Cat Laughs in good company

ArtScape/Deirdre Falvey:Being described as possibly "the world's best little comedy festival" is not at all patronising. Especially when you're bracketed with Montreal, Edinburgh and Melbourne.

Last week the Guardian in Britain put the Smithwick's Cat Laughs Comedy Festival in Kilkenny in the top five comedy festivals in the world, saying it has "something of a cult status and discerning comedy fans head to Kilkenny when the corporate whirlwind of Edinburgh becomes too much".

The Guardian continues: "It's a comedians' favourite, too, for its laidback vibe, small venues - often tucked in the cosy backrooms of local pubs - and for the Irish craic. As Jimmy Carr put it: 'Kilkenny is what a festival should be. It's just a weekend and it's in pubs. Everyone's pissed, so they laugh anyway.' "

That may not refer to the most discerning of punters, and may feed the national stereotype, but the festival earns praise for its strong mix of Ireland's finest comics and top international acts - which is, indeed, Kilkenny's great strength.

Very nice reading, presumably, for second-year director Eddie Bannon and producer Lynn Cahill, who are working on this year's line-up for the June bank holiday festival, to be announced in late April.

Arts Council funding this year dropped from €70,000 to €20,000, so they won't be able to repeat or build on the Cat Walk project, in which Kilkenny artists created a series of installations around the town. And while they may be smarting from that loss, they are thankful to have a title sponsor in Smithwick's.

Comedy obviously doesn't have the same production costs as, say, theatre or opera, but the festival goes out of its way to bring a lot of international comics to Kilkenny for the festival, rather than just putting on acts that are on the international touring circuit anyway - and that makes it pretty costly. This year the Cat Laughs will have more than 60 comics performing, including 11 from the US, four from Australia, 10 from the UK, a couple of Canadians and one Iranian, but the organisers are tight-lipped for now about further details. They're also continuing their mentoring programme (Adam Hills, Neil Delamere, Kevin Gildea, Neil Hickey and Colm O'Regan are the mentors this year) for "early career" comics; and theatre director Jimmy Fay is working with some other young comics.

[  www.smithwickscatlaughs.com ]

Dance, dance, dance

Set dancing is an enduring social dance and it's great to see the tradition being renewed alongside the practice of long-standing sets. A new set dance joined the repertoire with the official launch this month of Sionna Set. The Irish World Academy of Music and Dance commissioned the set and it was devised and choreographed by Dr Catherine Foley, lecturer in ethno-musicology at the Irish World Academy. It premiered in 2005 and is now published as an illustrated booklet with DVD and audio CD to help teaching in schools and elsewhere.

The last set dance commissioned by the Irish World Academy was the Limerick Tumblers Set in 1997, now part of standard repertoire for Irish and US set dancers.

Another strand of traditional dance is explored in Athmhachnaimh (Reflections), a piece by Catherine Young, the dancer-in- residence with Kerry County Council. It was commissioned by the council as part of the Per Cent for Art scheme and is the first dance commission awarded under the scheme by a local authority (Per Cent for Art more often applies to public sculpture).

Athmhachnaimh (Reflections) premieres on March 30th in Siamsa Tíre, Tralee. The piece looks at the isolation of the emigrant/ immigrant and the ensemble features Siamsa Tíre's Performing Company, contemporary dancers Tara Brandel and Jazmin Chiodi, Young herself and Hamed Toe from west Africa.

In contemporary dance, Daghdha Dance Company's Mamuska Nights, which began in 2004, are going international. The Limerick dance company's loose, unstylised evenings, with unpolished works from an assortment of art forms and artists, were "exported" to the Yorkshire Dance Centre in Leeds in December and are this month beginning in Tokyo, in collaboration with Dance and Media Japan. The Mamuska Nights Network aims to build an international organisation for cultural and artistic exchange.

Daghdha is also exporting artistic director Michael Klien's choreographic work, Field Studies, which was performed by Italian-born Daghdha dancer Elena Giannotti at Mamuska Tokyo and will also feature in the next Mamuska Limerick, on April 13th in the Daghdha Space, St John's Church, Limerick. The public is invited to attend these free events. More details at mamuskanights.blogspot.com or daghdha.ie

Speaking of Irish dance internationally, Fabulous Beast's The Bull, which divided critics and audiences here at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2005, has finished its run at the Barbican in London, where it got some rave reviews. The Financial Times described it as "a savage, scarily hilarious kill-or-cure-and-don't-mind-your- language extravaganza . . . Keegan-Dolan has energy, a beady eye, a flaring sense of the ridiculous and a no less bright, if despairing honesty." And the Guardian called it "a ruthlessly comic anatomisation of greed, stupidity and corruption as the two families, their pets, their lovers, even the cast of an Irish dance show ("Celtic Bitch") are slaughtered in a deliriously accelerating torrent of tribal bloodlust. This is murderously good satire from which only the bull emerges unscathed." Both the Observer and Metro made connections with Tarantino, while the Telegraph said it was "both serious and highly watchable entertainment."

Meanwhile, Keegan-Dolan will choreograph Robert Lepage's new production of The Rake's Progress, which opens next month at La Monnaie in Brussels ( www.lamonnaie.be). It is a co-production with Lyon, Madrid, San Francisco and the Royal Opera House in London.

Irish art getting bigger

The Céad exhibition, featuring 100 works by Irish artists throughout the world, opened this month here for a special preview as part of the St Patrick's Day celebrations in China's biggest city, writes Clifford Coonan in Shanghai. The exhibition, one of the biggest shows of Irish art abroad, was previously known as 6X6 and featured works 6in by 6in (15.2cm by 15.2cm) in size, primarily to save money on postage and exhibition costs.

This year the format is more flexible, as the curators - Limerick-born artist James Ryan, Chinese artist Jiale and Germany's Arvo Brüne - sought to get away from the 6X6 gimmick and show a better cross-section of work.

"We've a better mix this year because we let people go bigger. We were more critical, though we do always aim to keep it small because of funding," says Ryan, who initiated the project four years ago.

Among the works featured are Sean Hillen's The Great Pyramids of Carlingford Lough and George Bolster's Conditioned - a print of a child with a games console for eyes. The exhibition includes work by Varvara Shavrova and Fion Gunn.

"There are not that many superstars in there, it's mostly working artists, many of whom don't get big shows," says Ryan.

The exhibition, sponsored by Culture Ireland and the Department of Foreign Affairs, was opened by Sha Hailin, formerly China's ambassador to Ireland, and Minister of State John Browne. Also there were Consul General of Ireland Nicholas O'Brien and Irish Ambassador Declan Kelleher. The show

will resume in Shanghai on April 14th, moving to Beijing on April 24th and Hangzhou on May 12th.

The closing date for entries in the Allianz Business2Arts Awards - rewarding excellence in arts sponsorship - is next Monday, March 26th. The awards will be presented by the President, Mary McAleese, on May 30th. See  www.business2arts.ie

There was a bit of a moan this week about the Abbey spending €730,000 on new seats when it is just about to move house (mind you, it's several years down the line). And other arts bodies may be justifiably annoyed that the national theatre is given multiples of what any other arts company gets in State funding.

But whatever about its hefty annual funding, this Abbey refurbishment looks like a big improvement for a lousy auditorium - and of course it may continue as a performance space in the longer term. At a tour of the work this week those involved were so enthused that you'd wonder if maybe the theatre wouldn't need to move after all. But the firm response was that the Abbey has far outgrown its present home.