Three days at the Kilkenny Arts Festival left Arminta Wallace exhilarated, charmed, challenged - and jumping for joy
You can bring art to the people. You can bring the people to art. Or you can, as Osadia did at Kilkenny Arts Festival last week with its deliciously subversive slice of hair sculpture-cum-street theatre, go the whole hog and make the people into art. The concept was simple - two silent actresses in bubble-wrap kimonos, volunteers from the audience, and lots and lots of hairspray - the results, mesmerising. A girl with a cheeky grin became an insect from an alien planet, her head a mass of wild green squiggles. A tatty teenager emerged as a Greek god, the curve of his lips outlined in gold. A couple of children squealed as their granny grew, gently but inexorably, into a Rugrat. If you're thinking "duh, face painting", think again; Osadia is to face painting what an Olympic marathon would be to a half-hearted dash for the bus. Art as transformation is the name of Osadia's game. But also art as accessible, fun, surprising, interactive, thought-provoking and even, when you think about it, a tad cruel.
Which is - when you think about it - not a bad metaphor for this year's festival. The cruelty came in the shape of gleeful media coverage of a number of organisational and logistical howlers. A major art installation blew down in high winds; the opening concert-cum-fireworks spectacular was delayed by traffic chaos and marred by poor acoustics; and in a news item which might have come straight from the pen of Myles na Gopaleen but - alas - didn't, a life-sized sculpture was stolen from the grounds of Kilkenny Castle. Unfortunate? Undeniably. But it didn't dampen the festival spirit. On the contrary; to be in Kilkenny for three days last week was to be stimulated, charmed, challenged and entertained in equal measure.
A good deal of this had to do with a deliberate focus on alternative performance spaces as well as some judicious genre-bending. Kilkenny's director of two years' standing, Claudia Woolgar, is determined that the festival must not be simply a gathering of high-quality art exhibitions and classical music concerts that happens to take place in Kilkenny, but an all-encompassing artistic experience at all sorts of levels, not just for visitors, but for the city and its people - especially young people - as well. Accessibility and site-specificity have, therefore, been constant themes in an extraordinarily varied programme.
Tom Swift's quirky combination of gothic drama and hi-tech delivery, Dr Ledbetter's Experiment, took us on a literal journey through some of Kilkenny's most historic buildings as well as on an emotional journey into the dark side of Darwinism. The issuing of headphones and a tiny radio to each member of a walkabout audience is no small matter, but it was managed with grace and good humour - and it was well worth it, adding an extra dimension to a play whose creative use of locations and hilarious nods in the direction of "look behind you!" spookiness were surpassed only by some first-rate acting, especially from Fergal McElherron, excellent in half a dozen roles.
CoisCéim Theatre Company's two dance shows at the Ormonde Hotel, Swept - downstairs in the basement Venue Bar - and Chamber Made - upstairs in Room 409 - were also perfectly adapted to their respective spaces. The first is a love story that plays with platitudes about love stories, the second a virtuoso interweaving of three plot lines that unfold simultaneously in a hotel room. Lined up along the bar as the dancers did their flamenco-flamboyant seduction thing, or crammed into the corner of a bedroom in the Ormonde Hotel as six performing bodies flew through the air in all directions, inches from our noses, we wondered more than once whether they'd misjudge the distance and cannon into us, or even step on toes. They didn't. But they did offer moments of stillness which were all the more startling for being totally unexpected.
A theme that, unexpectedly, united these disparate shows was their clever, informed, utterly contemporary use of music. Osadia's dance/world beats attracted attention without being annoying; Dr Ledbetter's Experiment boasted an atmospheric original score by Rob Canning and a soundscape by Paul Brennan; the evocative soundtrack of Chamber Made was by Rory Pierce; Swept made particularly poetic use of a cello.
The Russian mime artists Comic Trust Theatre Company took music to the edge of madness with its high-energy White Side Story, which checked out everything musical from disco to Wagner via Rule Britannia and Playstation-type plinkety-plonks.
This tale of a medieval kingdom caught in a power struggle between a heartless white queen and her hapless daughter was perfectly pitched and expertly executed - the performers seemed not to have a bodily bone between them, and the pseudo-language used in place of text was evocative enough to melt a heart of stone - but it, too, had its magical moments. Some of these were visual, involving what the programme called "a time of endless raining bubbles"; some were emotional, ranging from "neh-neh-neh-neh-neh" schadenfreude to a rush of pure empathy. Coming out of the Watergate Theatre afterwards, it was hard not to jump for sheer joy.
A calmer kind of joy was invoked by the inspirational evening at St Canice's Cathedral in the company of Liam O'Flynn with his Piper's Call Band and their guest, fiddler Paddy Glackin. The master piper was at his magisterial best in a programme that ranged from traditional to contemporary but was always electric; and the venerable St Canice's proved, once again, its versatility. Jigs, reels and strathspeys danced over the ancient stones with merry insouciance, and O'Flynn's trademark slow air rose to the rafters as purely as any prayer. Some of the titles of the tunes, of course, are anything but pure, and the guitarist Arty McGlynn caused no little merriment when he introduced one of his awesome solos, I Killed My Wife and Danced on Top of Her, as being "from the romantic period of Irish music". If ever a standing ovation was called for, this one was.
Over to classical music, and the open rehearsal which constituted the two-day Trans-Fusion residency at the Parade Tower. My visit to this was all too brief, on account of a packed schedule - an hour wasn't nearly enough to get a feel for what was happening between the musicians over the two days - but for anyone not familiar with the workings of chamber music rehearsals, the attention to detail and the repetition of phrases and chunks of music must have been quite an eye-opener. My fellow audience members, however, looked to be very much at home with the process - which begs the question of whether the event succeeded in attracting the wider audience at which it was aimed.
There's also a distinct problem in that people wandering into the rehearsal couldn't possibly know which piece was being unpicked at that particular moment. Perhaps one of those notices they have in record shops would help: "Now playing . . ."?
The group's subsequent lunchtime concert in the airy tower, however, was a delight; music for a sunny day given added warmth by the luminous presence - musical and personal - of the young Irish violinist Claire Duff.
Music in a tower is one thing. But music in a forest in the middle of the night? Kilfane Glen and Waterfall, outside Thomastown, was the venue for Daniel Figgis's Motor, an ambitious attempt to transform the sylvan setting into a "sound sculpture" with integrated lighting design. As we assembled in the gathering at dusk, it was like a cross between a druid's conference and the Teddy Bears' Picnic. Three white-clad figures eventually emerged from the gloom and took their places on raised plinths: Figgis on drums, plus cellist and a guitarist wired to a series of laptops and gizmos. There were flashes of brilliance from the latter two musicians - resolutely un-named in Figgis's programme notes - and the lighting of the waterfall was suitably impressive, as was the moment when the water "disappeared". But for music which was billed as innovative and was clearly of high technological sophistication, it moved to a curiously dated beat. Figgis claims a wide range of musical influences, including that of the composer Malcolm Arnold. Daniel Figgis's Motor was, however, more Mike Oldfield.
Final paragraph approaching. How to sum up Ernesto Neto's playful, puzzling plasma-meets-particle-accelerator at the Butler Gallery in one sentence? Or comment on the difficulties of getting around Kilkenny city and county in a car: "The roads," I heard a German visitor explain to a terrified French woman at breakfast one morning, "are very little, and much curved - and they have a lot of plants." Nevertheless it was worth venturing to Thomastown to see Lúghaidh Ó Braonain's intriguing light sculpture, Circle I, at Grennan Mill.
A Stonehenge for our times, it was inscribed with (genuine) graffiti whose predictable dullness - "Celtic FC"; "C U next Tuesday" - was a saddening counterpoint to the translucence of the perspex columns. In a fairy-tale courtyard by the river, the wonderful Berkeley Gallery - under threat, alas, from Bob the Builder or somesuch - housed Debra Bowden's Home, a series of elegant, evocative doors and windows into the natural world.
Back in the city, there was a brace of exhibitions by enterprising young artists, including Phoenix, a group show in yet another unorthodox space - a house on High Street - which wound upstairs and into one room after another in an unusually appealing manner. Outside, the streets were buzzing, bathed in sunshine and the ubiquitous yellow-and-gold of Kilkenny hurling jerseys. A chap with a microphone inquired of passers-by - as if he needed to - whether we were sinners. A man with two Pekingese on leads queued up at the ice cream van on the Parade, bought a "99", and fed it, chocolate and all, to the two delighted doggies. Art as transformation? For three blissful days, Kilkenny Arts Festival changed the way I saw the world.
