Get out your compass and make for Kilkenny's most exciting Arts Festival to date, writes Ciaran Murray
"We have aspirations to knock Edinburgh off the map," laughs an excited Claudia Woolgar. In only her second year as director of the Kilkenny Arts Festival, Woolgar has helped put the arts showcase on the national map and transformed it into a hugely ambitious, countywide arts behemoth, featuring theatre, classical, jazz, world music, trad, literature, visual art and movies.
Last year's festival is a hard act to follow. According to a survey conducted in 2003, nine out of 10 cats prefer the Kilkenny Arts Festival. Of the 94 per cent who expressed satisfaction with the festival, 50 per cent rated it excellent and 44 per cent good.
For this, the 31st annual festival, the mission was to "decentralise" activities, to bring "stunning art to distinct locations", and to reach as wide an audience as possible. To this end, events will take place in nine different locations around Co Kilkenny.
This year's big profile raiser is Woodstock 2004, which brings together, among others, Hothouse Flowers, Jerry Fish and the Mudbug Club and Rodrigo y Gabriela (who must be cloning themselves to keep up their high workrate this summer). This showcase event of Irish singer/songwriters takes place in the gorgeous surroundings of Woodstock Gardens in Inistioge on Sunday, August 8th. The gardens (which Woolgar assures me contain the longest monkey puzzle avenue in Europe) will be totally transformed from the previous night's "pyromusical", a collaboration between the Northern Chamber Orchestra and fireworks company Walk the Plank.
This is not just a highbrow festival for the wine and cheese community. All tastes are catered for and getting young people and those not necessarily well-disposed to concepts of "high art" into the buzz is an important part of the festival's ethos. "We're attempting to actively engage people and get them hooked," Woolgar says. "We're trying to demystify art, and bring it back to the ordinary Joe."
A "meet the artists" schedule appears for the first time this year, providing people with the chance to meet and learn from some of the artists displaying work and performing at the festival and giving the sometimes anonymous world of art a human face in the informal and laid-back surroundings of Morrison's bar.
A premium is placed on pushing innovative and experimental artists to the fore. Woolgar becomes animated when talking about Dr Ledbetter's Experiment, which takes people on a gothic journey through the streets of Kilkenny in a fusion of live performance and technology. The audience will be given headphones and taken on a sound-enhanced exploration of the murky world of Saul Ledbetter, a once-renowned physician who became tainted by rumours of occultism and the disappearance of a string of young women. Surprises are promised along the way, and there's walking involved, so leave the stilettos in the wardrobe.
For a bit of Irish innovation, check out - or into - CoisCéim Dance Theatre's Chamber Made - Room 409. In this one, the small audience (there's only enough space for 15 per performance) will sit in the intimate environs of an actual hotel bedroom (in the Kilkenny Ormonde Hotel) and follow the interweaving stories of three couples with reservations. Just leave the minibar alone.
Rather than the usual festival fob-off of throwing a few bones to the kids, the Kilkenny festival is seriously attempting to engage the chiseller and teenage demographics. A full young people's programme will run alongside the main festival. The Katapult outreach programme brings together a 25-strong group of 14-18-year-olds drawn from rural villages and communities in the region. The resulting Dream City (which opens the festival on Friday, August 6th) is a video animation project, but further details are being withheld by the furtive young folk.
"Sculpture in a general sense" features heavily on the visual arts programme. Shane Cullen's The Agreement is a huge sculptural installation that introduces politics to art, and will be on display in the grounds of Kilkenny Castle. US artist Jim Collins displays his Watchers collection on Kilkenny's streets, and compatriot Pat Keck showcases her Puppets, Ghosts, and Zombies retrospective of painted wood figurative sculptures in Butler House.
Lúghaidh Ó Braonain wants you to create his next piece of work in his exhibition, Circle 1 and Scribe. People are invited to leave their graffiti mark on a Kilkenny city centre window, which will then be inscribed on an acrylic sheet and transformed into the final piece of Ó Braonain's light sculpture.
Former rock musician Daniel Figgis's Motor takes place in the covered setting of a hidden glen in Kilfane Gardens, Thomastown. Figgis, who started out as a rock musician and composer, sculpts the natural surrounds and imposes upon them with live musicians to create a surround-sound and integrated video/lighting extravaganza.
The festival closes on Sunday, August 15th, with the Festival Drumcircle, in the grounds of Kilkenny Castle. For this, you are invited to "bring along a drum", and beat it (quite literally, for those with no sense of rhythm) to a different beat.
• The Kilkenny Arts Festival runs from August 6th-15th.
www.kilkennyarts.ie
