BELFAST INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL
The Ulster Bank Belfast International Arts Festival is a pleasing contradiction – a brand new undertaking with a very deep history. When Queens University withdrew from the festival earlier this year, after 52 years as its base, it presented a challenge to the festival’s identity, which had started as a “student bash” in 1961.
It may also have been an opportunity to begin afresh. Besides, under Richard Wakely’s direction, the festival has weathered much turbulence to bolster its artistic credentials, grow its audience and return to financial health.
This year’s programme certainly shows no signs of timidity, asserting the role of contemporary arts by making Amanda Coogan its Artist in Residence, dotting participatory new works around the city from Corners of Europe, and mingling new home grown productions with adventurous performances from India, Mexico and Europe.
Roysten Abel’s multi-sensory production The Kitchen reaches the Grand Opera House this week, with its wordless drama performed against the preparation of South India’s fragrant dessert payasam, and the sound of 12 drummers. Belgian company Campo present a bright fusion of performance and visual arts in Robbery&Frank’s To Break and Belfast’s Prime Cut stage the Irish premiere of Jack Thorne’s drama Mydidae.
With Belfast City Hall serving as a canvas for live painted projections this Sunday (Oct 18), Lyndee Prickett’s presentation of her multi-media fictional treatment of India’s rape crisis (Oct 23) still to come, and Mexico’s contemporary dance piece on masculinities, Nosotros, soon after (Oct 30-31), the festival may have a new identity, but it still addresses the city directly while welcoming the world beyond its borders.
ART
Shot at Dawn: Chloe Dewe Mathews
IMMA, The Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, Dublin Until Feb 7 imma.ie
Chloe Dewe Mathews’ chilling and fascinating project involved her researching, finding and visiting the sites where soldiers from the British, French and Belgian armies were executed for cowardice and desertion during the first World War. She then photographed the locations as close as possible seasonally and to the hour at which the executions took place. “By photographing and titling them as I have, I am reinserting the individual into that space, stamping their presence back onto the land so that their histories are not forgotten.”
