Doing a Bronco on the Falls

As part of the city's bid to become the European Capital Of Culture in 2008, there is a brochure doing the rounds at this year's festival called "2008 Things You Didn't Know About Belfast". But being a City of Culture for 12 months, as Dublin well knows, has no significant impact on the cultural landscape.

Belfast might be better off playing to its strengths and consolidating and expanding what is, for many, the best arts festival on the island. You always know the programme is going to be strong when you hear of local acts complaining that they have been sidelined by Johnny Foreigner - there's usually a good reason why acts are "local", and three weeks of the year given over to a sumptuous array of international talent is hardly going to damage the local infrastructure.

This festival is Stella Hall's first as director. Hall, who has done some magnificent work in Britain, raised a cry of "Let There Be Light!" this year and her commissioning policy is certainly illuminating. One of the fabulous features of the Belfast festival is how this somewhat introverted city (understandable given the political situation) throws open its festival doors to exotica from more salubrious climes. Last year there was a Spanish feel to the programme, this year Hall has trained her sights on Japan (the keenly anticipated Ryusei-Shooting Stars rap-opera show) and the best of British-Asian artistic expression (the Lorca-esque A Dark River and the multi-tasking Nitin Sawhney).

Given that postmodernism is very last year, it's best to describe Hall's programme as engagingly eclectic. A reading by Douglas Hurd, a talk with Marianne Faithful, a laugh with Johnny Vegas, a cup of tea with a Geisha girl (Sarah Faulkner's Tea Ceremony), a go on the swings with the Grid Iron Theatre Company, a Stars In Their Eyes opportunity to star in The Mikado (you're given 12 hours to prepare), a post-rock musical experience with Mogwai, a look at the Divis Flats as an "installation", and a welcome tour around Bollywood. There is browsing here for all the brows (high, low and middle) and a welcome opportunity to have your prejudices thrown to the blustry Lagan wind as you smorgasbord your way around the city's venues.

I'd usually make my excuses to skip anything in the dreaded "Talks" end of a festival, but there was some worthwhile stuff here. Raj Persaud (from the Richard and Judy Show!) and Simon Singh (the director of Fermat's Last Theorem) talked on "Pop Science: Fact or Fiction?". Science was examined as the "new rock 'n' roll" and the question posed was whether mass appeal would compromise the rigorous nature of scientific research.

Anybody familiar with either his book Europa or his sports journalism in the Guardian would have been fascinated by Tim Parks's talk down in the Elmwood Hall. Looking and sounding like Jeremy Hardy's older brother, Parks read from his new book, Hell and Back - a collection of essays about the art of writing.

He read from the chapter on Dante which, oddly, dove-tailed neatly with readings from his soon to be published book about the Italian football team, Verona - "the academics view my writing about football as some sort of intellectual antipodes" he remarked.

Fans of Channel 4's Italian football coverage drank up Parks's limpid and oft-amusing account of football fandom. Parks now lives in Verona and follows his team with a Hornbyesque passion. Talking about how football is experienced in Italy, as opposed to Britain and Ireland, he noted how it ignited old regional city-state oppositions and he drew a few wry laughs by talking about the great Northern/Southern divide of Italian football teams - "perhaps not the best place to be talking about North/South divides" he stage-whispered.

Parks prefers to write about the fans rather than the game and its players. He beautifully describes the "totally fundamentalist, unreasonable, childlike, and aggressive" nature of his team's supporters and wonders if, somewhat perversely, such behaviour - controlled as it is, for 90 minutes a week - represents a yearning for a "community that no longer exists, a type of nostalgic, even comic community".

Wonderful to hear how fans from Northern Italian clubs shout "We pay for you with our taxes, you criminals" at their Southern Italian counterparts. Rival communities shouting abuse at each other. The symmetry was tragic.

Passing through the Loyalist redoubt of Sandy Row on our way to the next show, we stopped to admire some ingenious graffiti - "F.A.R.C. Off Gerry Kelly"- before skipping on up to the new Odyssey Centre (is this the ugliest building in Europe?) We ended up in one of its unfinished spaces - it was like an underground carpark from the set of The Sweeney. Pushed into an inner circle, we found ourselves in the middle of some scaffolding which was decked out entirely in clothing.

As the lights dimmed, heads emerged from the clothes; on the ground, suitcases opened as if by magic and in the background was a thumping beat that sounded like Brian Eno and Kraftwerk after a night on the cider. This was the local Kabosh company's Sleep Show - and a more splendid piece of physical theatre you won't see this year.

Reminiscent of the sort of shows they used to put on a few centuries ago in the Project Arts Centre, the six dancers (two male, four female) played hide and seek with the audience - disappearing into walls, re-appearing from ceilings.

There seemed to be some sort of theatrical poltergiest at work as objects in the space opened and closed of their own accord. The soundtrack, by Dublin composer Denis Roche, soon settled into a highly appropriate industrial-electronica as we watched the magical movement of the dancers. Odd, mysterious and unorthodox - but I suspect the wonderously talented Kabosh would take that as a compliment.

Kabosh's highly stylised show was neatly complemented by the roughly naturalistic acrobatics of Edinburgh's Grid Iron company's Decky Does A Bronco.

Think of the Dogma 95 principles applied to youth theatre and you're getting there: the show took place on a blustry afternoon in a park on the Falls Road. Previous winners of an Edinburge Fringe Festival First, the eight grown-up actors play a group of nine-year-old children playing on swings and capture brilliantly the dialogue of childhood - the immediacy of ideas, the casual violence, the whole screaming, shouting, swearing enchillada. When they were not beating each other up, falling off their bikes or doing Kung Fu/Star Wars impersonations, they were attempting to get one of the group, Decky, to do a "bronco" on the swings - a rite of passage for the group members which entails swinging really high up, jumping off and letting the swing wrap itself around the bars (we've all done it - now you know the name for it).

As the people on the Falls stopped and stared at these miked-up grown actors in their shiny tracksuits, a more sinister plot was unfolding. Child abduction, sexual abuse and murder all entered the frame to disturb profoundly the Blue Remembered Hills scenario. Utterly convincing and utterly brilliant, what really powered this show was its site-specific location. The "backstage" area was one of the park's bushes, the swings were real and some local dogs effortlessly broke down the "fourth wall" by wandering into the action.

The exuberant physicality of the troupe (climbing, jumping, throwing themselves around on the muddy ground) coupled with that frighteningly authentic dialogue made this the most dramatically arresting thing I saw in the festival. One problem though: whoever was responsible for bringing the young schoolchildren to the show should have read the programme, which gave an age guide of 13-24. As wide-eyedly impressed as they were by the action sequences, the show's plot-line was way beyond them.

Still, playing on swings and galloping around pretending you're an aeroplane - I'd run away and join Grid Iron tomorrow.

Jane Coyle reports on the second half of the Belfast Festival next week. To book, tel: 04890-665577 or see www.belfastfestival.com