A tempting confection at Kilkenny

From a musical co-op to a women’s group video show, Kilkenny Arts Festival is slicing up styles and genres and serving them up…

From a musical co-op to a women's group video show, Kilkenny Arts Festival is slicing up styles and genres and serving them up to an eager audience, writes SINEAD GLEESON

NEAR THE Courthouse on Kilkenny’s High Street, a man is surrounded by a large crowd and shouting. Standing in front of an easel, he brandishes a paintbrush with biblical zeal. This is no painter, but an outdoor evangelist, who is hollering about God and the Titanic.

Like most things during Kilkenny Arts Festival, appearances aren’t always what they seem. I pass Titanic-bible-man en route to an actual church, to see Steve Cooney play. The veteran musician arranges guitar leads in front of the altar and tells us, by way of introduction, that he “never does solo shows”. This fact has possibly contributed to the event being sold out, with standing-room only on the choir balcony.

Cooney, best known for musical collaborations with Sharon Shannon, Altan and Séamus Begley, is a former bassist with Stockton’s Wing; today he’s brought three guitars and a didgeridoo. The latter is a ceremonial instrument, he explains, before he sucks in his lungs and its baritone notes rattle the stained glass.

READ MORE

Not only is the Australian a deft acoustic guitarist, he can play slip jigs (O’Farrell’s Welcome to Limerick) on an electric guitar. Between songs he apologies for the “bad stagecraft” of talking and tuning, but his raconteur’s tales of a musician’s life make up for it.

There’s the time he was inducted into an Aboriginal tribe who told him to go find his ancestors in Ireland (he did, in 1980, and hasn’t left), or played set-dances for Kerry fisherman who would pay him with fresh prawns. From the Sean-Bhean Bhocht to The Wild Geese, Cooney rounds the final bend with a polka, and there is a palpable tapping of feet on the church pews.

Out on the street, another guitarist is singing his heart out. Instead of Canon Goodman’s Kerry jigs, 16-year-old James Corcoran plays The Script’s Breakeven. “Every year there’s a different feel to things,” says Corcoran. “It also means a lot that the festival makes Kilkenny ‘one of those cities’. There’s a sense of anticipation once the posters start to go up and it really livens things up for the month of August.”

Singing with Corcoran is Feibhár Baldwin-Wall (so christened because on the day she was born, her father found a fiver on the street). “There are definitely more people around. People come from all over Ireland to the festival – it’s one of a kind,” says the 17-year-old. “I’ve been going to the opening and closing events with my mum for years, so it means a lot to be part of it, even if it’s just singing on the street.”

Around the corner, in the Victorian Tea House (resembling an old shop kiosk) Aideen Barry is using her hair to cut the lawn, pretending to be a hoover and attempting to self-tan using an oven. In her video installation, Possession, Barry stars as a post-modern Stepford wife. Tackling the isolation of suburbia, domestic life and consumerism, Barry’s arresting work makes a feminist point with humour and humanity.

Possession is part of At the Still Point, a group exhibition of video art by women. Thematically there is an overlap: Cecily Brennan’s installation also examines the body. The artist stands in a white space, gazing off into the middle distance – until a tsunami of black water knocks her off her feet. This happens repeatedly, with jets coming from all directions as Brennan struggles to assess what’s happened.

As an arts festival, Kilkenny has always provided an admirable mix of both well-known and esoteric programming. It slices up styles and genres and serves them up side by side. Heavyweights such as John Banville and Paul Durcan (the poet gave a talk last night) share billing with a new generation of writers, such as Liza Klaussman and John Butler. Central to the festival’s ethos are its global and multi-cultural elements, which include a practitioner of Moroccan Gnawa music (a mash-up of African trance and Berber music) and what Ivo Papasov calls his “Bulgarian wedding band”.

Programming artists who might be considered niche can sometimes reinforce their “must-seeness”. Earlier this week, there were rumours of a venue change for Austrian hurdy-gurdy player Matthias Loibner. Loibner is unlikely to be known to Irish audiences, but his show – a joyride through intricate melodies on an unusual instrument – was sold out for weeks.

Loibner was in the audience at the Set Theatre to hear a musical co-op of some of the most interesting musicians working in Ireland today. Resound features Kate Ellis, Chequerboard, Laura Sheeran, Linda Buckley, Francesco Turrisi and Adrian Hart creating walls of sound using strings, guitars and vocal effects that are beautiful and disquieting. Poet Billy Ramsell recites his work over Ellis’s precise and fluid bowing, while visual artist Rory Tangney charcoals on a white backdrop behind the musicians. Resound in some way embodies an important aspect of the festival – the communal overlap of skills and themes – while staying faithful to individual artistry.

This concept was also evident in a poetry evening hosted by Ireland’s legendary Gallery Press. Introduced with wit by Olivia O’Leary, the poets Vona Groarke, Gerald Dawe and Michelle O’Sullivan explored themes of landscape, family and what connects us. Gallery Press founder Peter Fallon read A Summer Flood, a poem about concern for a teenage daughter starting out in the world (aptly read on the eve of the Leaving Cert results).

As the sun dipped low over St Canice’s Cathedral last night, strains of Iarla Ó Lionáird and 3epkano’s live score of Der Golem could be heard. In 1915, when director Paul Wegener made his silent classic, he could never have predicted it crossing the Atlantic 97 years later to be screened in Ireland.

That same unpredictability, the kind that marries different artistic forms, is just one of the things that makes Kilkenny Arts Festival so worth visiting.

Still to come

MUSIC

A Winged Victory for the Sullen

When Dustin O’Halloran (above) isn’t straddling the boundaries of classical music and contemporary composition, he teams up with Adam Wiltzie to make music. A must-see.

Saturday, Aug 18th, Set Theatre, 8.30pm

PERFORMANCE

Dán

Poet Theo Dorgan (above) joins forces with a coterie of respected singers to deliver a hybrid of poems and sea shanties. Features Scotland’s Alyth McCormack, The Breton Quartet from France and Irish/English musicians from groups Kan and Guidewires.

Sunday, Aug 19th, St Canice’s Cathedral, 8pm

LECTURE

Misha Glenny

The Balkans: Europe’s Other Failure

A former Europe correspondent for the Guardian and the BBC, Misha Glenny (above) reported on Sarajevo, the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. He talks about his work as part of the annual Hubert Butler lecture.

Friday, August 17th, St Canice’s Cathedral, 6pm

LITERATURE

Greg Baxter and Claire Kilroy

Edel Coffey interviews Greg Baxter about his latest novel, The Apartment, joined by Claire Kilroy, who discusses her much-anticipated fourth novel, The Devil I Know, about the economic crisis.

Saturday Aug 18th, Parade Tower, Kilkenny Castle, 6pm