Dreaming is free (Part 1)

It was as camp as Christmas, but this schmuck had a lump in her throat. The Old Millennium, or rather Mick Eile Copley dressed in a bright purple wizard's outfit, gave the stage to the New Millennium, represented by the hewn torso and raging blonde tresses of Ken Samson. Samson started to thwack the biggest drum in the world and Galway Arts Festival's Millennium Wild Weekend was upon us.

We all know the new millennium is just a game of numbers. However, at the Galway Arts Festival an era is really ending - although you haven't seen any of the group who have run the event since the late 1970s wearing any wizard's hats or beating drums on the streets. Artistic director, Ted Turton, is standing down this year. Last year four board members, Tom Conroy, Padraig Ferry, Declan Gibbons and Frances Burke, stood down. The "class of '76" as they became known because so many of them were at UCG at the same time, and which included former directors Trish Forde and Ollie Jennings, dreamt up the festival, and now they are consciously letting go.

"The closing date for applications for the post of artistic director is next Friday, and we have over 50 applications already. People might fear it's going to be one of the class of '76 who'll get it, but we've turned the page and it's blank," says Fergal Mc Grath, festival manager.

The festival began as a movement and must change into something else if it is to survive: "I proposed stopping the festival two years ago as a kind of provocation," says Tom Conroy of Macnas, a former festival board member. "It could. It has achieved its aims on one level. It has to regenerate to survive and it might not."

The aims of the festival movement were, broadly speaking, to agitate for an arts infrastructure in Galway, and to develop an audience. Where does the festival fit in now that the Town Hall Theatre, the Black Box, the Galway Arts Centre and the Roisin Dubh are programmed all year round? "We decided `Let's do things that wouldn't otherwise happen in places where they wouldn't otherwise happen'. It's ironic. We were given the infrastructure and now we're going back into the streets," says Fergal McGrath.

This year there is no ambiguity as to the artistic centre of the festival - it is street theatre. "Street theatre has always been the centre of the festival," says board member and former artistic director, Trish Forde. "It has developed our audience from day one. The only reason we don't do more is because it is so expensive. The one thing I would wish for the festival is that it would be continued over the next 20 or 30 years."

This year I grasped for the first time that the Galway Arts Festival is a festival in the traditional sense, more about socialising than about art: "It's not what happens on stage," says Forde. "It's what happens on the streets and in the coffee shops". Street events offer the perfect excuse for socialising in new ways, although the two young American men crammed together and against me as we waited for the Macnas parade were not taking well to the experience: "What am I supposed to do here?" asked one. "I suppose I could bite you to death."

I saw hardly anyone else who looked immune to the excitement of the arts festival's first night-time parade, designed by Tom Conroy and directed by Dominic Campbell. All any of us had was a little piece of sky, a little kaleidoscope through which the night creatures shifted. There was Groupe F's huge metal flaming firebird; luminous pirates on beautiful metal ships; an enormous owl, its wings streaming over the crowd, with a gaggle of white-masked little owls beneath it.

We whooped with wonder tinged with an agreeable bit of fear - the fire-machine was hot on my face. The humans were a little lost in the night and the small street dramas couldn't really work in the dark, but as the parade of lights moved over Wolfe Tone Bridge and towards the Claddagh, its drums sounding fainter and fainter across the Corrib, it really didn't matter.

We had to wait for those lights to end in a blaze for the fireworks to begin. Some got impatient and a dire rendition of The Fields of Athenry was sawing the air by the time all heaven broke loose across the Claddagh. Red, blue, white, gold, green, forging straight up, shattering into sparkling fragments all over the blackboard of the sky - Groupe F's fireworks seemed to reduce over 100,000 people to a single gasp.

Surprisingly, Cargo de Nuit will still have to compete to stay in the memory as the highlight of the Millennium Wild Weekend; Strange Fruit from Australia were like human fireworks, huge poppies on waving fibre-glass stems. The Field saw four men and four women characters swimming towards each other and away again in the Byzantine dance of the mating game: Madama Butterfly sang out over the Corrib, then the Charleston, then a Balkan folkdance. We loved it because we just like things that fly, and people that fly are best of all - their second show, Flight, saw a beautiful golden girl, winged like Icarus, being worshipped and pawed, but eluding a cast of sinister-looking men from the era of Alcock and Brown.

On a smaller scale, Horse and Bamboo's Streetstory told, with the aid of superb masks and puppets, the story of the pollution of the Nigerian delta by white businessmen and their African collaborators. A Nigerian/ English co-production (the English side, with the best will in the world, ended up looking as comfortable as Blue Peter presenters), this show riveted with one horrific image: the large puppet of a mother, with a cavernous face and huge hands, carrying the grey-blue corpse of a poisoned baby.

Playing the crowd over the weekend were the strange stilts army of grey, faceless men called Les Big Brozeurs (France), who held up a fruit van while I was watching and peered in the windows, upfolding retractable necks. Speerman from Barcelona via Argentina, a street clown who plays an anti-Superman, started his show by greeting an elderly man as "my fazzer", only to be answered with the traditional father-son greeting, "F***k off". A little boy was made to dress up like Captain Dangerous and take a leap off a box: "What you mean you don't know him? What does he watch on TV, Mamma, sexamovies?" These were street stars, booked through agents for the festival, but all weekend long the streets were alive with acts - indeed, all night long the walls of my flat resounded with the bongo drums of the restless natives.

The only kind of event which competes with street theatre as an excuse for a party is open-air music, of course, and the Millennium Festivals' Garden Party in the Fisheries Field on Saturday came as close to that archetypal summer-oflove-in-the-sun experience which we all imagine we had in adolescence. The bongo-drummers wouldn't let me through in time to catch Sean Keane, but I arrived as Sharon Shannon was playing "a few jigs for ye" and then "a few reels for ye" - it wasn't an education in the traditional box and fiddle, but it was great fun.