Craning for a view as Culture Night catches on

With new funding and ambitious plans, Culture Night will open its doors well beyond the capital later this year.

A BALLET OF cranes dancing across the Dublin skyline, in a choreographed piece by composer Donnacha Dennehy; children leaping and weaving in response to their favourite paintings in Temple Bar; special buses buzzing back and forth along the quays between "culture clusters" up until 11pm - all these will figure in this year's Culture Night in the capital, along with exhibitions, demonstrations, guided tours and films, including the screening of a new production from the Gaiety School of Acting with interviews of past students, including Colin Farrell.

Last year, the chance to ramble into vast, vaulted buildings and sample some of Dublin's cultural delights appealed to more than 80,000 citizens. Eighty different venues were involved, including Farmleigh, Christchurch Cathedral, the Chester Beatty Library, the Abbey Theatre, the National Photographic Archive and Dublin Castle. This autumn, the doors of public and private institutions, galleries, theatres, libraries and museums will again be thrown open, free of charge.

This year, for the first time, Culture Night, on Friday, September 19th, will also take place in Cork, Limerick and Galway. The initiative has been granted a budget of €75,000, as announced earlier this month by the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Séamus Brennan.

Gráinne Millar, head of cultural development at Temple Bar Cultural Trust, who introduced the Culture Night concept to the capital in 2006, says the hope is that other counties and towns will also "apply for funding from the department to run their own culture night this year". She adds that "we are talking with Belfast and linking with the Cathedral Quarter there, and we are talking to Derry as well, in terms of encouraging them to look at setting it up".

Cork, Limerick and Galway are each currently talking with up to 25 organisations to get the event off the ground for this year, Millar says. "At this point, the organisers haven't set the target in terms of numbers, but from our own experience the figures we would be expecting would be in and around 15,000 to 20,000 for year one [in each city]."

Temple Bar Cultural Trust, along with RTÉ and the Digital Hub, will also introduce a live website for Culture Night, providing "an opportunity for thousands, if not millions, of people to participate in Culture Night without coming into the city", according to Millar.

"I suppose it's recognising the fact that there's a whole new generation who understand culture is something that they either can make themselves or participate in themselves and create themselves, but through new technologies."

Millar points out that more than 8 per cent of the total annual Arts Council budget goes into the Temple Bar area. "So for us, making sure that public monies or Government investment in the arts is reaching as wide an audience as possible is key, which is the reason why we launched the Culture Night initially, back in 2006".

At last year's Culture Night, the Book of Kells attracted 5,000 people over the space of five hours, and the National Gallery had more than 2,000 visitors.

"A number of venues broke their own attendance records for the highest times in the summer," Millar says. This year, there will be "a big events programme in place. We are working with Dublin City Council to organise that, because one of the key things that came back from the research was how much people wanted to participate and engage creatively in the night, whether that's through workshops, such as at DanceHouse, which ran a whole series of workshops last year in salsa and belly-dancing and was completely booked up. And like meeting the artists in studios - in some ways, this demystifies the role of the artist as a secluded, isolated figure. It's getting to see them and understand, meeting them in their "office" and getting to open up that relationship a little bit more. There's huge interest in that."

The music for Donnacha Dennehy's crane ballet will take place in the National Concert Hall, and "the logistics of the viewing platform are being worked out", according to Millar. "That's an RTÉ commission where Donnacha Dennehy has composed a short piece of music which acts as a soundtrack for a physical crane ballet in the city, where crane drivers are being choreographed to create a movement piece to be accompanied by the music of Dennehy. The plan is to have screens located in the city linking up with viewing platforms for the public to watch the crane ballet."

MILLAR SAYS THATthis year's programme will engage with elements of the Chinese New Year celebrations, as well as with the Polish cultural representative body in Dublin, with the Goethe Institute, with Alliance Francaise and the Italian Cultural Institute.

"They were all open last year. It's really about developing that relationship . . . We started working last year with the Indian community, with the Nigerian cultural community, and it's really about finding ways for us to continue to develop that, and we are working with the intercultural officer in Dublin City Council to develop that this year," she says.

Other additions to the list of more than 120 venues that will open in Dublin on September 19th include Dublinia, which recreates the city in Viking times, the Custom House and the GPO.

"We were very close to opening up the Dáil, but renovations are going to get in the way this year," says Millar.

The Garda Museum, located in the grounds of Dublin Castle, will be open, however. "It's a new cultural space that a lot of people would not necessarily know. One of the things on view will be the safe that housed the crown jewels," says Millar.

At TCD, the Science Gallery, the Samuel Beckett Centre and the Book of Kells, will all be open for viewing. According to Millar, "Trinity in itself is like a cultural enclave".

The profile of those who took part last year "was very different from what you might normally expect", Millar says. While those aged between 18 and 40 are the usual visitors to cultural spaces, at last year's Culture Night those who attended in the greatest numbers were the elderly and families with young children. The focus this year is to ensure "a greater involvement" with these groups, says Millar. Ultimately, she adds, Culture Night raises questions about "the accountability and responsibilities of publicly funded organisations and their relationship with the public. I think that's something that needs to be discussed and debated at a national level."