Think inside the boxThe city was at risk of becoming 'soulless, bland and dull', but the Black Box has given Belfast a forum for its artistic, creative community, writes Fionola Meredith.
TUCKED AWAY DOWN a cobbled street in Belfast's Cathedral Quarter, the Black Box performance space is at the very centre of the city's newly invigorated arts scene. In the two years since it opened, the Box has proved itself to be a real champion of young home-grown artists and performers, showcasing a wide range of imaginative, offbeat and sometimes provocative material. Belfast has certainly never seen the like of it before - but with hordes of punters through the doors every night, it's fair to say that Belfast likes what it sees.
The real strength of the Black Box is the sheer diversity of cultural events on offer. As Stephen Hackett, who sits on the venue's management committee, says, "the Black Box is an open space for a variety of experimental events. We are interested in taking risks. Recently, we had alternative Christian services going on in one room, while the Outburst queer arts festival went on in the other one. You just don't get that anywhere else in Belfast."
"It's like a blank canvas for artists and performers," agrees architect and Black Box co-director Declan Hill. "You get all ages in there, from the teenage Goths on a Saturday afternoon to old people's tea parties. I am really proud that we finally got the thing up and running". Along with Sean Kelly of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival and several other prominent figures in the local arts community, Hill fought hard for years to make the Black Box a reality. Initially, their plans for an arts venue in the Cathedral Quarter faced opposition from the Dean of St Anne's Cathedral, Houston McKelvey, and from unionist councillors on Belfast City Council. Criticising the local authorities for the "petty-mindedness . . . and bureaucratic turf wars" that were holding up the plans, columnist Newton Emerson pointed out that the city was at serious risk of becoming "soulless, bland and dull, a mall of chain stores by day and a brand of super-pubs by night".
Fortunately, funding from the Millennium Commission, and the discovery of a suitable venue - an imposing old warehouse on cobbled Hill Street - meant that the not-for-profit Black Box finally opened its doors in April 2006 with a colourful programme spanning music, theatre, circus and cabaret, literature, comedy, performance art, visual art, film and dance.
The Belfast illustrator David Haughey (29) is one of the many young artists who meet, collaborate or exhibit at the Black Box. Haughey recently exhibited an eye-catching series of drawings in the venue's gallery space. Crackling with creative energy and mordant wit, his work features evil-looking roosters, three-eyed schoolboys and dapper dogs in suits. One ink drawing from the exhibition shows Belfast's latest acquisition, the "Big Wheel" - a huge, futuristic, gleaming white ferris wheel - rolling free from its supports and spectacularly crushing the staid domes of City Hall in the process. That's perhaps a fitting metaphor for the city's painful cultural evolution, where new, unorthodox ideas continue to jostle for space with the conservative sensibilities of the city's old guard.
But while there's a latent sense of subversive humour in most of Haughey's work, his drawings are not limited to the whimsical or the surreal. In fact, he spends a good deal of his time on illustrations commissioned through Canadian company Three In a Box. His first commission, in December 2005, was an illustration to accompany an editorial piece for the Wall Street Journal, looking at the effects of the approaching Olympic Games on the people of Beijing. Further illustrations for Oxford University Press, CNN, the BBC and a whole host of other magazines, papers and journals across the world quickly followed the Wall Street Journal commission.
But Haughey has always been prolific, even as a child. Growing up in Five Acres, a village near Strabane, Co Tyrone, he kept filling sketchbook after sketchbook, giving his work away as birthday or Christmas presents to family and friends, a practice he has kept up throughout his life. In fact, it was a self-published series of these idiosyncratic drawings called One Gun Kid that attracted the attention of Three in a Box in 2005.
Perhaps unusually, there's a clear trajectory from the art that Haughey made as a child back home in Co Tyrone to the material he produces today. Not long ago, on a visit to his parents' house, Haughey came across a nativity scene he had painted when he was eight or nine, and was struck by how well the scene was composed, and by the simplicity of it.
"It was just a pencil line work with a transparent low saturation watercolour wash, and it's probably still gathering dust under a bed at my parents house," he says. "But if I were to set a definite marker as to where the stylistic influence of the drawing I do at the moment originates, it would be from that little nativity scene."
While all Haughey's drawings, it's his Belfast-based material that really stands out. As programme illustrator for this year's Jameson Belfast Film Festival, his work - depicting iconic moments from cinema history, refracted through that unique Haughey-vision - has been showcased on billboards across the city.
What's more, in partnership with a mysterious figure known only as "Foss", Haughey also contributes a cartoon strip to The Vacuum, Belfast's arts and culture magazine. Entitled Beermoth, it is the weirdly compelling story of a group of "young vibrant 20-somethings with shiny teeth running around Belfast doing magical things", as Haughey himself puts it. And Haughey's recent exhibition at the Box was based on the illustrations he provided for a special "Fantasy" edition of the magazine, in which Belfast-based contributors offered up a number of strange stories about their native city, featuring - among other things - a ruthless robot Lord Mayor, an imaginary dialogue between Ian Paisley Jnr and Jesus, and, of course, that runaway Belfast Wheel.
There's clearly a real affection for the place among the people who work and play at the Black Box. John McGurgan (29) and Pawet Bignell (23) run a popular Friday night jamming session there, which rejoices in the name "Das Vibic Sexy Time". McGurgan and Bignell see it as a kind of social network for musicians, sparking all kinds of new musical partnerships and collaborations every week. "Improvisers have the opportunity to develop their ears," they say, "and songwriters can share songs and try their material out with percussionists, bass players and other instrumentalists."
"None of this could happen without the Black Box and the positive attitude of the staff and management," says McGurgan. Part of the charm of the Box is that it is the kind of place where you can nip in for a bowl of lentil soup in the gallery space at lunchtime and come back for an event in the main space in the evening.
Ann McVeigh, who runs a regular burlesque night at the Black Box, says, "Going there is like being invited to someone's house party; it has that home from home feel." And while the Box has much to offer younger people, McVeigh believes that her "Belfast Unbound" nights - which she describes as "saucy seaside postcard" evenings - attract an older crowd who enjoy the ambience of the venue, as well as the chance to kit themselves out in feathers and fishnets. She's already planning her next event, a "Bad Luck Ball" on Friday, June 13th. "Other venues want to squeeze as much money as possible out of events," she says, "but the Black Box is different - they want to give artists a chance."
From David Haughey's curiously warped images to the creative fun of Das Vibic Sexy Time or Belfast Unbound - and with all manner of puppet shows, comedy nights and off-beat church services in between - the Black Box is rapidly establishing itself as the cultural space Belfast has always needed. As John McGurgan points out, "anything can happen there" - and it frequently does.