We've been hearing a lot about the traditional arts since the Arts Council launched its new policy on them a few weeks ago, but all too often they sit in glorious isolation from one another, tunes and tunesmiths dominating the field while singers, dancers, storytellers and poets languish on the periphery. The session still reigns supreme.
Belfast's Open House Festival is doing its best to break out of that straitjacketed approach. The city's Cathedral Quarter has, for the past six autumns, been abuzz with music, song, poetry and dance. And instead of shoehorning events into a single week - or, heaven forbid, a weekend - it sprawls across four long weekends.
Kieran Gilmore, the festival's director, is keen to retain its unique colour. "The original idea was to bring traditional music back into the city centre," he says, "because for a long time it had been encouraged in certain parts of the city but not necessarily the city centre itself. . . . Recent years have seen an acceptance of cultural things improving and becoming more accessible to everybody, and that's why we've called it Open House. The identity of the festival is that it's a neutral, accessible city-centre-based traditional arts festival."
Gilmore is keen to avoid predictable divisions. "We haven't politicised the music," he says. "We've put the quality of the music at the forefront, and I think people recognise that and are grateful for it. There have been situations in the past where the music has been politically hijacked, but I've had this weird notion of there being one community - a music community - and I've allowed that dictate who we are and where we're at."
The Belfast poet Gearóid MacLochlainn has been closely involved with Open House; this year he's written a book with the Armagh artist and piper Brian Vallely, called Rakish Paddy Blues, in honour of Ireland's great travelling musicians. The book, which was commissioned by Open House, is an example of how festivals can be much more than showcases for existing work, according to MacLochlainn.
"There's a very creative buzz around Open House," he says, "because Kieran Gilmore's commissioning and developing new work as part of the festival programme, and that's an all-year-round endeavour. He spots aspects of your creative development which you might not be fully aware of, and he puts you in touch with someone else who he knows you're going to spark off."
The festival has been bringing together an eclectic gathering of other musicians, poets and artists, including Jarlath Henderson, an 18-year-old Dungannon piper who was named BBC Radio 2's young folk musician of the year, Brendan Begley, Maighréad Ní Dhomhnaill, Jean-Michel Veillon, Róisín Elsafty and Peggy Seeger, not to mention the much anticipated arrival of Kate Rusby, the English folk icon, who rarely performs in Ireland.
Further evidence of festival's boundary-breaking preoccupation can be found in Open House's Trad with a Difference sessions, at which Gilmore encourages yet more unlikely musical meetings. "Trad with a Difference is about inviting musicians who can play great traditional music on unusual instruments to play together. We've got Neil Yates, who plays trumpet in the Michael McGoldrick Band, and Seamus O'Donnell, on saxophone, and the great lilter Seamus Fay, from Cavan. It's about asking them to play a few tunes and have a bit of fun together."
Gilmore is determined that the festival will never be curtailed by the likes of its modest €150,000 budget. The art is in creating something new, he says. "I know events with twice that budget," he says, "and they have very plush offices, the latest equipment and so on, and they might produce very little. That saddens me. For us what comes first is giving people the chance to really develop their work. My office is our back bedroom, but the money I could spend on a laptop I'd rather spend on booking a musician or a singer. It's as simple as that."
... Siobhán Long
Open House runs until Sunday.
More details from 048-91454754 or www.openhousefestival.com
