This year's Belfast Festival at Queen's was determined to make sure that every event was worth seeing. Jane Coyle was impressed.
Planning an annual arts festival is all about risk. Some like it, some don't. Some audiences demand surprises, to be confronted with experiences they can find nowhere else; others prefer to stick with tried-and-tested performers, in whose company they are assured of a good time. The event's programmers must try to satisfy everyone - and balance the books at the same time.
Over the past 42 years successive directors of the Belfast Festival at Queen's have battled against a largely apathetic public attitude towards the arts in general and the festival in particular. It is to its eternal credit that it stayed afloat through the stormy years of the Troubles and, in the process, introduced to Northern audiences a long and distinguished line-up of international names.
It has found itself in a rather curious situation these past couple of years. In 2003, faced with a combination of inherited debts, dwindling sponsorship, financial cuts and staff shortages, Stella Hall and her team put together a more mainstream, populist programme than had been seen in the past, breaking box-office records but sending aficionados into tizzies of disapproval.
This year they have sifted the mix, blending crowd-pleasers with challenging international work, attracting good houses and enthusiastic responses from public and critics alike.
"We are our own harshest critics", says Graeme Farrow, Hall's deputy. "In an ideal world we would love to be able to take more artistic risks. But it's a complex balancing act, and you have to bring your audiences along with you. Really it comes down to trust: we have to convince our customers that if an event is in the festival programme, no matter how unfamiliar or obscure it may appear, it will be worth seeing.
"We feel that we are moving in the right direction and that, give or take the usual quota of blips, 2004 will be judged a real success. There are always things we'd like to change, but with box office up again on last year we're not going to reinvent the wheel. We're approaching 2005 with great confidence and can promise that we have some real chestnuts in prospect for next year's festival."
Other than two musical world premières - by John Tavener (see review, above) and Neil Martin - the highest-risk element was in the world theatre and dance section. The journey of discovery began early in the first week, with the maverick Argentine company El Descueve's Hermosura, a daring and erotic dance musical that had critics scrabbling for superlatives.
Three and a half hours of Chekhov's The Seagull, in Hungarian with the actors in street clothes, no formal set, no stage lighting and English surtitles, did not, on paper, appear to be a barrel of laughs. In the hands of Budapest's gifted Kretakor (Chalk Circle) company it was one of the most absorbing evenings of theatre imaginable, with the cast virtually living the story and the audience eavesdropping on private grief. (The company's concentration had been severely tested on the opening night, however, when shrieking smoke alarms and general pandemonium inside Queen's new theatre provided an unwelcome 20-minute diversion.)
The glossy, sophisticated Aladeen found an ideal venue in the pitch-perfect surroundings of the BBC's Blackstaff television studio. This collaboration between London-based Motiroti and the Builders Association of New York examined the aspirations of American-coached call-centre workers in Bangalore, coolly capturing the senses and the imagination if not entirely the heart. Moving from India to New York's streets and London's clubland, there were stabs of poignancy in the way these upwardly mobile 20-somethings are turning their backs on their traditional culture in favour of a slick Western lifestyle.
It was left to the ground-breaking German company Fabrik to bring down the curtain, with Pandora 88 (also at the Pavilion Theatre, in Dún Laoghaire, this week). Wolfgang Hoffmann and Sven Till have collaborated closely for many years, a fact that was clearly evident in their emotional, humorous and intensely physical evocation of the intimate interdependence forged by Brian Keenan and John McCarthy in their tiny Beirut cell.
Defying gravity and all preconceived notions of what the human body can achieve, they made one fearful of the day when these two kindred spirits would have to be separated. It was not easy to take our leave of them, but with Hoffmann recently appointed director of Dublin Fringe Festival, it comes as a relief to realise that at least half of the partnership is to remain among us.
