DAVID Boyd has a vision of making austere East Belfast a place of thriving arts activity, writes Colin Harper. He is the man responsible for the infectiously popular Belfast Carnival Band - regularly popping up at gigs around the town - and last year's surprise Belfast Carnival Parade. It took to the streets in a blaze of colour, a shoestring budget and virtually no publicity and proved against the odds that something involving drums and people on the march in Belfast could be in some smally way a life enhancing experience.
On Saturday, September 7th he's doing it all again. "I was determined" he says, "to get something on the streets so that people could see the possibilities. It's an uphill struggle because funding bodies here don't know what you're talking about when you say a `carnival'. And certainly if you use the word parade people think about sectarianism. But it's also a struggle because Belfast isn't a very fun city in the way that Galway or even Derry would be." Given these obstacles, Galway's sizeably funded parade group, Macnas, was a key support to Boyd's plan of action last year. In July 1995 he took a team down to Galway to take part in Macnas's Hayfever parade, and last September, the favour was returned, when a version of Hayfever stormed the dismal streets of Belfast to unanimous approval.
"Last year was all about giving people a taste of the vision," he says. "We've got to the point now where we have credibility, which is why the City Council have given us an unprecedented amount of money - because we've delivered. Even the Arts Council would see the Carnival Parade as a flagship project, but I want them to actually get behind it financially, because this needs to be funded as an arts project. If we have to keep running after money for children's work, cross community work and so on, it pulls us in the direction of those agendas. There's other cross community projects going on but this is something unique, and I want to see it carry on.
One unique factor is the East Belfast connection itself. Temporarily out of work three years ago, Boyd set up office in an old YMCA building: "There wasn't a job or a salary but I came here with a bit of grant money to try and establish a community arts project with the drumming as a big element of it. To me it was important that it was in East Belfast because I was aware of the lack of opportunity here for young people. The only opportunities were flute bands, hence the interest in starting a samba drumming project - because it's directly related to the cultural tradition here. But we don't want to be part of either a loyalist or a republican bandwagon. We're doing something for the whole city, and something different which people from either side - or no side - can be involved in."
This year's parade - entitled Sea Change on the theme of the sea, with an obvious double entendre - will be a wholly Belfast produced affair, albeit incorporating 250 samba drummers from elsewhere. "The whole point of doing this in the city centre is it's a neutral area," says Boyd, "and we want this to be owned by everyone in Belfast."
