A drop in China's cultural ocean?

By our standards the Festival of Irish Arts and Culture is a big event. But how much of an impact can it make, asks Rosita Boland

The city of Beijing is on such a massive scale that the search for green begins to hurt the eye. Every gaze returns steel and glass: scores of metal cranes swivelling on endless building sites, crowded six-lane highways and vertical horizons of impossibly tall buildings, marching in to a seemingly everlasting distance. Beijing, capital of the People's Republic of China, is enormous: it has a population of some 15 million people and a staggering 80 kilometres of suburbs. It's so big that it takes you a long time to get in to, a long time to get out of and a long time to get around.

Given all this, you'd wonder if it's possible to measure the impact of a foreign arts festival in such a big city. The Festival of Irish Arts and Culture in China ran in Beijing from April 30th until Saturday. A broadly similar programme of events continues to run in Shanghai until June 16th, when the Rejoyce exhibition opens there, at the Lu Xun Museum. Among the events in Beijing were three performances of the Gate Theatre production of Waiting For Godot, a traditional-music concert hosted by Donal Lunny, a piano recital by John O'Conor, three performances of CoisCéim's Mermaids, a dance collaboration between the choreographer Liz Roche and the National Ballet of China, club gigs by the DJ David Holmes and The Frames, a visual-arts exhibition from the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, residencies by the artists Amanda Coogan and John Behan, and showings of several Irish films.

On paper it sounds like a substantial amount of culture. Then consider this: about 2,000 new cars come on to the streets of Beijing every day. The taxis, which are plentiful, come at two prices: 1.20 or 1.60 yuan (12 or 16 cent) a kilometre. You know the rate before you get in, as it's marked on stickers on the passenger windows. Both types of taxi are exactly the same cars - mainly Ladas, Citroëns and Volkswagens - but the drivers of the 1.20-yuan cars tend to be from the suburbs or from outside Beijing altogether. Hence they get lost a lot. The 1.60-yuan drivers get lost too, but less often.

You soon wise up to this, as trying to find an arts venue in Beijing in a 1.20-yuan taxi - even such a distinctive landmark as the Forbidden City - is not easy. The festival venues were spread across the city, involving taxi rides in crazy, fast-moving traffic for at least half an hour from our hotel on Wangfujing, one of Beijing's main shopping streets.

After you've spent a couple of hours a day in a taxi, travelling to venues, you begin to wonder if festival of any size could ever make even a small impact in such a huge city, let alone in a country the size of China.

Almost all of the performances sold out in both Beijing and Shanghai. The capacity of the venues ranged from 300, at the Central Conservatory of Music, where John O'Conor gave a recital, to 1,400, at the Poly Theatre, which hosted Riverdance, Altan, the traditional-music concert and Barry Douglas with Camerata Ireland. The Chinese media, in both Mandarin and English, gave consistent coverage to the festival. Possibly the single most far-reaching coverage was a news report featuring the opening night, which was carried on CCTV1, China's national television station.

More telling, perhaps, is the fact that the festival happened at all. The Chinese ministry of culture, a cultural partner in the festival, is notoriously bureaucratic. Getting past protocol and miles of red tape to produce not just a visiting festival but also a companion return festival, in which Ireland will host Chinese events, is an achievement for both countries that adds up to far more than rear ends on seats.

It is no secret that China is the world's great untapped source of potential capitalism, and every Western country wants to have a part of it. Some Chinese have never heard of Ireland; by first forging cultural links Ireland is putting itself on their radar, a strategy that should pay dividends in the future.

Beijing has some terrifically controversial arts venues. The love-it-or-loathe-it Millennium Monument Museum is a huge concrete circle with a slanted roof and a spike that acts as a giant sundial. This is where Views From An Island - paintings, videos and installations mainly from the Irish Museum of Modern Art - was on show. The exhibition, which included work by Sean Scully, Alice Maher, John Behan, John Kindness, Hughie O'Donoghue, Dorothy Cross, Paul Nugent and Clare Langan, was carefully displayed and well lit. It opens in Shangai next Monday.

The catalogue essay by IMMA's senior curator, Catherine Marshall, was also printed on a large display board at the exhibition, both in English and Mandarin. It begins: "Putting together a group exhibition to represent your country is a daunting task." It concludes: "Chinese viewers will bring to this exhibition a level of critical objectivity that is impossible at home. It is also possible that the Irish experience of global art and development, observable in some detail because the population is small, can serve as a useful case study for larger nations."

It was, however, disconcerting to see visitors touching and tapping installations and fingering the paint on canvases. The rudimentary protective barriers that act in the West more as symbolic do-not-touch signals were ignored by curious Chinese. The afternoon I was there the security guards did not attempt to stop them.

The Irish exhibition took up one exhibition hall. The second hall was filled with Chinese embroidered pictures, several of them by Yao Jianping. Although much skill was clearly involved, the subject matter was rampantly kitsch throughout. One complex piece of embroidery depicted an eerily convincing copy of the Mona Lisa. Other pieces showed white horses, fish and birds. One visitor asked me to take her photograph in front of an embroidery of a basket of uncannily lifelike tortoiseshell kittens, an image as weirdly sentimental as its subject suggests.

Kitsch is actually central to Chinese culture. The Chinese invented fireworks, after all, and karaoke is a national pastime. Every public building in Beijing worth its onions is permanently festooned with fairy lights. There are also marvellous streetlights that look like stylised lollipop trees and light up at intervals like exploding fireworks - no occasion needed. No occasion ever needed, in fact: my hotel lift played Jingle Bells on a loop one hot early-summer afternoon.

If Chinese gallery-goers act differently from their counterparts in the West, so do Chinese theatre-goers. Beijing audiences are not quiet. It's not a question of shuffling, coughing, sneezing and whispering - all these happen as a mater of course. No, it's the mobile phones and the conversations held on them throughout performances. Tickets carry requests for patrons to turn off their mobiles or switch them to vibrate mode. But it's rare to hear the same request over the tannoy. The cast of Waiting For Godot soon discovered the drawbacks. Even phones left on vibrate - perfectly acceptable in China - are very distracting. From the balcony of the Poly Theatre during Lunny's From Clare To Here concert, I watched phones owned by people in the stalls light up all night like an inverted starry sky as text messages arrived. Clickety-clickety-click went scores of fingers, instantly texting back.

The Chinese also have a different approach to children in the theatre. The back of my ticket declared that children "below 1.2 metres are not permitted in the theatre. Children above 1.2 metres are admitted with tickets only." I didn't see anyone in the lobby with a measuring tape, but measuring the maturity of an audience by height rather than age is also a technique we're unused to on this side of the world.

If Catherine Marshall acknowledged that selecting artwork to show in China was a daunting task, the same applied to choosing a programme for From ClareTo Here. The concert featured Lunny's band, the singers Mary Black, Cara Dillon and Róisín Elsafty, and the fiddle and guitar duo of Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill. The artists chose what they wanted to perform; Lunny's job, which he did with considerable style and grace, was to pull it all together.

Lunny endeared himself hugely to the audience by reading out several phrases in correctly pronounced Chinese, a task he had prepared himself for the previous day with a translator en route to visit the Great Wall of China. He introduced some of Elsafty's seán-nós songs with the Chinese words for "ancient music".

The language barrier meant the singers were always going to have a tougher time than the musicians. Hayes and Cahill fairly wowed the crowd with their supple playing of beautifully controlled tunes. Of the singers, the audience responded best to Elsafty's haunting séan-nós, the words sounding impossibly exotic in the setting, and every note pure. Dillon had flowers cast at her from the audience.

Black discovered that she has the honour of being available in China on pirated CDs, an honour she shares with Enya, The Cranberries and Westlife, all of whom are constantly played in Beijing restaurants.

But, introducing her four-song set, which included Ellis Island and Song For Ireland, Black hit rocky ground. It's always hard to know how to read an audience in another country, but if you don't speak the language it's probably best to stick to what you usually say or drop the introductions altogether. "I don't know if ye understand me," she said, stopping halfway through her piece about emigration and peering out at the audience. "Do ye?" Well no, unfortunately: the Chinese-speaking members of the audience had no idea what she was talking about. The embarrassment of its English-speaking members at the potted Irish history lesson was palpable.

O'Conor's recital at the Central Conservatory of Music had the fewest phones going off of any performance I attended, but, even so, messages beeped and people texted. Most of the people in the audience for the recital, which included Holahan's Monaincha and Haydn's Sonata in B minor, were students at the conservatory. They watched and listened attentively to a polished, confident recital that also doubled as a masterclass.

O'Conor had the distinction of receiving three prolonged encores. He judged his audience perfectly in his choice of encores: first came Chopin's Nocturne in E flat major, then Scriabin's Nocturne in D flat major for the left hand. Lastly, to the delight of the younger music students in the audience, he played Mozart's Bread and Butter Waltz, a playful, charming piece performed with one finger of the right hand. I'm not sure if anyone in the crowd was under 1.2 metres, but those over 1.2 metres loved it.