Delighting some, startling others, soprano Niamh Murray serenaded students and staff in the college's indoor "street", in Dublin City University, during last week.

The glass-roofed atrium rang to the sounds of "I could have danced all night" as Niamh inveigled unsuspecting passers-by to waltz with her.

In the nearby canteen, students' ears were filled with the lively tones of The Camembert Quartet while their eyes feasted on jugglers from the Belfast circus.

Around the campus, 38 "spies" from the Gaeity school of acting, with masked or painted faces, flipped open notebooks, stopping students and staff with mimed or written demands for entertainment.

The whirlwind force behind DCU's Arts Week 2001 is college lecturer and arts week director Marie-Louise O'Donnell. She is vociferous in praise of the college, a place that has never countered her suggestions with the weasel-word "can't".

Having brought six shows from the festival fringe to DCU, she is there, close to midnight, still radiating energy, cheering the hilarious Bondage, in the Hub. The drag act, by the Ladies Blue and Max, had engineering, chemistry, physics, biotechnology students laughing their way through the evening.

Could this possibly be the campus where techies are reputed to enjoy the most boring of social lives?

And while arts week brought an extraordinary selection of artists, singers, musicians, poets and players to DCU for a week, the future holds a new £30 million arts centre with a concert hall, theatre and experimental theatre, due to be completed next year.