Straddling the fault line between high seriousness and utter flippancy, Kilkenny Arts Festival asks us niggling questions about our culture and its expression, writes Peter Crawley
It was hard to tell whether Lee Breuer, the director of American experimental theatre company Mabou Mines, was being self-deprecating, apologetic, or simply truculent. But on a clammy Saturday afternoon in Kilkenny, during the questions and answers session of a public interview with the Kilkenny Arts Festival's theatre co-ordinator Jimmy Fay, Breuer was pressed for a genuine answer.
To what extent did his piece, A Prelude to a Death in Venice (Harvey's Version), an off-the-wall example of puppet theatre, gender-political pageant and blues musical, owe its existence to Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, a comparatively on-the-wall piece of literature about mortality and desire? After all, the novella's cover is projected on the stage at one point while Mann himself appears to put in a telephone call to the actors.
Breuer considered the question and sighed. "Unfortunately," he replied. "I was being ironic." It is often said that Americans don't get irony (by Europeans), although, ironically, American popular culture now excels at it. In its left-leaning experimental theatre, preaching (and some time screeching) to a sympathetically appalled choir, irony has become the lingua franca. Breuer's work, however, is a postmodern gallimaufry of West Coast playfulness and East Coast wit so heavily ironic it could become downright annoying. Keeping us on our toes is one thing, I thought, as the performance piled pun upon pun, reference upon reference, but eventually you have to mean what you say.
In conversation with Fay, though, Breuer was never less than inspiring. For those in attendance, his serious endeavours to treat canonical texts with boundless intelligence but very little reverence held an instructive lesson: displaying the desiccated husks of repertoire is never enough, when the life blood has ebbed away from a work, we demand a transfusion.
The fortunes of irony have been hard to gauge in this year's festival, the city's 34th, but there has been a curious energy between artists who adopt a knowing camouflage and those who play it straight.
Take the Mingus Dynasty. The first Mingus-branded repertory band to arise following the great jazz musician's death, in 1979, the current incarnation of the small group is led by Trombonist Kuumba Frank and whose players, though extremely talented, are such striplings it seems unlikely they could ever have encountered Charles Mingus in person.
The band seems to want to emerge from his shadow while trading on his name. To that end we hear invigorating renditions of the work of other fresh composers - Elvis Costello's Invisible Lady for instance - together with spirited versions of Mingus compositions; the still swaggering horns in Fable of Fabous being the absolute highlight. It is odd to hear the joyous swing of Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting and realise that it has now become a theme tune, but the Mingus brand still packs them in.
THERE SEEM TO have been two distinct responses to Vyvienne Long, the former Damien Rice cellist now fronting her own chamber pop outfit, which several people have been compelled to share with me. The first is that her performance in St Canice's Cathedral was insufferably twee. The second is that her performance was actually sufferably twee.
These reactions, I'm guessing, are a sort of acid reflux response to her closing number, in which the audience was instructed to sing the words, "Happy thoughts, happy thoughts, happy thoughts will save me" ad infinitum.
To those of us whose happy thoughts do not involve singing self-help mantras at unsteady vocalists, Long's appeal dematerialised.
The secret of performance, as they say, is sincerity - once you can fake that you've got it made. Long presented herself as a shy eccentric but the act was hard to swallow: with a voice too timid to carry Donna Summer's On the Radio, her cello is conversely assured through her own compositions. When Long works out where she wants to reside on the idiosyncratic spectrum between Joanna Newsom and Nellie McKay, and ditches the ingratiating kookiness, hers will be a talent to embrace without hesitation.
3epkano, the music ensemble that pitches original live scores to classic silent movies, do several things very well - nervy atmospheric string passages, occasionally pummelling rhythms, discretion - but irony is not chief among them. Given that the vogue for live scoring first tethered itself to silent comedies, where playful jazz ensembles could match gong strokes and slide whistles to the slapstick of Buster Keaton, the Dublin group's approach is marked by complete earnestness.
It's there in the film choices, in this case Sergei Eisenstein's soviet montage Battleship Potemkin and Fritz Lang's muddled masterpiece Metropolis. The question is whether something like Metropolis is worthy of reverence? The group are nowhere better than when matching grinding motifs to mechanised displays of dystopia, but when we visit the leisurely gardens of the plutocrats, for instance, the musicians swoon into a shimmering pastoralism, which is not quite what a capitalist critique intends.
Moreover, Lang's astonishing fetish for a particular part of the female form - unmatched in cinema until the dawn of Russ Meyer - demands more comment than musical facilitation. I'm not sure I'd like 3epkano to go down the Lee Breuer route, who scored his play's emotional climax with the theme tune from Benny Hill, but where's a slide whistle when you need one?
Music against the grain was justly and intriguingly celebrated in The Art of Sound, an exhibition with audio snippets (sadly all in mono) that charted the unrestrained impulses of Irish composers from Aloys Fleischmann (whose Songs of the Provinces also asked the audience to sing, but made no demands for happy thoughts) to Jennifer Walshe (whose This Is Why People O.D. On Pills/ And Jump from the Golden Gate Bridge instructs her performers to "learn to skateboard, however primitively".)
The weather for the Kilkenny Arts Festival has alternated thus far between constant drizzle, blips of sunshine, and a low oppressiveness alleviated by the occasional downpour; making it, by my reckoning, the most pleasant festival of our summer.
This allowed Polish company Teatr Ósmego Dnia's outdoor spectacle The Ark to go off without a hitch, but it also meant that it fell to Silverio Pessoa to bring some Brazilian heat to the festival. Much like Tom Zé, or several other emissaries of Brazilian pop, Pessoa has a blistering ability to scavenge ideas from tradition then uptool them with gizmos of the present - forró, the work song of plantations, meets with clipped ukulele, woozy synths and Portuguese rap, a combination that can sound like a wandering radio dial, but which Pessoa melds together along infectious dance beats.
INTRODUCED TO US by literature curator Colm Tóibín as a man of many guises - his latest being "an historical novelist of the most playful kind" - Edmund White arrived as much a legend as a man. Gay identity will inevitably encounter black outs tracing its cultural history, that legacy having been erased by discretion or oppression.
White, who wrote the gay Bildungsroman, A Boy's Own Story, is thus an inventive authority on sexual history, filling the gaps with research and imagination. He was there at the Stone Wall Riots, year zero for gay rights, and now he is there at the end of the 19th century with his new work Hôtel de Dream, based on a book about a gay relationship that the canonical American writer Stephen Crane is said to have started. The substance for that claim, White happily admitted, is so dubious as to be laughable, yet his novel buttresses apocrypha with fastidious research into the era and the writer, or, as White put it, "the archaeology of sentiments".
That the story within the story involves a love affair between a 30-year- old and a 16-year-old carried an uncomfortable frisson, and it seemed that White, who referred to the phenomenon unswervingly as "intergenerational sex", was both alive to its controversy yet content to revel in ambiguity. "The whole thing was already a crime," he said during the Q&A, "so the age difference wouldn't have added much more."
Erudite, endearing and thoroughly unsentimental, White seemed to trail his cape rather innocently - but did he always mean what he said? Most jazz neophytes will admit that they don't quite know when they should applaud, but back on the pews of St Canice's Cathedral I was worried about when we were supposed to kneel.
"Much of what we do is described as wordless hymns," Tord Gustavsen said softly, his trio performing roughly where the altar should be. "We are very at home here."
Pity the poor music journalist, or music promoter, who reaches for an analogy between a band's music and the landscape of its country, but Gustavsen's minor key sombreness and pianissimo reflection is often said to owe something to Norway's topography. This would be a neater argument if Norway's fjords weren't also so fecund for death metal.
Gustavsen is so mellow that his music can inspire restlessness - both in the listener and in himself. A compact, slight-framed musician, he frequently rises from his stool, arms twisting and fully extended, as though he is trying to pull free from the piano's merciless grip. His drummer, who plays with his fingertips more often than his sticks, winces with a similarly irreconcilable effort to play drums without the troublesome consequence of actually registering a beat. In the wide spaces Gustavsen allows in his music there is room to breathe, to contemplate, to resonate, and his new collection Being There supplies some alternately serene and agitated moments. I'm just not convinced that jazz belongs in the church. Yet.
The Kilkenny Arts Festival thus far, however, knows the precise dilemma of its congregation. Straddling the fault line between high seriousness and utter flippancy, it asks us niggling questions about our culture and its expression, the weight of history and the disposability of the contemporary. Between these two poles, it asks, can we say what we mean, or mean what we say? My key moment in the conundrum came back in Breuer's discussion when the director was asked about the place of dogs in his life and his work. Moved to poignant remembrance of a dog he once loved who was sadly stolen, he shook his head and admitted, "She was a great, great, great metaphor". Which of us has not known the pain of losing a metaphor? Fortunately, Breuer, wasn't being ironic.
Kilkenny Arts Festival runs till Sunday. See www.kilkennyarts.ie
