Beautiful trees in a jungle of the arts

FESTIVAL DIARY:Interactive cafes, afternoon downpours, hilarious vegetables, clowns aplenty and some late night dancing – it was an eventful Clonmel Junction Festival for MICHAEL HARDING

WHEN I arrived in Clonmel at lunchtime on Friday, a band from Holland was playing world music beneath the arcade of arches that fronts the Main Guard, a magnificent building dating from 1675, near Gladstone Street.

They were jumping up and down, like men on the moon, and getting the crowd to join in. The crowd jumped like Tellytubbies, but everyone was laughing and having fun.

A little girl in the crowd with a Jedward T-shirt danced a jig, and the fiddle player joined her. Then it rained and workmen with bottles of Lucozade took shelter from the rain under the arches and listened to the music.

I went off to one of the interactive cafes that were set up in disused premises around the town centre as part of the festival.

As well as having big artists such as Neil Delamere and Mick Flannery, the festival also likes to create spaces where the public can interact with the arts.

There was a drama cafe, a singing cafe, and a dancing cafe. But I wanted to go to the bio-diversity cafe, because it had a lovely name; it was called “The Place to Be”. So I went in and sat on a sofa, and tried to just “be” for a while.

People were sitting around a large table drinking tea, and making small sculptures in clay. There were flowers and leaves and branches and lots of other organic material strewn about. One young girl was sleeping with a hot water bottle on a couch in the corner. A retired school-teacher was talking Irish. Everyone was sharing in conversation.

The sculptor Andrew St Ledger was there, talking about trees. He said that if you look at Ireland on Google Earth, you can see bald patches in the middle of the country where the forests have been razed.

“We need to nurture our forests,” he said. “So that they can nurture us.” In fact, the cafe itself was a cozy and nurturing place to hang out but for some reason I began thinking about the oil leaking from the sea floor in the Gulf of Mexico, and I felt unbearably sad, as if the world was bleeding to death, and I was doing nothing about it.

I went to see Cirque de Legume later, hoping they might cheer me up; and so they did, although their little circus didn’t have any exotic animals or fantastic trapeze artists. All the two clowns had on stage was a box of vegetables and their own bodies to create a comic world.

But they certainly were extremely funny; the cabbage became a dog, and the woman became a squirrel and then a seal, and she could peel an onion with the alarming intensity of a striptease artist.

I saw another clown later, in Fossett’s Circus; a master clown who juggled and played with umbrellas and water, as the children screamed with delight and the uniformed ushers sold popcorn and smiled with eyes as lavishly painted as Cleopatra.

Then the circus ring filled with smoke, and loud music, and powerful spotlights, and far above the crowd, a girl in a white leotard attached one foot to a red silk ribbon, and spun like a top, upside down, while the children below gasped in awe.

That night, Ray Yeates performed Dermot Bolger's play The Parting Glassin Chadwick's Theatre, and in St Mary's Church, the people who had been involved in the music cafe came together and gave a recital accompanied by the distinguished French vocalist Caroline Moreau. As I entered the church, a man was singing What a Wonderful World, with his hat on, and he was funny, and the audience loved him. As I left, everyone was singing In the Jungle (The Lion Sleeps Tonight). It seemed as if the entire town was engaging with the arts.

I WENT TO THEFestival Club, where a DJ from America played music from her Apple laptop through the sound system in the bar until 2am. I was the last dancer on the floor, dancing alone, and still feeling emotional about the Gulf of Mexico, when someone whispered in my ear: "I don't mean to be rude, but it's late, and you must be over 50." I said: "That's true; but I know trees that are 500 years old!" It was that time of the night.

I checked out of Mulcahy’s Hotel on Saturday morning. The receptionist was a young Russian woman who came to Ireland 10 years ago, worked in Monaghan, fell in love, and settled in Clonmel. We talked briefly of Tolstoy, and the Russian singer Anna Netrebko, and I asked her what she liked about Ireland.

“The countryside,” she said, without hesitation, “and the trees. It’s all so beautiful.”