ARTSCAPE:SO WHAT does the emergency budget mean for the arts sector? Anyone wondering how things were going to pan out this week was left wondering, as the figures won't be released until the revised estimates in the week beginning April 21st, writes Deirdre Falvey.
It is understood that the detail of the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism’s budget has already been decided, although its statement this week just confirmed that overall expenditure in the arts, culture and film sector “has reduced by €41m from €221m in 2008 to €180m in 2009, a reduction of 18.5 per cent” (It had been reduced to €184.5m in the October budget, so this is a further cut). The cut in current expenditure, the statement said, has been 6 per cent, and in capital expenditure 42 per cent, “owing primarily to the completion of once-off major capital projects such as the Wexford Festival Opera House and the Gate Theatre extension”.
Those lobbying that additional cuts to the arts be contained have pointed out that the creative economy employs 50,000 people, that the sector was hit hard in the October Budget, the enormous importance of the cultural sector to tourism, and that, for example, visitor numbers to cultural institutions have increased in the early part of this year. The Arts Council had a very large cut in the October Budget, with consequent substantial cuts in funding for arts companies all over Ireland, and a further cut is expected in the Estimates. The additional cut is understood to be about €2.4 million (this is an additional cut of about 3 per cent since October’s cut), bringing its funding for 2009 to just over €73 million.
The national cultural institutions (NCH, Imma, Chester Beatty, Crawford) are expected to get a further 2 per cent cut in budgets. Funding for Culture Ireland – whose work to raise the profile of Ireland internationally will include work on the Shanghai Expo and an initiative to promote Irish art in the US – will be down a further 1 per cent on the October figures, to just over €4.5 million.
The Irish Film Board’s budget for this year is expected to increase by 7 per cent (up to close to €22m) on the figures from October, which is a reflection of an increase in the number of big film projects in the pipeline (and some of which have already started), which are bringing inward investment with them, on the basis of Section 481. There won’t be a new Access capital funding programme, but projects already started, such as storage facilities for the National Museum and at Imma will be completed, and capital projects worth over €75m will be honoured.
Printing house no more
The Printing House Festival of New Music was a pretty odd name for a festival, explained by the venue – the old printing house in TCD, writes Michael Dervan. The festival, which used to happen in December, is still alive and well, though the venue has been abandoned with the name change. Enter the Ergodos Festival, running for nine days from Friday 17th at the National Concert Hall, the Unitarian Church, St Stephen's Green and St Bartholomews Church, Clyde Road. The festival's two directors, composers Garrett Sholdice and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, have again put together a programme that's sure to surprise.
There's going to be a gamelan (an orchestra of Indonesian percussion instruments) playing works by Western composers, a concert with traditional Irish and Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, much use of electronics, hexaphonic guitar, and a representation of US experimentalism, including a performance of the late James Tenney's In a large, open space.
The name, by the way, comes from the adjective ergodic, which Sholdice and Schlepper-Connolly explain, is defined as “relating to or denoting systems or processes with the property that, given sufficient time, they include or impinge on all points in a given space and can be represented statistically by a reasonably large selection of points”. See ergodos.ie for more.
Lonergan wins research prize
Patrick Lonergan, a lecturer at NUI Galway and a theatre critic for this newspaper, won the 2008 Society for Theatre Research book prize this week for his volume Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era, writes Karen Fricker.
Lonergan's book, published by Palgrave Macmillan, places the developments in Irish theatre since the early 1990s – in particular the extraordinary international success of playwrights including Brian Friel, Marie Jones, Conor McPherson, Martin McDonagh, and Marina Carr – in the context of the transformation of culture and economies around the world brought about by globalization. Professor Katherine Newey of the University of Birmingham, a member of the three-person jury, said they were "gripped" by Lonergan's book: "he introduces sophisticated ideas, with clarity and humour, and identifies the ways in which all of us think about the global and the local at the same time." The jury selected Lonergan's book from a shortlist of six volumes, including a history of the theatrical Irving and Terry families by Michael Holroyd, and a book about grassroots popular theatres in Belfast and Derry during the Troubles by Bill McDonnell. Lonergan's is the second book about Irish theatre to win the 12-year-old Prize, after Christopher Morash's A History of Irish Theatre 1601-2000(Cambridge University Press), which won in 2002.
Lonergan is a graduate of University College Dublin and NUI Galway, the former reviews editor of Irish Theatre Magazine,and the director of the Synge Summer School. The prize was awarded by the writer/actor Steven Berkoff, who jested that he gave the award grudgingly since the name "Berkoff" does not appear in the index (Berkoff famously directed Oscar Wilde's Salomé for Dublin's Gate Theatre in the late 1980s).