical one: "If your child were sick or disturbed, and you brought him or her to the doctor, you wouldn't think the paediatrician was someone who flunked the exam to be a grown ups' doctor.'

Growing-up, he says, "is a process of loss as much as a process of gain". A child, Drury suggests, can enjoy things like "fear, physicality and uninhibited joy" in ways adults don't, whereas grown-ups appreciate "taxonomy and abstraction" in ways children can't.

In the 50 or so programmes the Ark has mounted over the last five years - a mix of theatrical productions in the building's lovely little performance space and hands-on creative projects in the sunny gallery and workshop areas - Drury has sought to give children "time out of time" for them to enjoy and enhance their artistic sides. "There is a huge issue of how we construct time for children, constantly moving them on to the next experience.

It's quite important to create physical and metaphorical space for being in the moment." This elusive quality of "presentness", which he seems as intrinsic and essential to childhood, fascinates Drury. "I almost want to take a year off just to think about this - the relationship between the presentness of art and the presentness of childhood." It won't be the next year: it's a crucial time in the development of the Ark Trust (see panel); the tie Drury is wearing in the photograph (like the jacket he threw out of view of the lens) was for the sake of potential donors he was meeting the same day he met The Irish Times.

The bustling Ark, and its bustling director, shouldn't create any illusions about the poor state of children's arts provision in Ireland, Drury warns. By way of illustration, he hands me a 240-page book which is a directory of children's theatre companies in Holland. A leaflet would do the job in Ireland. "The Ark is only here because of an urban renewal project in Temple Bar and the vision of a particular person, Laura Magahy of Temple Bar Properties, who wanted to have something for children in the area."

The educational system in this State, while it has largely shed its "particular theologies", still works on the assumption that "the business of school is inculcation" - a poor working assumption for a creative environment, Drury says. And out-of-school provision is equally poor. "What we're doing here is very well understood by the Arts Council, but I continue to believe that this notion that 15 per cent of Arts Council money should be devoted to children and young people must be a typographical error - it should be 51 per cent."

When Drury spells out the case based on demography, children's economic dependency and the priority of developing new audiences and participants in the arts, it is, as usual, hard to argue with him.

Especially when the Ark has been so active in creating new audiences for its own programmes. Drury pulls the statistics from a drawer: between 1997 and 2000, a startling 75 per cent of all Dublin schools have taken part in at least one programme at the Ark. What's more, with the help of the donor-faciliated "20 Per Cent Scheme", two in five of the schools taking part have been those designated by the Department of Education as disadvantaged therefore they availed of 20 per cent off the already-low ticket prices. (The discount also applies to out-of-Dublin schools.) It means that a school-day programme in the Ark is likely to have a wider social mix that of most other children's activities.

Drury refuses to indulge in odious comparisons between an Ark programme and other, more obvious media for children's entertainment, which have their own parts to play.

"There's not a duel going on," he says. "What's important is richness in a child's life. Our business is not to bemoan what's there but to provide rich alternatives, a public place where things can happen, a place where stories and images can be made and unmade.

"If a child were to think of this place like the football pitch, the library, the swimming pool, the park - that would be mission accomplished."