Glory road as trouble brews at home

ArtScape: There may be hints of trouble from some quarters on home ground for the Galway Arts Festival, what with Project 06 shaping up to mount a single-year challenge-of-the-malcontents which looks like coalescing into a fringe running alongside the long-established festival. But overseas there is praise and glory.

The festival's production of Mark O'Doherty's Trad, in Australia as part of Adelaide Fringe Festival, has been playing to packed houses and receiving a wonderful response from the audiences. Its first review, a five-star from The Advertiser, the main daily Adelaide/South Australia newspaper, called it a "delicate morsel of eloquent Irish culture", describing it as "Waiting for Godot meets Dancing at Lughnasa insofar as it is an absurdist meditation on static society".

Samela Harris writes, "With affection and acrimony, they exchange a dialogue which is both lyrical and earthy - in the very best of Irish literary tradition. It is an exquisitely written work wherein comedy jousts gently with poignancy. And the performances by Frankie McCafferty as Da, Peter Gowen as Tom and David Pearse as the others are spellbinding. Such a sweet and unusual play it is - what the Irish may call a 'cracker'."

The critically acclaimed production, directed by Mikel Murfi for the 2004 arts festival in Galway, and which later went to the Dublin Theatre Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe (winning the Writers' Guild of Great Britain award for Best Theatre Writing 2005 and an Edinburgh Fringe First), features the original cast members, with musicians Tony Byrne and Andrew Morrow. After Oz it has a month's run at London's Bush Theatre (April 4th-29th).

Dancing for Galway

US artist Tanya McCrory has been nominated as Galway's first dancer-in-residence - a position which "crystallises a growing interest in dance as a form of creative expression and activity" in the city, according to its arts officer James Harrold, writes Lorna Siggins.

McCrory studied and taught in Los Angeles and San Diego, California, and has been based in Galway latterly. She recently completed a master's degree in contemporary dance performance at the University of Limerick.

Last year, she founded the Galway Contemporary Dance Theatre, and she also organised a "day of dance" at Galway's Town Hall Theatre. Apart from her artistic talent, such organisational skills are central to the post of dancer-in-residence, according to Harrold who believes it may be the first of many.

As part of the residency, she will work in the Community Resource Centre in Ballybane. She will be developing "Galway dance culture" at individual, community and professional level while also providing advice and teaching dance skills citywide.

She will work with other city arts organisations and residency projects, and is currently engaged with the Contempo String Quartet, Galway's ensemble-in-residence.

The residency is jointly funded by the local authority's arts office, which will be advertising shortly for a new writer's residency, Harrold adds.

A map of Kinsella's poems

The keynote address at this year's Poetry Now festival in DúLaoghaire will be delivered next Thursday by Prof Patrick Crotty. Entitled Stunning Places: Thomas Kinsella's Locations, it promises to track the long arc of Kinsella's poetic career, from the publication of Poems in 1956 to the recent publication of Marginal Economy (Dedalus). Kinsella has written many of this half-century's defining poems and the integrity of his work is one of its defining features, as are the great lyrics of childhood and family life which have appeared in his Peppercanister volumes. Kinsella has also constantly engaged his poetry with public events, from his castigation of Charles J Haughey and Taca in the 1960s to his broadside responses to Bloody Sunday and the redevelopment of Wood Quay.

Of late, Kinsella has lived in the US and, perhaps as a result, has seemed under-represented in recent accounts of contemporary Irish literature. Prof Crotty, who is a translator of Irish poetry as well as an anthologist (of the forthcoming New Penguin Anthology of Irish Verse) is well-placed to speak of Kinsella's work, and his lecture will reinvigorate debates about Kinsella's achievement. Bookings can be made at the Pavilion Theatre at 01-2312929; inquiries about this event or about the Poetry Now festival can be made to arts@dlrcoco.ie

The priest and the Floozie

Eamonn O'Doherty has been shortlisted for the widely publicised Selvaag/Peer Gynt international sculpture competition for Oslo. This prestigious commission (previous winners Jim Dine and Enzo Cucci) is for a work based on a theme from Ibsen's eponymous drama, and O'Doherty's chosen subject is "The Thin Priest with the Fowling Net", a choice influenced perhaps by the location of his new studio in Ferns, Co Wexford.

The studio, located in a range of 19th-century two-storey stone outbuildings is, says O'Doherty, "a joy", especially after 25 years working in inadequate and unsuitable premises in Dublin. He will shortly be able to offer a residency in a separate studio adjoining the main sculpture workshop and gallery complex.

O'Doherty is best known for the late "Floozie" in O'Connell Street but is less than pleased that the public and the critics appear to be unaware of his 30-plus other large public works in Ireland, Britain and the US, many of them highly regarded outside Ireland (the New York Times lauded his Westchester sculpture as "this great work"). However, fans of the "Floozie", and O'Doherty claims they are many, will be happy to know that the bronze figure of Anna Livia, without the stone surround, is to be installed this year by the City Council in the pool in the small park opposite the Aisling Hotel near Heuston Station.

Back at full power after a serious illness, O'Doherty is working on a number of commissions, including an eight-foot bronze for Innishturk Island, part of which will form a sort of Mappa Mundi of the islanders' world. However, with the amount of time and effort and the poor returns (never mind the abuse) attendant on public artwork, he will be trying to concentrate now on more personal work.

Improvised Music Company's 6th annual Openjazz runs tomorrow afternoon (2-6pm) in Temple Bar (Music Centre and Meeting House Square). It's a free event, specifically for younger people, with performances by leading Irish musicians (including guitarist Mike Nielsen, singer Honor Heffernan, and trio White Rocket led by Irish drummer Sean Carpio), US drummer Keith Copeland with guitarist Tommy Halferty and bassist Ronan Guilfoyle, while Newpark Music Centre is presenting its "one o'clock band". There's a strong educational component, with introductory workshops on various musical instruments including guitar, bass, drums, piano, percussion, voice and saxophone. And this year 30 young musicians from the Ballymun Wind Band Project and Alexandra College, along with composer Dylan Rynhart and his Fuzzy Logic outfit, premiere a new, extended piece.

For those who'd like their own print of a photograph by the late Harry Thuillier jnr, the first exhibition and sale of giclée print editions of his work opens tomorrow at Cherrylane Fine Arts, Killincarrig, Delgany, Co Wicklow (until April 2nd). Thuillier, who died in 1997 aged 33, was one of very few photographers to master platinum printing, a notoriously expensive and difficult medium. A certified limited edition of each print will be for sale, printed on museum-quality canvas and produced individually by a master printer. The documentary Darkroom, based on his life, and directed by his brother Ian (commissioned by RTÉ and shown on Arts Lives and Sky TV) is released on

DVD and won Best Documentary award at the Boston Irish Film Festival; Ian was chosen as Best New Talent by the Irish Film Board.

Good to see the Gate theatre reprise its celebrated readings of Harold Pinter's plays, prose and poetry in Turin last weekend, directly after the prestigious European Prize was awarded to Pinter at the Teatro Carignano. Michael Gambon, Jeremy Irons, Charles Dance and Penelope Wilton attended the reading, directed by Alan Stanford.