After early worries about ticket sales, even the rain couldn't wash away a busy first weekend at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, writes SARA KEATING
DESPITE THUNDER, lightning and torrential rain, the Kilkenny Arts Festival got off to a busy start this weekend. The streets were awash with tourists and locals, sheltering under the canopy of buildings or large umbrellas to watch street entertainers and outdoor artists battle the elements.
At the start of the week advance ticket sales had stalled at a worrying 30 per cent, but by the time the festival was officially launched on Friday afternoon, many of the weekend’s events were sold out.
Out on the streets, as well as in the theatres and art galleries, there was also evidence of flourishing participation as well as professional output among the local community. Informal exhibitions displaying the work of local amateur artists could be seen in shop windows and along The Parade, while some of Ireland’s top artists – Louis le Brocquy, Nick Miller, Tony O’Malley – were represented in curated spaces.
There was evidence of healthy local participation in more structured events too. The Franzini Brothers – two Irishmen masquerading as Italians – were keen to involve the audience that gathered on the street for their performance despite the bad weather, and the audience obliged, while small family groups clutched sodden treasure maps for the Festival Trail, exploring local history and festival events with the hope of winning a prize. Along the pedestrian enclave of Kieran Street, the roofs flapped with eye-catching decorations made by local children.
Inside the venues, too, an army of over 200 volunteers – children as well as adults – distributed tickets and programmes, and guided people to their seats, and the auditoria filled up quickly for literary readings by Pat McCabe and Dermot Healy, rock jazz group TrioDV, and 3epkano's marvellous live accompaniment to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.
At Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage,the audience needed no encouragement to cheer the conquering hero or clap along in rhythm with Banana, Bag Bodice's raucous score.
Speaking at the launch, Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin spoke of the “healthy return on investment” that the festival offers to the State: last year the Arts Council, Fáilte Ireland, Kilkenny County Council and Kilkenny Borough Council offered combined funding of €530,000 to the festival; it returned €6 million to the local economy in revenue. It was a prescient comment that set the tone for Saturday’s events, which were bookended by a stimulating discussion on the value of the arts and a typically stringent lecture by economist Morgan Kelly on the parlous state of Ireland’s fiscal fortunes.
It was Morgan Kelly’s address on Saturday night which drew the largest crowd of any event, with rows of extra seats put in to accommodate listeners. After the spirited debates about the arts that dominated the first two days of the festival, it seemed a bit ironic that an economist should prove the biggest draw at an arts festival. And yet under the astonishing vaulted ceiling of St Canice’s Cathedral – perhaps one of the finest monuments to artistic creativity in Ireland – Ireland’s history of patronage and inspiration was never far from the rapt audience’s mind.
Introducing Kelly, Olivia O’Leary said the real reason that Ireland was in such dire economic straits was because there were “no dissenting voices” during the boom. “The most important thing you need to know about an economist,” she said, “is who pays him.”
Well, there was no culture of consensus at an earlier debate about the arts, when the audience was invited to contribute their individual perspectives. An encouraging crowd of around 80 people gathered early on Saturday for a debate provocatively titled The arts are a luxury we can’t afford right now. As panel chair, Pat Cooke, director of the MA programme in cultural policy at UCD, commented, holding such a discussion at an arts festival is a bit like preaching to the converted.
However, the three speakers – poet Gerard Smyth, Gráinne Millar, head of cultural development at Temple Bar Trust, and economist Finbar Bradley – each took vastly different approaches to the opening statement, even if they concurred in their conclusions, and when the audience were invited to contribute to the discussion dissenting voices began to emerge.
The room was broadly split between representatives of cultural and political bodies such as The Arts Council, Culture Ireland, Fáilte Ireland, and Kilkenny Chambers – as speakers introduced themselves it felt a bit like being at an election hustings, with each speaker defending the work of their organisation and the important contribution their organisation makes to the arts and how that trickles down into the wider community.
However, the individual artists in attendance were highly critical of the way in which arts policy exemplified the wider failure of Celtic Tiger Ireland, encouraging bricks and mortar funding and expanding administrations at the expense of arts participation and creativity.
Visual artist Blaise Smith was especially vocal in his criticism of the cultural climate in Ireland, expressing his dismay that the “taxpayer gets so little from bursaries” and Arts Council investment. There is “too much funding”, he argued, “too many artists being trained, without any understanding of the fact that they need to make a living and contribute to society”.
The dissenting energy that brought the debate to a close seemed a vital and positive force.
The Kilkenny Arts Festival continues until August 14th.
Kilkenny kicks off: weekend highlights
Modified Expression
Curated by Angela O’Kelly, this innovative craft exhibition takes inspiration from the festival’s literary strand, and it provides a stunning visual and conceptual experience, with works simply inspired by poetry to pieces that literally deconstruct books, slicing pages out of them to create abstract forms. Provocative, playful and very pretty, this is one of the strongest pieces of the entire visual arts programme.
Pat McCabe and Dermot Healy
It would be interesting to know what Pat McCabe made of Modified Expression, in which his latest novel The Stray Sod Countryis punctured so deeply it looks like it has been shot. At a reading with Dermot Healy, McCabe was in ebullient, theatrical form, choosing excerpts that gave a packed audience all the shocking thrills of the book's macabre landscape.
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
Billed as part of the classical music line-up, 3epkano’s live score to the 1920s silent masterpiece was more electronic than purely classical. Enhanced by improvised organ accompaniment by Eric Sweeney, the uncanny tale of murder and madness was made even more atmospheric by the haunting vaults of St Canice’s Cathedral.
