With all the uncertainty which preceded the appointment of Stella Hall as director designate of the Belfast Festival, few might have expected that the acting director, Rosie Turner, could have pulled such a good festival programme out of the fire. But this doesn't look like a stop-gap event. The programme, launched yesterday, centres on the Festa/Fiesta series of Spanish and Catalan events, and boasts the major Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, in conversation with David Johnston. The talk will tie in with the performance at the Lyric of Vargas Llosa's play, La Chunga - The Woman of Our Dreams, in a version by David Johnston.
Details of some other highlights of this mini-festival have already been carried here: there will be visits from the Catalan theatre company, Els Joglars and by the flamenco Compania Sara Baras. Other tantalising events include Carles Santos's Ricardo I Elena - "an assault on the senses" of theatre and new music, and Pep Bou, a Catalan "theatre magician" who creates a world of brilliant colour with his "flying bubbles", and the Spanish poet Carlos Alvarez.
Turner has tackled the lack of a festival atmosphere head-on by staging events such as La Gran Fiesta, which will turn the Whitla Hall into an Andalusian fiesta plaza (something of a transformation, you'll agree). There will be workshops in "how to party like the Spanish", salsa classes and Spanish and Cuban music in the shopping centres.
Another highlight is the residency at the festival of the major jazz saxophonist, Ornette Coleman. He will work on a new piece called The Belfast Suite with Irish musicians Michael Mc Goldrick, Dezi Donnellu, John Mc Sherry and Jonjo Kelly. He will also be reunited on stage with his old jazz cronies, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins. And he will play, with the Ulster Orchestra and his own trio, a new, specially commissioned score for David Cronenberg's film The Naked Lunch.
Another promising event is Tinderbox's site-specific performance in the Crumlin Road Courthouse, which dominates the skyline of north Belfast, and is now vacant, after a notorious career.
The festival's traditional twin peaks of Shakespeare and ballet are on the map again, with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre presenting Hamlet and Twelfth Night, and the Royal Ballet of Flanders doing The Sleeping Beauty.
There will be a new installation by Rita Duffy and performances by the early music group The Sixteen in Belfast's two cathedrals, a talk entitled Irish Classics: from the Gaelic Bards to the Belfast Agreement from Declan Kiberd on the subject of his forthcoming book, and, as the man said, much, much more. The festival runs from October 27th to November 12th and the box office number is 028-90 665577.
Longing for the fog of art-critical theory to lift? The Irish branch of AICA, the international association of art critics, is listening. And has decided to do something about it, to wit, "The Grace of Writing", an international symposium designed to encourage the return of art criticism to "the realm of enjoyable reading". It takes place on Saturday at the National Gallery of Ireland from 10 a.m. to 5.30 p.m., and on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
The invited speakers are Donald Kuspit, Robert Morgan, Jean Fisher and Mick Wilson, with discussion sessions chaired by Medb Ruane and Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith and a plenary session chaired by Dorothy Walker on Sunday morning. Admission is £10 (£5 concessions), payable on the day and all are welcome.
Tim Brennan, the artistic director who was the great, white hope of Arthouse, has passed out through the institution's revolving door after only nine months. He says he simply felt that the job at Temple Bar's multi-media centre wasn't "quite right" for him, but adds that the five-year-old organisation still has to work out "an appropriate structure for its employees", and that it hadn't been within the parameters of his job to do that. The organisation's CEO, Eileen Pearson, says that a major restructuring of the artistic programme, partly devised by Brennan, will go to the board later this month. She says his departure is "the nature of the business . . . the nature of the world today".
Brennan has taken up a new position of director of the Project Art Centre's Talks and Critical Events Programme. After a six-month research period, he will unveil a programme which will not exclude "artists producing work which involves debate and conversation", he says.
