An intriguing game of musical chairs is in prospect in the North. The Arts Council of Northern Ireland's chief executive, Brian Ferran, is soon to retire, amid strong criticism of the organisation from across the Northern arts community. Among those being tipped to succeed him are ACNI director of strategic development, Nick Livingston, and Belfast City Council arts officer, Chris Bailey. ACNI performing arts director, Philip Hammond, is shortly to return after a six-month sabbatical, during which time his deputy, Imelda Foley, stood in for him. Her old post was temporarily filled by former Lyric Theatre artistic director David Grant, who is thought to be in line for a move to Queen's University's recently established drama department.

Meanwhile, of course, change is afoot at the Belfast Festival at Queen's, where Stella Hall has just been appointed to the director's post. She leaves Warwick Arts Centre to head the Belfast team in September and will hold a watching brief for the 2000 Festival, which has been programmed by assistant executive director, Rosie Turner. There is considerable interest in the way in which Turner's job may evolve, since she was pipped at the shortlist stage for the top post. She stepped in to put the programme in place after executive director Robert Agnew took early retirement a few months ago. Stella Hall will fill the long-standing gap caused by the departure of former programme director Sean Doran, who left in November 1998, a year before the end of his contract, to take charge of the Perth Festival in Australia.

Barabbas, The Company heads off tomorrow to EXPO 2000 in Hanover, where from Sunday to Friday, they will entertain the punters on "European Boulevard" with a show called Barabbas: the CUBE. Designed by artist Paki Smith, with a soundtrack by Roger Gregg, it takes place in a stainless steel cube where manipulated images play with perceptions of Ireland. I suppose the show is designed to bring people right down to earth after a stroll on the Boulevard, between the madhouse of the Dutch pavilion, topped with windmills, layered with a tulip field, and fronted with a Heineken bar, the perspex Atlantic Homecare edifice from Britain, patterned with blue and red polka dots and jolly Union Jacks - the architectural equivalent of a Bucks Fizz Eurovision winner, or the Italian white flying saucer in which you queue to the strains of Pavarotti as you wait to ascend to a car showroom . . .

The only worry is, will Barabbas come back feeling so upstaged they can never tackle absurdism again? Hopefully not, as they have exciting plans for the Dublin Theatre Festival in October - a version of Kleist's Amphitrion by John Banville called God's Gift. Banville's last Kleist adaptation, The Broken Jug, was a hit at the Peacock.

Amphitrion is based on the Greek myth in which Zeus descends to dally with a mortal woman he fancies. The dramatic version was written by the Latin comic playwright, Plautus, and features Jupiter descending to Rome from on high. In Banville's version, Jupiter descends to Vinegar Hill in 1798 (not too long before Kleist's play was written) and sets his cap at General Ashburningham's wife, Minna. He dallies with her in disguise as Ashburningham, and Minna has few complaints.

Banville offered the play to Barabbas, having seen their superb version of Lennox Robinson's The Whiteheaded Boy, which struck him as wonderfully true to the original. He wrote the six parts to be doubled, the device used in Whiteheaded Boy, but director Veronica Coburn has worked the play for a full cast of Raymond Keane, Mikel Murfi, Mary O'Driscoll, Paul Meade and Louis Lovett. The show will play at the Gaiety Theatre in the second week of the festival.

You're sitting in your armchair listening to strange squeaks and pips, against a funky background, coming from the CD player and you say to yourself, "ah, the magic of the global economy!" So the composers of Distant Early Warning, Alexander Perls and Simon Break would have you do, anyway, because theirs is art with a purpose. They are seeking to promote "global security and stability" because they are part of an arts movement affiliated to, you guessed it, NATO. Just a year ago - on NATO's 50th anniversary - they voted to set up NATOarts, and Perls and Break, calling themselves Icebreaker International, began a journey in a container ship from Yokhama to Halifax, Canada, working on a score inspired by an old Cold War distant early warning system. To be honest, it's quite nice, even though I can't quite echo the press release's claim that it leaves you with "a feeling of well-being and contentment rare in the attention deficient blipvert world of the modern media".

I know, that's what I thought too, but NATOart is not a joke. So proud is NATOart of its work to date, in fact, that it is holding a retrospective exhibition in New York in September - and The Irish Times will be there. The only worrying part of the story is why we got sent the press release and why now; is there something the Government would like to tell us?

Further information from: info@natoart.com

Paul Muldoon is giving a poetry masterclass at the Scriobh Festival in Sligo in September - submit three examples of poems you would like to work on to Poetry Masterclass, Scriobh 2000, The Model Arts Centre, The Mall, Sligo. To arrive before July 31st . . . Plans are well advanced for a major seminar on public art in Dublin in October, organised by Cork Sculpture Factory. Confirmed speakers include Christo (yes, the wrapping man); Guy Cortosa, the French critic and curator; and Maximiliano Faksas, the Italian architect and director of the Venice Biennale of Architecture . . . A festival of children's theatre will run in August in Cork. Tel: 021-434 4858 for information . . . Applications are invited for places on a choreography workshop with Fionola Cronin in August, organised by the Association of Professional Dancers in Ireland. Places are open to people with and without choreographic experience. Tel: 01-8730288 . . . The ninth Biennial Conference in Baroque takes place this year in Ireland for the first time. Tonight, at St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, there will be a public lecture and opportunity to experience the historical Lutheran liturgy, based on the practice at St Thomas's Church, Leipzig when Bach was working there. Further information from: www.music.qub.ac.uk/tomita/baroque/9baroque.htm