Claudia Woolgar, new Kilkenny director, aims to put her own stamp on the established arts festival, she tells Rosita Boland
The Saxon has arrived to do battle with budgets, funding, and arts programming in the Norman town of Kilkenny. Sussex-born Claudia Woolgar took up the post of director of the Kilkenny Arts Festival from outgoing director Maureen Kennelly in January this year. It's the 30th anniversary of the festival and people are finally getting used to calling it the Arts Festival, rather than Arts Week, which it ceased being in 1999.
It's Woolgar's first festival, and she's had a truncated year in which to programme events and fund-raise. As this is her first time to live in Ireland, she's also had to familiarise herself with the local and national politics of the arts world - a slippery and unscientific task.
"I felt as if I'd landed in someone else's world," she says cheerfully. "I've used my ignorance as a foil, but it can be dangerous. But I've had great support from most quarters so far."
Asking how she thinks Kilkenny as a festival compares to other Irish festivals is a question going nowhere; Woolgar hasn't had a lot of experience of other Irish arts festivals.
"This job has been the steepest learning curve ever," she admits. "The Mount Everest learning curve!"
In addition to taking over the festival, Woolgar has been renovating an old house, and planning her wedding to Dutch theatre production manager Arno Nauwels, which will take place immediately after the festival. Clearly, energy is something she is not short on. She seems to take all challenges literally in her stride; when the photographer arrives, she simply pulls out her lipstick and re-applies as she's walking to the better-lit spot he requires. It's virtually standard practice for most women interviewees to disappear for a few minutes before being photographed, but Woolgar is refreshingly relaxed about it all.
Woolgar studied at the City University, London, followed by an MA in theatre criticism at Exeter. It was 1989, and Woolgar wanted to use her training to work as an arts journalist, but there were few opportunities in Britain at the end of the recession. She decided that to get published, she would have to offer something different.
Using her initiative, she packed up and travelled to Eastern Europe, Russia and the Baltic states, just as those countries were facing great political change. The long-established tradition of state-subsidised ballet, theatre and opera across middle and eastern Europe meant that the arts were strong and had very sophisticated and critically attuned audiences.
Few of these productions had been seen in Europe, and, as Woolgar travelled between St Petersburg, Moscow, Bucharest, Gdansk, Kraków, Vilnius, and other major cities, she sent back articles and reviews to the Spectator magazine and the Guardian.
"I was reading War and Peace at the time, and doing lots of train trips," she recalls. "So I was travelling some of the routes I was reading about."
In the mid-1990s, Woolgar got involved in running cultural exchange programmes between Britain and Romania, and then in establishing ITEX, the International Theatre Exchange with the Baltic States. Prior to coming to Ireland, she was based with ITEX in Rotterdam. Thinking she might be interested, a friend in Ireland sent her a clipping of the ad for the Kilkenny job and she applied.
"The idea of being a festival director has to be one of the most exciting things ever," she enthuses. "You have a playground of possibilities."
Getting to know Kilkenny, both the actual place and the programmes of past festivals, has been a priority. A 30-year-old festival has advantages and disadvantages: it has an established audience base and a critical reputation, but it also generates certain annual expectations. For instance, classical music is a strong part of Kilkenny's programme.
"I wouldn't want to reject the expectations of the audience. I'm building on the achievements of the past 30 years. There's no point throwing the baby out with the bath-water when the baby is perfectly happy to be in the bath-water," she says.
Woolgar is confident that she can both retain the established elements, and put her own stamp on the festival. Given her background, she has a particular interest and knowledge of Eastern European theatre, "the productions that have inspired me in the past". This year, the remarkable Small Theatre of Vilnius will be performing its production of Mikhail Lermontov's Masquerade, which played some years ago at the Belfast Festival at Queens. She has also been keen to include a number of emerging artists across all disciplines on the programme.
One of the highlights this yearwill be the Irish première of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, the world's oldest professional chamber orchestra. The Moscow-born violinist, Anton Sorokow, will also make his Irish première, playing his rare 1743 Andrea Castagneri instrument. Woolgar was assisted in the classical music line-up by Susan Proud and in the literature section by Paul Fahy, but did the visual art herself, and has overall responsibility for all programming.
The highlight of the visual arts this year will be a huge-scale installation in the grounds of Kilkenny Castle of German artist H.A. Schult's Bin Soldiers. The 1,000 soldiers are all full size, and composed from rubbish, and have previously appeared at Cairo's Ampitheatre of Xanten, in Moscow's Red Square, and on the Great Wall of China. A miniature trash soldier has even been in space, aboard the shuttle Endeavour. This will be their first appearance in Ireland.
English company Walk the Plank is creating the firework display, called Tower of Light, for the opening night of the festival, which will be in the grounds of Kilkenny Castle.
"They did Paul McCartney's wedding and they do his private New Year's Eve party every year," Woolgar says.
Among other items on the programme this year are: Joe O'Byrne's new production of Oscar Wilde's De Profundis; the multi-discipline Spanish company Joan Baixas; the Russian-trained Kopelman Quartet; films by the (deceased) Georgian-born artist, Sergei Parajanov; a collaboration between visual artist Anna Hill and singer Iarla O'Lionaird; writers Anne Enright, Evelyn Conlon, Jane Smiley, Jennifer Johnston, and documentary-maker Saira Shah.
There's also an extensive children's programme, devised by Teenagh Cunningham.
Apart from the here-and-now of this year's line-up, Woolgar's primary concern is the ongoing issue of funding. This year, it got €300,000 from the Arts Council, in the last year of the Arts Council's multi-annual funding to the festival. What happens next year is unknown territory. The cost of running the 2003 festival is €750,000, with the rest coming from fund-raising and box-office revenue.
"I wish we knew where we were going to stand in terms of financial support next year," Woolgar frets.
She's already started working on programming 2004, without knowing what public and private funding will run to, "because, of course, you can't start fund-raising for 2004 when the 2003 festival hasn't happened yet".
She may still have to see her first festival being performed, but Claudia Woolgar is already talking the talk of every other artistic director in Ireland: funding and how to get it.
The Kilkenny Arts Festival runs from August 8th to 17th. Booking on 056-7752175 or at www.kilkennyarts.ie