Project '06 worked because it was created by local artists as a one-off festival to make a point. But what happens next, asks Rosita Boland.
Galway is a small city with a lot of big personalities. This month, it hosted two fortnight-long arts festivals - Galway Arts Festival (GAF) and Project '06 (P06). How do you measure success at an arts festival? Box office? Quality of programming? Involvement of the local arts community? Audience reaction? The amount of funding you have received? It's a question every arts festival must continually ask of itself, no matter how new, or how established. This year, it's true to say that it's not only Galway's different festivals that will be attempting to measure their success after they finished over the weekend, but also the people who attended and participated in them.
P06, which came about because of concerns about local audiences and artists being sidelined from the GAF, was headed up by Ollie Jennings, Mike Diskin and Paraic Breathnach, and in a remarkably short time 150 events were put together, involving some 1,000 people.
P06 started a day before the GAF, and ran its parade, Morning, Noon and Night, on the Saturday night before the annual Sunday afternoon GAF parade, The River. Both were excellent, although sometimes audiences were left doing catch-up: P06 sent one of their floats - a boat, with the registration P06 on it - down the streets at the top of the GAF parade. On Saturday Breathnach was wearing the red P06 T-shirt. During Sunday's parade, he was wearing the GAF orange T-shirt. Two festivals at the same time, two parades back to back, one man literally wearing the colours of two different camps - was it riches, was it overkill, was it ridiculous?
And what was the meaning of the second-last float of P06's parade? A huge inflatable crescent moon was accompanied by a group of apes/gorillas/baboons, some of whom were clutching fat bags with dollar signs on them in their big, hairy paws. A crescent moon has long been a symbol of GAF, appearing on all its programmes and posters.
In the bar of the Town Hall Theatre three days later, Ollie Jennings, Mike Diskin and Galway Youth Theatre's director, Andrew Flynn - who took his three shows to P06 this year, when an unresolved question mark hung over his inclusion in the GAF - all suddenly seem to be suffering from collective amnesia about the float when this question is first put to them. "Well, the moon was there because the theme was Morning, Noon and Night," Jennings offers after a while.
And the apes/gorillas/baboons, with their money bags? "If you're asking if the Galway Arts Festival is too preoccupied with money," Diskin says, "yes, it is."
At one point in the conversation, Diskin mentions "sides". Sides? The word everyone involved has been so self-consciously careful not to use publicly ever since P06 first kicked off? "Let's not be disingenuous. There's a row going on between ourselves and the Galway Arts Festival," Diskin says bluntly.
Row or no row, one thing has become clear in the last 10 days. If you measure the success of a festival by support and goodwill from your audiences, who can get the place buzzing, and lots of sell-out shows, then P06, barely over, has already been a success, surprising even those who set it up.
"With the head of steam we've built up, something will have to give from the Galway Arts Festival after this," Diskin states. "We can't do this again next year. It's amazing we managed to put as much as we did together on the money we had. If any other town in Ireland had put on the festival that we've managed to do, it would be a big news story." P06 received €10,000 from the Arts Council's small festivals grant. "We have got great feedback from local people; from our audiences. They have been coming up to us constantly, and saying they feel like festival time belongs to them again, and that there's a great buzz on the streets," Jennings says. "We have communicated with the people through our festival, and we have proved there is an audience for what we have been doing."
Where things go from here, though, is unknown. P06 in its present form, is, they say, unsustainable: resources are simply too limited. In some ways, P06 has worked because it was self-consciously created as a one-off festival to make a point by a large community of local artists. Now the point has been made, even those who have been involved in setting it up seem unsure about what happens next.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about P06 is that it has taken so long to happen. Galway audiences, after three decades of world-class shows every July, not to mention its literature festival, Cúirt, and the presence of Druid, are extremely sophisticated. Dance, for example, by far the most difficult act for any theatre to sell to an Irish arts audience, always does well here. But it is almost 30 years since the first Galway Arts Festival took place, and it seems evident that there is a new generation of artists who want to be part of something. P06 may have been initiated by Jennings et al, but it has been resoundingly supported by hundreds of young artists who want to belong under some artistic umbrella.
"Maybe Galway audiences are now leading the debate again about arts in Ireland," Jennings suggests hopefully.
"In the 1970s, Ollie Jennings, Paraic Breathnach, Garry Hynes and other people in Galway started a revolution in Galway city in terms of pioneering the professional arts," says Tomas Hardiman, director of the Galway Arts Centre. "But the pioneer spirit never goes away. It appears to me that Project 06 is saying to people starting out in their creative and artistic careers: 'Do as we did. Make your own art.' Anyone who tries to make this an issue of taking sides between the festivals is damaging the whole. The two festivals are two sides of the same coin."
"There is no antagonism between ourselves and Project 06," Paul Fahy, director of the Galway Arts Festival states firmly. "And I can say exactly the same thing about getting huge support from people on the street and from our audiences over the past two weeks. I respect what they have been saying about not wanting to be part of a fringe, but they couldn't have designed a better template for a fringe festival if they had tried. Maybe the most obvious thing that's come out of all this is that Galway is ready for a fringe festival. But what I've been saying all along is, my job is to programme the Galway Arts Festival, not a fringe festival. The Galway Arts Festival has always been programmed by selection, and a fringe is about allowing whoever wants to participate, participate. They are two different things."
So what of the art offered in P06? With 150 events, even the most dedicated festival-goer could only take in a small portion, but there was certainly a huge choice, in all kinds of venues. Little John Nee's latest show, Limavady, My Heart's Delight, packed them in at lunchtimes in the Mercy Primary School. Out in Inverin, Aislingí Grádha agus Rámhaillí Fiabhrasacha Oídhche Lúghnasa, an adaptation in Irish by Mick Óg McGee of A Midsummer Night's Dream, set in modern Connemara, was outstanding. McGee and Beartla M Ó Flatharta co-directed a cast of 50 from Irish-speaking Connemara, with the action framed around a local disco and its Greek chorus of five dysfunctional losers on the pull. This was not only hilarious, but a highly imaginative, beautiful and visually rich piece of staging. It also proved that Bottom the ass really was a Connemara donkey.
Less successful was Colm Corless's new one-man play, The Fairgreen Slaughterhouse, directed by Paul Brennan and featuring Diarmuid de Faoite as George, billed as a black comedy, and supposedly a satire on how society devours its homeless. George is a cannibal, who turns up once a week to tuck into another dropout who won't be missed - it lacked any of the subtlety, depth or nuances of meaning that satirical writing demands.
There was plenty of street theatre and some of the best could be seen in the St Nicholas grounds, where Zest-Feist aka Gombeen theatre group, clowned at lunchtimes. Jonathan Gunning and Miquel Barcelo - whose final routine, involving wigs, a banjo and a nursery rhyme was comic gold - charmed audiences. Galway's first dancer-in-residence, Tanya McGrory, together with fellow dancers Jacob Sullivan and Alysha Oclassen, presented Reveries and Illumination at the Galway Arts Centre, a four-part dance piece. By far the strongest of these was Illumination, which all three performed to Van Morrison's Astral Weeks: a joyous, skilful and superbly invigorating interpretation.
As at all the best arts festivals, you never knew what you would next come across. Above Kumar's restaurant on Flood Street, I was offered a cup of tea while I watched the 15-minute video, Response to Japanese Peace and Reconciliation. This fascinating and haunting piece featured an interview with a 94-year old local man who had been a submarine officer in the second World War, who met up with the son of the Japanese man whose submarine he had sunk in the Malacca Straits. Leonie King and Tom Flanagan's beautiful piece about the nature of family secrets was both moving and thought-provoking.
Walking up Shop Street on Tuesday afternoon, you could hear Eugene McGivern performing his poetry. Brown Thomas had a gorgeous window of silver retro-style clothes, designed by Helen Flynn. At Charlie Byrne's Bookshop, the windows displayed work by those members of the Galway Writers' Workshop, who had sat at a desk in the window in turns for four days, writing.
All of this, and similar other free, ad-hoc P06 projects around the town, created a hugely lively atmosphere on the streets of Galway. It wasn't all quality work by any means, but when festival events are free, sometimes, it's much more about the general buzz that they generate than the particular event itself.
"Who owns the festival?" Mike Diskin asks rhetorically. But surely the answer of ownership ultimately lies with audiences. Audiences can always do their own quality control on shows, whether those you pay into, or those that are free. Both the Galway Arts Festival and Project '06 reminded us of that vital fact all fortnight. What happens now in Galway next July is anyone's guess.
