`And there are 4,000 individual pieces of glass in the Waterford crystal chandelier and these are Bokhara rugs and - did you notice the tapestry on the wall just there? That's a Matisse . . . " It's not that they're boasting or anything, but the people at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, superbly situated on a leafy bend of the Potomac River in Washington DC, are proud of who they are and what they do. As we were sped, openmouthed, on a whirlwind tour of the enormous building, many of the gifts presented by foreign governments on the occasion of its opening in 1971 (Egyptian alabaster, African textiles, 3,700 tons of Carrara marble, etc,) were indicated with the flick of a passing wrist.
But the Kennedy Center, as its supporters are equally quick to point out, is more than just a building. Three theatres, an opera house, a concert hall and an art house cinema make it a pretty classy arts venue; comprehensive education and workshop programmes, not to mention a free concert for every day of the millennium year - Christmas Day excepted - make it something of a phenomenon.
"Accessibility": that's the word which gets Kennedy people buzzing. It has been a particular source of satisfaction to the organisers of the fortnight-long "Island: Arts from Ireland" festival that the nightly gigs on the millennium stage, have attracted uniformly large and appreciative crowds for the mix of acts - from step dancers, through singer Karan Casey, to a Celtic rock band led by the mayor of Baltimore. And if many of the faces in those crowds were clearly Irish, a respectable number just as clearly weren't.
As for the face of Irish art, well, it isn't as comfortingly familiar as it once was; and though the Kennedy Center's programme was criticised in Dublin before the festival started for playing things a bit too safe, it hasn't actually turned out that way. Even if you don't count, say, Druid Theatre's stunning production of Marina Carr's harrowing new play, On Raftery's Hill - hardly playing it safe in anybody's book - the sheer scope and scale of the festival has generated a healthy level of debate around the topic of Irish cultural identity which must, sooner or later, translate into some serious re-evaluation on both sides of the Atlantic.
Of course, Irish-American perceptions of cultural safety and those of "the old country" have never really met in the middle, and certainly don't now. A concert entitled "The Northern Voice" provided an unusually stark illustration; billed as "songs of Northern Ireland", the first half featured old-timers Tommy Makem, Davy Hammond and Jean Ritchie, accompanied by a superb traditional ensemble led by Donal Lunny and Arty McGlynn. A packed house clapped and sang its way through a beguiling selection of such old favourites as My Aunt Jane and The Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond, egged on by the indomitable Makem - "Come on, join hands and we'll try to contact the living," he declared at one point, when he felt the response cooling to lukewarm.
After the interval, Different Drums of Ireland took the stage: but by then half the audience had already left the theatre, and most of the rest had melted away long before the five percussionists had come to the end of a dizzyingly virtuosic display, which merged bodhrans and whistles with Lambeg drums, the latter complete with highly visible portraits of King Billy. This was a genuinely challenging performance, both musically and politically, and it was a pity that so many of the good denizens of DC missed the opportunity to test their expectations, let alone their eardrums. However, in the pub frequented by the visiting Irish contingent - Different Drummers included - the issue was hotly debated long after the echoes of the Lambegs had faded into the balmy evening air.
It continued to surface during the week, this business of the interpretation of Irishness. At an introductory press conference, music producer Philip King had spoken of following musical trails, of tracing "America's indelible thumbprint" on the development of Irish culture, particularly music. The festival, he said, was to be "a celebration of what we have in common, but looking at our different accents".
Sure enough, the latter emerged in force with the appearance at the first of two literary sessions, when novelists John McGahern, Jennifer Johnston and William Kennedy were joined by Angela's Ashes author, Frank McCourt. Though the audience responded well to all the readings, it was clear that it was McCourt they had come to see. It was to him that most of the questions were addressed, and for his autograph that an adoring queue waited patiently until he was, literally, hauled away to catch a plane. Now it was the turn of the old country representatives to be bemused: Frank McCourt, literary superstar?
There were, fittingly, no questions at all after the following evening's mirror-image poetry reading, a superbly orchestrated event which saw poets Paul Durcan, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Michael Longley and Eavan Boland range over a variety of subject matter - love, death, nature, technology, Srebrenica - and prove in the process that at its best, Irish culture has no difficulty playing any number of new tunes on traditional instruments.
The immaculate display of Tony O'Malley's glorious Visions of Ireland exhibition in the delightful brownstone townhouse which contains The Phillips Collection - Bonnards and Van Goghs rubbing shoulders with Renoir's Boating Party - did likewise, as did an immaculate double-handed recital by Seamus Heaney and Liam Og O Flynn.
Thanks to massive advance ticket sales, Heaney and O Flynn's "The Poet and the Piper" had to be moved from its original venue to the somewhat daunting surroundings of the centre's cavernous concert hall. Unruffled, the pair produced an uplifting and memorable evening which, though relaxed and conversational, was anything but "easy" - it demanded a sophisticated and knowledgeable audience, and that was exactly what it got.
The waters have become considerably muddier with the opening of the theatre productions. DC audiences are notoriously conservative in matters theatrical, and while the energy and exuberance of Donal O'Kelly's Catalpa earned him a first-night standing ovation, there was a more guarded response to Marina Carr's On Raftery's Hill. At least part of the problem was to do with simple acoustics - many of those at the back of the Eisenhower Theater simply couldn't catch everything that was going on - but though it was predictable that people would baulk at the subject of incest and at the stark manner in which Carr presents it, there were some surprising reactions. One couple declared the play to be "not black enough"; others made unfavourable comparisons to Pinter, and to Martin McDonagh.
In its second week, no doubt "Island: Arts from Ireland" will throw many more flickers of light on these and related matters, with performances still to come from The Irish Chamber Orchestra (who will premiere the new work from Bill Riverdance Whelan, eagerly awaited by all but especially, we are told, by the woman who made the festival happen, the former ambassador to Ireland, Jean Kennedy Smith) and from Barry Douglas and Camerata. Among other events still to come are Rough Magic's production of Stewart Parker's Pentecost, a film festival, and a theatre symposium.
In the longer term it's impossible to say what, if any, the effects of "Island: Arts from Ireland" will be. But the festival has undoubtedly created some cultural ripples, and when cultural ripples start, who knows where they'll end up? For the Kennedy Center life goes on, in the shape of a booked-out Bolshoi ballet and a mouth-watering programme of symphony concerts. But if just one black kid from a disadvantaged area of DC grows up to remember the day he or she had a ball with Tommy Peoples and his band, and carries that memory in a different musical direction, maybe it will all have been worthwhile.
