My Cultural Year 2

Contemporary circus, a culture night, Sweeney Todd and a Thomas Kinsella tribute are among the highlights of the past year for those involved in the arts. They share their pick of 2007 with Catherine Foley, in the second of a two-part series.

Rowena Neville, Director of marketing and PR at Business2Arts

The year was marked by the incredible raising of standards. There's a rising tide of amazing directors and fantastic set and costume designers, so that when you go to the theatre it's a feast for the eye, the mind and the soul.

Shows such as Terminus by Mark O'Rowe in the Peacock Theatre jumped out for me. I thought the writing was amazing. The scene at the end when Eileen Walsh is talking you through dying, I actually forgot to breath. I was captivated. It was amazing.

I thought that the year was really marked by circus. Now that circus has been recognised as an art form, it seemed that every second thing I went to was some kind of contemporary circus this year. It was very much championed by the Docklands Development Authority - there was quite a lot of it down there. I liked La Clique at the Dublin Fringe Festival in the Spiegeltent. It was great fun. I saw it three times. Every night I went it was different.

This was the year of second chances. In Ireland, because we are very small, runs tend to be quite short, and you miss things by the time you get the word of mouth. Because of Culture Ireland, I got to see The Walworth Farce in Edinburgh at the festival, which was probably my big highlight of the year. It was an amazing show. And then because of the Arts Council Touring Experiment, I got to see Improbable Frequency by Rough Magic, which I've missed every time it's been on. So that's just an amazing thing that two Government-supported projects have facilitated the carrying on of these shows that have had great support.

The Walworth Farce was absolutely frenetic, it was like a marathon for the actors. The four actors were amazing, it was hilarious but horribly shocking. I was totally captivated by it. I got to see Improbable Frequency in the Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire, it is very irreverent and great fun. The first song was Please, Don't Patronise the Irish, so that started it off. And it had a great cast.

Cliodhna Ní Anluain, Producer and editor of RTÉ Radio 1's Sunday Miscellany

I'd choose the Andalucian flamenco guitarist and composer Paco Peña at the National Concert Hall in Dublin in May. I had seen his phenomenal Misa Flamenca there in the 1990s when he was thrilling the world with his newly composed mass. I was introduced to Peña when I lived in Spain and I suppose from that time I loved his ability to transport his audience with the passion of his presence and performance and the guttural nature of his delivery.

The evening dedicated to Thomas Kinsella at the Gate Theatre during the Dublin Writers Festival was especially memorable. A number of writers introduced and read Kinsella's poems. It came to a fitting conclusion when Kinsella stood on the bare boards of the stage and briefly read.

Then, in celebrating the centenary of sculptor Seamus Murphy, the city of Cork itself was being celebrated. For me, it could be said it was celebrating a way of life, when it was neither usual nor easy to make a living out of art in one's home place.

I thought the Crawford Gallery had a great cultural year, its artography exhibition brilliantly brought together notions of mapping and art in what was an intriguing show, merging contemporary and centuries-old visual treasures with essays in the accompanying book by Prof William J Smyth, William Laffan and Mic Moroney.

The Genius of Photography series on BBC 4, which is still running, is a reminder that cultural moments can be enjoyed from the comfort of one's own living room, and of how the camera can pick up detail that the ordinary eye cannot. In the same way watching the Irish rugby matches in Croke Park and the watershed that it symbolically and literally represented was extremely moving and again a reminder of what the television camera can so magically do, as it panned the faces of the team in the minutes before the matches started.

I'd also choose Ellen Gallagher's exhibition Coral Cities at the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, which will also take place at Tate in Liverpool in 2008. Gallagher is a black Irish American whose work is informed by race and identity politics and it is superbly rendered. The exhibition includes new paintings as well as an evolving body of work on paper entitled Watery Ecstatic. Together they explore elements of a myth revolving around a lost ship of slaves on its way to America and the underwater world that those lost may occupy. I had first seen Gallagher's art in her exhibition DeLuxe at the Whitney Museum, New York in 2005, and was immediately impressed by her alluring and beautifully made pieces. It was fantastic to get a chance to see this latest progression of Gallagher's work in Dublin.

Doireann Ní Bhriain, Arts consultant and broadcaster

Both Marina Carr's Woman and Scarecrow in the Peacock during the Dublin Theatre Festival and Opera Ireland's Dead Man Walking left me sitting in my seat afterwards not wanting to move or speak, such was the power of their emotional impact. Olwen Fouéré and Barbara Brennan's superb performances in the former were particularly memorable. I do hope it gets another run.

The three shows mounted by the Rep Experiment during the Dublin Fringe Festival (Platonov, Metamorphosis and Mr Kolpert) were a striking illustration of the value of allowing theatre people to work together in repertory.

As an amateur chorister, I love choral music, and I heard wonderful performances, both amateur and professional, at the Cork International Choral Festival, with the Calmus Ensemble from Leipzig being a particular highlight of my brief visit in May.

June brought my annual trip to the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, where the marriage of sublime music and stunning landscape lifted my spirits yet again. The Lismorahaun Singers with Naomi O'Connell gave a wonderful concert during the Merriman summer school in Lisdoonvarna in August and sent the audience out on a cloud.

The memorial gig for the much-missed Micheál Ó Domhnaill in May was a mixture of sadness and joy, with some of the best traditional musicians in Ireland celebrating his life and his music.

I was lucky enough to visit the Venice Biennale in November and was delighted to see the two excellent shows from Gerard Byrne and Willie Doherty in the very well-located Irish pavilion were still popular with visitors.

Culture Night in Dublin in September was great, when the streets were alive with culture seekers of all ages consulting their maps and packing in as much cultural activity as they could in one night, making me glad I live in such a creative city. And I must mention Garage. Pat Shortt and Lenny Abrahamson both deserve Oscars.

Mick O'Dea, Artist

Three things come to mind. One is the rugby match between Ireland and England in Croke Park, which I think was a hugely significant event given the history of the situation, the fact that Ireland won the game, the respect shown to the British national anthem, God Save the Queen, the robustness when Amhrán na bhFiann was sung and the incredible atmosphere. I watched it on the television and [it was] the coming of age of a great rugby team, but it unfortunately didn't happen for them when they got to the World Cup. It was as if they peaked too early. But I thought that that was a really significant event and it put down a significant marker in Irish history.

I thought that the Lucian Freud exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma) was a very important exhibition. It wasn't a major exhibition of his work, but nonetheless I thought it was a very significant show, and all the more significant because it was shown in Imma and in Dublin. It drew people's attention to the art of painting and particularly to the art of figure painting and portrait painting and that tradition that he is part of - part of a continuum and the idea of working from observation and working from the model.

The other thing which was significant was that at the annual general assembly of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in October, a decision was made to go ahead and build studios and thereby enter the education area again for the first time since 1940. As part of its refurbishment programme, the RHA is building studios on top of its present building, and I have had the honour of being elected principal [of the new school].

Also the annual RHA exhibition was very exciting. It was a very important exhibition because it's the last time that the annual show will be held in the space as we know it now. I thought that the quality of the paintings and particularly the drawings was of a very high standard, and contrary to what people say about the art of drawing and painting, there are some really very good artists out there. It's just because the whole world of the visual has expanded so much and so many people are involved in the visual arts, but those that are painting and drawing are achieving incredibly high standards.

Michelle Read, Writer and performer

In film my highlight was a film called The Host, an Asian monster movie directed by Bong Joon-ho. It's about a mutant fish that eats people but it has a real heart and soul as well. I'm not really into monster movies but it was so unusual, I really liked it. It had real depth of storytelling and you really felt for the characters. It had pathos and interest, it wasn't just gore.

My gig of the year was Joan as Policewoman at Vicar Street. She's a New York singer-songwriter and her gig was great.

And in theatre, there were a lot of big shows that I loved in the Theatre Festival, and also Sweeney Todd at the Gate. One that I saw much more recently that I really liked in terms of directing and drama was David Mamet's The Shawl by Gúna Nua and directed by Paul Meade in Bewley's. It was great because they put it in the middle of the theatre so they took it off the stage and they used the space differently - it's a brilliant three-hander, a short but quite intense piece.

I loved Sebastian Barry's The Pride of Parnell Street in the Dublin Theatre Festival, a Fishamble production directed by Jim Culleton. It wasn't necessarily what I thought I would enjoy, but against my expectations I thought it was a really wonderful piece of storytelling.

Gaby Smith, Accountant and former chair of Amnesty International

I think the 50th Dublin Theatre Festival was a great high point. It was much buzz-ier than it's ever been, the quality was much better, it went on for a little longer and I think the city got behind it. If I was to pick a single piece of theatre it was probably Don Carlos from Rough Magic at the beginning of the year. It was a big, courageous, relevant piece and I just loved it, I really loved it.

On the music front, I saw the Goldberg Variations twice this year. Once with Angela Hewitt, the Canadian pianist, in July and more recently in a string trio arrangement conducted by Dmitry Sitkovetsky with cellist Mischa Maisky, and both of them were sublime. They were probably the musical high points for me. Both were on in the National Concert Hall.

Music Network had a Swedish pianist called Hans Palsson over and I saw him play Beethoven's Eroica Variations in the Pavilion in Dún Laoghaire, it was absolutely amazing. I hope the whole Touring Experiment picks up - when you see shows such as Improbable Frequency and Palsonn playing tiny little venues around the country, I just think that's brilliant.