Who'd have thought, a year ago, that we'd now be in the midst of a second round of annual arts festivals severely restricted by Covid. There was a quiet, unfamiliar for this time of year, on the streets during the opening weekend of the 2021 Kilkenny Arts Festival, and heartbreaking rows upon rows blocked off in the Watergate Theatre, reducing its 300+ auditorium to 50 seats. It's one of this year's few indoor festival-venues, while elsewhere rain is the ever-present risk for outdoor performance.
And yet, there’s a palpable sense of celebration at festival events nonetheless, a delight that artists can make and perform, that audiences can attend – the pity being that so few can do so because of pandemic limits.
Ironically, a year and a half into the pandemic, in vaccination-nation, the festival is even more limited in what’s possible than last year. There’s even less nuance or consistency in regulations – to which those making work or managing audiences are sticking scrupulously – and seemingly insufficient guidance on any possible flexibility. Thus last year’s one-to-one Encounters performances aren’t possible now, nor is live performance, even for an audience of 50, in St Canice’s vast and airy cathedral, because it’s not formally a performance space.
A sense of place imbues the Kilkenny festival, its urban home, both medieval and contemporary, a constant presence
The constraints even extend to the logistics of after-show gatherings, with the 11.30pm pub shutdown very much in evidence.
This year's may be a reduced programme but it's going in interesting directions, and it's been an extraordinary balancing act by festival director Olga Barry and her team. Barry seems sanguine, sustained by watching new work unfold, such as Róisín Reimagined, in which Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh joins the Irish Chamber Orchestra for fresh arrangements of sean nós songs, streaming from August 13th.
One upside of the national Covid response is top performers such as Nic Amhlaoibh and Karan Casey having had time to work with the festival on innovative approaches. A superlative folk/trad singer, Casey's I Walked Into My Head at the Watergate is a scripted music-theatrical show, framed as a conversation between Casey and her Voice, berating each other, as she seeks to find her own voice, rather than always singing other people's songs. Far from a linear life story, it's fragments of memory, polemic, anger, tenderness, and humour, flowing between English and Irish without blinking, and in and out of song and speech. Her Voice demands less talking, more singing, but Casey sings plenty: ballads, rebel songs, her own compositions, a sassy snatch of blues, "f**k the patriarchy" (debating with her Voice: can I sing that? "But they were singing along"). The performance is sometimes melodious and pure, other times dark and discordant, reaching into the piano to create angry sound. The impressionistic memories and reflections range over performance, travel, motherhood,to dark spaces "putting in on me", and toxic misogyny in music, a dark underbelly exposed by the Fair Plé collective, to whom the show is dedicated. Elliptical and occasionally unclear, it would be great to see this personal-becoming-political show further developed.
A sense of place imbues the Kilkenny festival, its urban home, both medieval and contemporary, a constant presence. It's buzzy at the Butler Gallery on Saturday afternoon, just more than a year into its spectacular new base at Evans' Home. Outside, the terrace and garden are buzzing, with cafe tables and Blaise Smith painting live portraits for his Village People series; inside is a contrast, with Richard Mosse's intimate and intense Mediterranean migration film Incoming, and the engaging Invitation to a Journey film installation, evoking aspects of Eileen Gray.
Though it's at an early stage of development, the city's new Abbey Quarter on the former Smithwick's site, with St Francis Abbey at its core, feels prominent in the festival already. An impressive river walk and open spaces precede the buildings. At the abbey, visual artist/theatre-maker/composer Peter Power and a creative team including composer Michael Gallen are working on The City Is Never Finished, a multimedia live-theatre promenade performance next weekend, following on from Power's involvement in the stunning fLux installation in St Canice's a couple of years ago.
Further down the river walk we come to the Abbey Quarter’s new skatepark, setting for Dumbworld’s Carnival of Shadows installation. Superimposed on, and then incorporating, the native habitat of the skateboarders, there’s a lot going on here, including what lies beneath. Under the bridge are projected images – reminiscent of cave art and of graffiti – of bones, bodies, physicality, while through headphones we hear Brian Irvine’s composition and a forensic pathologist talking about deducing information from old skeletal remains. In the present, the life of skateboarders creates an intersection, gliding and spinning and tricking. It’s a perfect counterpoint and a sort of multisensory exploration of the layers below the new concrete of this space through time.
Sense of place, this time Castle Yard, is dominant too in Irish National Opera’s outdoor Elektra, a triumph over adversity to create an exhilarating experience. For a small audience – who were 2m apart and masked despite being outdoors in the wind – the gods decided Strauss’s rousing opera needed even more drama, so the heavens wept on the action. While the hardy audience held firm under plastic ponchos, the outstanding cast sang, an act of will and strength determinedly in keeping with the opera’s tone of heightened rage.
Then to St Kieran's College on Sunday, for Helen Comerford's The Nineteen, an exhibition of that same number of gorgeous encaustic paintings, all textured physicality whose layers cry out for touch. En route I pass a musical huckster's travelling van: the tech for that night's opening of Tonic, Rough Magic's new show by (and starring) Fionn Foley. Rough Magic are past masters at rain-sodden Kilkenny performances, but later that night, the precipitation only spots lightly on another sea of masks and plastic ponchos. The tale of the Calibri Triplet Family Band is a hoot from the first minute, a black musical satire set in 2047, when civilisation has collapsed and the end of the world is nigh. Put like that, sure, in the context of doomsday, what's a pandemic and a bit of rain? It could be worse. Two fingers to adversity, and march on.
Kilkenny Arts Festival continues until August 15th, kilkennyarts.ie
