Taking to the streets

Surely, only in Belfast - and Derry, as it turned out last weekend - would you find a massive street party at this time of year, as if to mass-celebrate the onset of lousy weather. Belfast's Halloween saw temporary funfairs on the streets, while Millennium Festivals rowed in to support the fireworks display and provide the Millennium Drum Carnival - making the earlier-than-usual kick-off to the Belfast at Queen's festival look like a whole lot of Halloweens, Christmases, New Years, street carnivals and arts festivals rolled into one.

But by God, did they get public support. On Saturday, the chilly streets were full of fancy dress kids: fat little Batmen and impeccably costumed little witches, like refugees from a Grand Opera House panto. Others improvised with sloppy face-paint and recommissioned refuse sacks, while somebody made a fortune from the ubiquitous luminous headbands. Some adults even turned out: the odd festive zombie, an axe-wound gaping from the forehead; or in the more bibulous end of town, Goths cross-dressed as black-bedecked angels, or worse.

The rain held off for the fireworks this year, but as it got dark, the weather was already punishing when the Millennium Drum Carnival hip-hurrayed into life on its big stage outside the railings in front of the lit-up City Hall.

People began to gather from the shopping streets around Royal Avenue, rocking for warmth and child-distraction to the rattling beats, which strayed into sunnier Moorish, African and South American rhythms, after the symbolic duet between the Lambeg and the bodhran.

You had to admire the showbiz steel from the dancing ladies in their carnival scanties, as the cold, capricious gales whipped around the canyon streets. And once you'd battled through the crowd, a steady stream of people flinched into the crosswinds as they filed down to the Lagan, where the Young at Art people had organised a parade of kids to send little rafts of candles down the river, to represent their fears - this being Halloween and party time.

Down by the river, more tornado warnings lashed around the car-parks and plazas, where apart from admiring the long queues for the burger stalls, thousands hung around in support of the local morale-rouser on the back of the Downtown Radio vehicle.

No matter how bleak it got, people were there to enjoy themselves. By the appointed time for the fireworks - 8.30 p.m. - they had thronged in their tens of thousands, from the countless toddlers on Pop's shoulders to rug-wrapped old ladies in wheelchairs. Ten, 15, 20 minutes went by, and some distant but spectacular skybursts upriver made the crowd wonder whether they were in the wrong place.

Everyone was cold, two-year-olds were going bananas, but finally, a little after 9 p.m., Pierre Berthonneau's fireworks sent up their opening fanfare, followed by discreet barrages of firecrackers that flared or wriggled or squealed or lit up the night sky with constellations of colour, and loud explosions which sent the Lagan's birdlife flapping in horror over the crowd, and bumping off high windows as far away as the Europa Hotel. The crowd, and all the kids, genuinely oohed and aahed, and after 20 resplendent minutes, I've never seen a place clear quicker. But the sheer turn-out had made it a phenomenal, and profound success.

For those in town, there were indoor respites in the festival's arts programme - children's acts such as Teatro del Carretto's Snow White, an elegantly abridged version which brought out the sheer perversity of the tale. Played out from within a kind of wardrobe by four Italians, it used rod-puppets in a tiny set with miniature flies and scenery, to operetta music and big arias underpinning a clipped English narration. Mind you, the arrival of the wicked Queen was such a roar of glacial malevolence that some toddlers started howling, but once these were culled from the audience, the rest were enthralled.

Teatro del Carretto also delivered a Romeo and Juliet at the Waterfront, one of the deserving headline lead-off acts of the festival. No balcony scene here, or congested thickets of Veronese ham: rather, a beautiful, strangely medieval, underlit 90-minute production of wooden contraptions, moving trompe l'oeil stage-scenery, puppets, and actors in masque and ballooning costumes - again to operatic music, with the (Italian) text cut back to the imagistic bones of a folk tale.

With a stage like the top of a Rubik's cube - a three-by-three grid of trapdoors with gaps for puppet rods in between, and six actor-puppeteers holed up inside. Each new puppet or character is unveiled or emerges from shadow like a picturesque or grotesque sculpture, moving through a dense medium: unveiled, like the monstrous knight Tybalt, killing Mercutio in a slow-mo ballet; the gnarled monstrosities of the underling characters; or the final, painterly, pre-Raphaelite fantasia of the lovers' catafalque - beautiful images which seeped into you with a slow, dreamy allure.

By contrast, the British troupe Northern Stage Ensemble used scale and technological bombast to punch across their macho, swaggering adaptation of Anthony Burgess's Clockwork Orange, the cult futuristic tale of an incorrigibly violent young "Droog" who endures an aversion therapy to violence, and with it, his one-time exhilarated appreciation of Beethoven's 9th.

This was well-attended by a young, crusty, predominantly studenty-looking audience. And some of the stage-images, apart from the laddishly gratuitous tits and ass, were strong, mock-psychiatric affairs - and it's quite something to see video projected that large.

But it was something of a period rock opera production - the style perhaps suiting the 1970s vision of Orwellian/Huxleyan totalitarianism. And after the decibels of the amplification, the space was rather too vast to allow the unmiked dialogue to do anything but scatter up into the high roof of the big hall in the Maysfield Leisure Centre. Not exactly "real horror show".

QFT provided an inspirational experience in Dziga Verto's classic, silent film document of Moscow daily life in 1928, Man with a Movie Camera - a film more often read about than seen, now buoyed along by a new score - electronically played "live" by its composer-collective, In The Nursery. It's a real eye-opener for anyone who has ever seriously wielded a camera.

FROM its opening fetishisation of the mechanics of films - projectors, lenses, apertures, folding seats in the new Soviet cinetheatres - it launches on a delirious, dream-like segue-through of images of Moscow's busy streets, market squares, registry offices, maternity hospitals, flower-bedecked funerals, aircraft hangars, tram depots, and hard, greasy industry.

All the techniques of the time are used in delirium: double-exposures over flickering eyes, wheeling cameras, splitscreen, time-lapse. But Verto's eye on humanity is lyrical, humorous, and deeply compassionate: views of bourgeois families, market traders, countless street kids sleeping rough.

It only gathered about 40 people, but it was a nice piece of programming alongside the pre-release screenings of The Blair Witch Project.

One festival art show which should not suffer the same relative obscurity is Gilbert & George's The Fundamental Pictures, at the Ormeau Baths - thanks in large part to Ian Paisley. After an invitation, boldly emblazoned with a piece, Human Shit, arrived on his Stormont desk, members of the Free Presbyterian Church picketed a well-attended opening last Thursday. Naturally, in terms of press coverage, Human Shit hit the fan.

Programmed by gallery director, Hugh Mulholland, it's a far more in-your-face show than the G&G show in IMMA a few years back: the large images of the artists' congealed spit, urine, blood, and of course, a number of well-turned stools as big photographic quasi-abstracts; alongside celebrations of the rough trade Asian and black youths. Yet the many nude images of the artists (like Bloody Faith) delivered a half-comic but profound poignancy I hadn't really seen before in work which, formally, hasn't changed much in two decades.

Their polite rejoinder to the protesters deserves quoting: "We more than understand the thoughts and feelings of the Free Presbyterian pickets. We as Western artists have the privilege of free speech and so do they. May the best man win."

It was a typically varied first weekend for the Belfast Festival at Queen's, which somehow needs to market its small but undeniable gems better. As the city opens up there's certainly a huge potential audience there.

From what I saw, it's not just the new Laganside architecture which has changed the city, but a real tangible spirit - so plainly visible in the masses who turned out on a dark, cold Saturday for the fireworks display, a huge, staunchly good-humoured event.

Belfast Festival at Queen's continues until November 14th. Booking and information from: (028) 90665577