Facing the music with Macnas

What would it be like to weave through Galway with 250 other street performers as part of the city’s arts-festival parade? There’s only one way to find out

A CLASSIC ANXIETY dream is to find yourself in a play and realise you don’t know your lines. Just before the start of yesterday’s annual Macnas parade, whose organisers gamely agreed to let me be one of its 250 performers, I realised that I didn’t even know the route.

The parade, an event as important to Galway Arts Festival as the streets through which it moves, effectively offers great reassurance to its participants: someone here will know the way. And I didn’t have any lines, as it turned out.

This year’s parade, entitled The Wild Hunt, was the brainchild of Noeline Kavanagh, the company’s artistic director. With 2009’s Orfeo, a twilight promenade inspired by the Orpheus myth and dense with poetic allusions, Kavanagh, a long-time Macnas member, had begun nudging at its tradition. “I’m trying to create a collective community parade,” Kavanagh said, “but also to try and tell a story.”

This year that story, in which a boy explorer chases figures and fantasies through the streets, seemed to touch on a heady stew of references, many of them poetic, few of them obvious and most of them difficult to represent with a parade float. Pablo Picasso took the shape of a Minotaur, William Blake and Angela Carter were fused together as a wolf, and Ted Hughes was a crow.

Among Kavanagh's trail of explorers, innovators, artists, storytellers and feral creatures were the saltimbanques– street performers that she described as vagabonds, schemers, dreamers, chancers, charlatans. They sounded like my kind of people. I would walk among them as an orator and chronicler, dispensing verses of poetry to anyone who would listen. "The focus I would give you is that you're a writer," she said.

This I could do. Loaded up with text by Blake, Hughes, Yeats and Leonard Cohen, I was given a further sense of character from Macnas’s costume department: breeches, a stained swallow-tail coat and a busted top hat – a skewed stab at elegance that ended up somewhere south of chaos.

Everyone gets this attention from Macnas. On the final day of rehearsals Kavanagh inspected the choir, the musicians and various groups with the kind of competency that only directors on the final day of rehearsal will ever know. Her inspections were thorough, but her intention was to instil confidence. “I’m going to be a fascist dictator today,” she said to them, apologetically, “but we’re on tomorrow. You have this one moment and it will never come again.”

Early on the morning of the parade, the Macnas buildings had the slow-building buzz of an awakening hive. Make-up was applied with military discipline and design-school flair; younger cast members rolled in from parties without sleep; groups performed warm-ups and devised physical routines. But everyone conceded that none of this preparation – the staggering discipline of the production team; the startling design and construction of the translucent sculptures, mechanical chariots and enormous puppets; the mind-boggling health-and-safety requirements – would foretell how, or even what, the spectacle would be. That would depend on 80,000 spectators. You only have this moment, and it will never come again.

The experience went by in a heartbeat, a procession of camaraderie and adrenalin marching to the beat of tribal drums and whirling klezmer music, in which I learned that you can establish an unusually instant rapport with Galway spectators, American students, Dutch tourists, the old and the young by reciting Blake or Cohen in mock seduction, so long as you are wearing six inches of face paint and a battered top hat.

It’s a thrill, a laugh and an oddly humbling experience. “If you’re in the parade, you won’t see it,” Kavanagh had told me. But being in the parade – however unimportant, unskilled, under-rehearsed or overacted a component part – was to be part of a bigger design.

I can’t say I kept the theme firmly in mind, but I think I got its message. It was a wild time. I didn’t lose my way. I followed the procession.

A mad chase through Galway: Lorna Sigginswatches the parade

“It was a wind that would take hair from a horse, and moor-grass from the ground; it would take heather from the hill, and willow from the root; it would take the limpet from the crag, and the eagle from its young; and it came over the gritstone peaks, howling and raring, in blazing sparks of fire.”

Alan Garner's epic description of a mythical "wild hunt", from his book The Moon of Gomrath, came to life on the streets of Galway yesterday when "dreamers, schemers, tricksters" and more participated in the arts festival's annual Macnas parade.

Based on the Celtic folk tale about spectral hunters and their hounds, the mad chase was known as the Herlathing in England and Wilde Jagd in Germany. It tended to occur on nights of full moon, but horses’ hooves and baying hounds could also be heard at noon.

Everywhere the hunt’s arrival presaged catastrophe. Yet there was no imminent sense of the sky falling in Galway yesterday as the “savage joy” heralded by the band of street performers, artists and volunteers was unleashed.

Otto Dix would be “coming to town”, Macnas had promised, referring to the late German artist and printmaker, who was best known for his depictions of the cruelty of war. The thousands of spectators would be treated to a mixture of the poet William Blake and a “Picasso-type” version of Herne, the wild hunt’s antlered giant.

Sure enough, there was Herne, and there was the wild hound, and fierce fantastical fairies waving shields resembling dreamcatchers, and horses’ heads and ravens and more. The narrative was difficult to follow, however; unlike last year’s Macnas trip to the underworld with Orpheus and Eurydice, there appeared to be too many images, too much confusion and no clear storyline to follow for a loyal Galway audience with a critical eye.

The parade wove its way from Spanish Arch, up through Quay Street and Shop Street, down Eglinton Street and over Salmon Weir Bridge towards the cathedral.

Barriers in parts of town made it difficult for the enthusiastic performers to engage with the crowd. Down at the cathedral and the Corrib riverbank there was more freedom; by this stage percussionists and drummers astride clever Professor Branestawm-type contraptions worked hard to maintain the atmosphere.

There was a brief round of fireworks and a confetti canon – after all, the street-theatre company has had its budget cut – a stiltwalker whipped a photographer off the footpath and whisked her away to screams of delight from children in the crowd, and the Macnas madness was over for another year.