My cultural year 2

It was a year when the cultural sector regained confidence about its pivotal role in Irish life, as evidenced by the concluding part of our highlights round-up

CLAIRE KILROY

Writer

I bought my first piece of art this year, a diptych from Siobhan Ogilvy's series, Household Tales, a sequence of photographs taken in a forest. Having art at home is exciting.

At the theatre, I found myself moved to tears by Phillip McMahon's All About Town, a monologue about a naive gay Irish boy's lost year in Australia. Stephen Rea was similarly moving in Sebastian Barry's Tales of Ballycumber. The Seafarer, currently at the Abbey, to quote the script, got me "feeling Christmassy".

The best gigs I saw were both at Electric Picnic, by Florence and the Machine and Fleet Foxes. Nicola Benedetti gave a cracking performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with the Czech Philharmonic at the National Concert Hall, and she’ll be playing it again with our own RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra in March for a fraction of the price, as well as headlining the 2010 West Cork Chamber Music Festival.

Richard Ford read out a long short story in its entirety at Trinity College Dublin in November, and Paul Auster told us of his friendship with Beckett when he delivered the inaugural Beckett Address at the Mountains to Sea book festival in Dún Laoghaire. It was an outstanding year for the Irish novel on the world stage: Colm Tóibín, William Trevor and Ed O’Loughlin were longlisted for the Man Booker; Deirdre Madden was shortlisted for the Orange Prize; Tóibín and Peter Murphy are currently shortlisted for the Costa (which Sebastian Barry won last year); and Colum McCann won this year’s National Book Award, the literary equivalent of taking home the World Cup.

My cultural highlight of the year was hearing Neil Jordan point out on the RTÉ Radio 1 news, at the Global Irish Economic Forum in Farmleigh, that the Irish people have been let down by the banks, the construction industry and the Church, but that Ireland’s cultural industry has not failed us. The recent outpouring of support for the arts from unexpected quarters, such as economists, was deeply heartening.

LIZ MEANEY

Cork City Arts Officer

Cork’s nomination as a Lonely Planet top-10 destination is a definite highlight. I rarely require reassurance about this city, but reinforcement is always welcome.

Cork Midsummer Festival's Scottish showcase presented the wonderful Midsummer, a musical romance, while Hammergrin transformed a townhouse into the residence of a 400-year-old man for its production, Hollander, the festival's hottest ticket.

Florence and the Machine's debut, Lungs, was a definite highlight, and their recent gig at Cork Opera House, part of the Big Night Out series, was a lowlight only because I was not there. The Bad Plus, during the Cork Jazz Festival, were a live standout though.

Two vampire films appealed. The sinister and lingering Let the Right OneIn and the wonderfully juvenile New Moon.

Triskel's ESB Substation saw exhibitions by Shane Cullen and Adham Faramawy. Cullen's work, Factories Electricity Regulations, could have been commissioned for this building. Concurrently showing was Faramawy's four video pieces, a collaboration between Triskel and Cork Film Festival.

The podcast, This American Life, delivers perfectly formed wonders, as does Michael Chabon's new book of essays, Manhood for Amateurs.

The Street Performance World Championship provided entertained for more than 40,000 people in June.

During Culture Night in September I wandered the streets, sampling the cultural offerings, including those of the English Market. In October, Cork Community Artlink brought spooks onto the streets during its Dragon of Shandon Halloween Parade.

In November came the floods. A week afterwards I stood in the winter twilight, part of a large, expectant crowd. Seemingly miraculously, when the button was pressed, the Christmas lights came on. You cannot keep a floating city down for long.

ENRIQUE JUNCOSA

Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art

In theatre, what I most enjoyed this year was the Cheek by Jowl/Chekhov International Theatre Festival production of Three Sistersin the Gaiety Theatre, directed by Declan Donnellan. It is considered one of the most important plays of the 20th century. I was a bit intimidated at having to see it in Russian, but it was so well done, the actors were superb and even the sound of the words was sensational.

I loved the exhibition of Thomas Roberts at the National Gallery. He was an 18th-century Irish landscape artist who died extremely young, so his career was very short. He was an artist I didn’t know, so he was a discovery. He painted beautiful romantic landscapes with a gorgeous yellow light.

I liked Broken Embraces, the Pedro Almodóvar film. But also Antichrist, by Lars von Trier. It is a very important film. It was savaged by critics, because it is disturbing, self-indulgent and difficult to endure, but it is also, somehow, an extraordinary new kind of horror film.

The Massive Attack concert in Dublin’s Olympia in October was fantastic, with fabulous electronics, digital images in the background, fantastic sound. For a pop band, they are quite experimental.

In classical music I saw the London Symphony Orchestra in the National Concert Hall, playing three pieces by Alban Berg and conducted by the American, Michael Tilson Thomas. I’m a fan of contemporary music, and they were three very early works from the 1920s with a huge orchestra. It is expressionistic music, which was revolutionary music at the time.

Another thing I would like to mention is the Dublin Dance Festival, a very good festival in general. This year, what I enjoyed most was Apocrifu, by choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, a beautiful and dramatic production with singers on stage.

My favourite book was Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín. He manages to make the main character, a woman torn between Ireland and New York, very close to the reader, so that we are almost taking her final decision with her.

I also liked Panti's show, A Woman in Progress, which played as part of this year's Dublin Theatre Festival.

This year, not one but two gorgeous new bridges opened along my regular dog-walking route, so I spent the year obsessively watching them take shape. The gracefully undulating white concrete Spencer Dock Bridge (along the new Luas extension), by Amanda Levete Architects, is a small but perfectly formed joy, all sexy curves and gliding lines, even if a little trespassing is needed to get the best views. Understandably, if a little unfairly, it was overshadowed by the spectacular arrival of the Samuel Beckett Bridge only 100 yards away. Watching this being floated up the river and lowered into place was definitely a highlight of my year.

Even though the weather was less than perfect this year, the Electric Picnic was fantastic. Highlights included Florence and the Machine, Chic, and Rodrigo y Gabriela. One of the great things about festivals is stumbling across exciting new acts you’ve never heard of, and the wild, kinetic energy of Ebony Bones had me jumping and mud-squelching like a giddy teenager.

I approached Conor McPherson's The Birdsat the Gate with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Wisely, I felt, McPherson has stripped away much of the source material to create a play that nods to Daphne du Maurier but is very much its own. Sinéad Cusack was wonderful, and although I'm usually suspicious of voiceovers in the theatre, I could listen to her reading the telephone book and still think she deserves a Tony Award!

Niall Sweeney's Revolver, genius graphic designer Sweeney's "performed lecture" at the Lighthouse Cinema, presented as part of the Darklight Festival, was an inspiring, unusual, thoughtful and fun overview of his incredible body of work. Making full use of the digital-projection facilities and interspersed with spoken word and music, it was a visual feast that left you with tired eyes from trying to take it all in. I left the cinema thinking: "I must work harder!"

GERRY GODLEY

Director of the Improvised Music Company

Demand in the Godley household was somewhat suppressed in 2009 due to the arrival of baby Amalia, but cultural life fought gamely on nonetheless. Back-to-back shows at Dublin Theatre Festival proved an affirmative experience as to the current health of Irish drama. Pan Pan delivered a typically warped version of Hansel and Gretel with The Crumb Trail, and I think there is a real signature to the company's work now as it picks away at the darker recesses of the contemporary Irish psyche that we would sooner suppress. Hours later, Slat, from Featherhead Productions, brought me somewhere completely different, beyond narrative, shamanistic and very affecting. Apocrifu, at the Dublin Dance Festival, had similarly emotive properties, as it ruminated on our relationship with religion and the written word.

Watching Julie Feeney take on St Canice's Cathedral at Kilkenny Arts Festival with her artful chamber pop confirmed for me that this is an artist of real wattage. In a more modest venue, Polar Bear played Galway's Crane Bar in the city's jazz festival, a gig that had Leafcutter John manipulating sonic objet trouvés with a laptop, Wii and Xbox controllers in a way that was musically adroit and entirely natural. CDs that I will still be playing on the wireless in 2010 include Dublin Made Me, the vigorous debut from piper Seán McKeon and fiddler Liam O'Connor, playing like men 20 years their senior, and Siwan, from ECM artist Jon Balke.

In a year where truth has been stranger than fiction, the testimony of Clonmel's Michael O'Brien on Newstalk's The Wide Angleon the Sunday after publication of the Ryan Report was a raw moment in Irish broadcasting. Irish realpolitik, and particularly electioneering, is also stripped of its artifice in Pat Leahy's engaging and informative book, Showtime: The Inside Story of Fianna Fáil in Power, though the humour is bitter-sweet for all of us now.

By way of a coda, an unanticipated highlight, given our adverse circumstances, has been the collective realisation, politically and elsewhere, that Ireland’s culture is of enormous value, any way you care to measure it, a realisation evidenced by the groundswell of activism brought forth by the National Campaign for the Arts.

MICK HANNIGAN

Director of the Corona Cork Film Festival

One of my favourite Cork pubs is the Corner House, where one can regularly hear the Lee Valley String Band (every Monday night for 25 years!), but the event that always puts a grin on my face is a monthly programme put on by the Lee Delta Blues Club, called Blues for Kids, where young musicians can turn up and strut their stuff on stage with the house band providing back-up. Rory Gallagher would be proud they continue the tradition.

One of the undiscovered pleasures of autumn in Cork is Cork Community Artlink’s annual Halloween spectacle put on under Shandon Steeple. There is a huge dragon, scary skeletons, a Mephistophelean master of ceremonies and a local cast of hundreds. It’s primal and delightfully scary, and the sight of all those kids doing their choreographed zombie dance is exhilarating.

I was delighted to attend Roger Gregg's Crazy Dog Audio Theatre show, The People's Republic of Gerry Murphy, in the Everyman Palace during the Cork Midsummer Festival. I was unprepared for the inventiveness of Gregg's musical and dramatic adaptations and the ethereal singing of Charlie Murphy.

One of the rewards of working with the Corona Cork Film Festival is the opportunity to meet pretty damn interesting people, and having dinner recently with Julien Temple was a real pleasure. He was erudite, wise, funny and full of delicious stories about The Sex Pistols and assorted malcontents! His new film, Oil City Confidential, is a delight. It's not just about the great Dr Feelgood but a cultural history of the pre-punk period and also a moving morality tale.

The Triskel Arts Centre, currently closed for renovations, has found a new temporary home in the old ESB Sub-station in Caroline Street. Of the consistently exciting series of shows there, one which stood out for me was Qasim Riza Shaheen's Stains and Stencils, work formed out of his living with the transgendered sex workers of Lahore's red-light district in Pakistan.

And well done to the Crawford Art Gallery – belying its institutional smell – in devoting a retrospective to the great Vivienne Dick! Her 8mm “no-wave” films are cinematically and socially important.

[ My Cultural Year I ]