ArtScape : The appointment of Michael Hunt as chief executive of Wexford Festival Opera seems to have taken the Irish arts world by surprise, writes Michael Dervan.
He doesn't seem to have been a front-runner in most people's shortlists, and the general expectation was for the post to go to a candidate from abroad.
The main reason Hunt wouldn't have been in people's minds is that his track record is a creative rather than an administrative one. He produced the first Operatic Scenes for Wexford back in 1982, he has directed for Opera Ireland (a Traviata in 1989), and also for Opera 2005 in Cork (Mozart's Figaro's Wedding), and he has directed numerous productions for his own touring company, Co-Opera.
From a Wexford perspective, it's probably the Co-Opera work that is most relevant. Hunt planned and carried out Co-Opera's first tour in 1998 at the behest of receiving venues who wanted to present opera, and the tour was achieved without Arts Council assistance.
For a period, Co-Opera was integrated into Opera Ireland as the larger company's touring arm, and, according to Pamela Smyth's Arts Council-commissioned report, Towards a Policy for Opera, Opera Ireland's 2000 annual report revealed "a very small net benefit to the company from Co-Opera's activities, amounting to some €6,350".
The convulsions that brought Opera Ireland close to extinction over the following few years saw Co-Opera de-merge and later achieve a temporary refuge at the Belltable Arts Centre in Limerick. And Co-Opera style productions have re-emerged at the Theatre Royal in Waterford, where Hunt is currently director. His tenacity in the face of adversity and his fortitude in dealing with limited resources are exceptional.
His appointment comes at a time when change is underway at the top of two other Irish opera companies. Opera Theatre Company's chief executive Andrew McLellan is moving on at the end of this month, and Opera Ireland's chief executive, David Collopy, is stepping down in December to develop a project management company. And the fledgling Opera 2005, a project born out of Cork's term as European cultural capital, has managed to get its foot on the rung of Arts Council funding, with a grant of €100,000 which, although the council notes that it is "on a once-off basis", can't be bad news.
Opera, the most expensive of art forms, has always fared badly in terms of Arts Council funding. Over the last 10 years, for instance, there has been a dramatic shift between the council's support for opera and dance. Dance has moved from a position of receiving Arts Council funding some 44 per cent below that for opera to a level of grant offer for 2006 that is more than 6 per cent above it.
Over that same period, the proportion of council funding for opera has dropped from 5.5 per cent to 4.3 per cent. That drop of 1.2 per cent amounts to €868,000 of the council's 2006 budget. By contrast, in Britain, a country not known for its generosity to the arts, the Arts Council of Wales spends 9.7 per cent of its revenue on opera, and the Arts Council of England significantly in excess of 10 per cent.
Comparisons farther abroad would be invidious. If the Arts Council is serious about finally taking on the challenge of providing realistic funding for opera in Ireland, there could hardly be a better time.
Artistic directors on the move
Belfast theatre company Kabosh has just announced that Paula McFetridge is to be its new artistic director, writes Jane Coyle. The move returns her to the independent theatre sector where her earliest roots are.
McFetridge, one of the original members of Tinderbox in 1988, recently left the Lyric, where her four-year contract as artistic director came to an end last month.
In November, she will succeed Karl Wallace, widely regarded as one of the most exciting and innovative directors on this island, who founded Kabosh in 1994 along with a like-minded group of theatre studies graduates of the University of Ulster. Wallace is leaving Belfast to take up new challenges on the other side of the Irish Sea.
His final production, Unlucky for Some, will run during the Belfast Festival at Queen's in October. He is remaining characteristically tight-lipped about the detail, but has revealed that the show will be a dangerous and thrilling live-action movie experience, where the audience will travel all over Belfast and into deserted locations.
We have come to expect the unexpected from Kabosh. In his time, Wallace has directed productions with the audience seated in blow-up sofas, large installations with rain and snow in the Odyssey Pavilion, one-minute plays in pubs and coffee shops, telephone plays and a clutch of award-winning touring dramas. Most significantly, he has firmly established the company in the international arena.
Meanwhile, the talk around the arts community is about who will succeed McFetridge at the Lyric.
"That has not yet been decided," says Richard Gaston, acting press officer. "A five-year strategic plan is being drawn up, which considers staffing implications over the next three phases of the Lyric - the current operation, the level of producing during the closure of the Lyric site for a £12 million [ €17.6 million] rebuild and the move into the new theatre."
With a provisional plan in place, interim programming responsibility now rests with a sub-committee of board members, which includes actor/directors Ian McElhinney and Richard Croxford and acting chairman Mark Carruthers.
Castleward Opera's production of The Bohemian Girl, which runs until Thursday 22nd, is going to be followed by a project presenting all three works at the RDS in Dublin, writes Michael Dervan. The opening concert performances of Maritana take place on June 24th and 25th. The Lily of Killarney and The Bohemian Girl will follow in 2007 and 2008, in a series that's being presented as part of the RDS's 275th anniversary celebrations.
The Maritana cast is an all-Irish one, with the title role taken by Limerick soprano Mairéad Buicke, who was awarded the RDS's €10,000 music bursary in 2004. She will be joined by Lynda Lee (Lazarillo), Robin Tritschler (Don Cesar), Owen Gilhooly (Don Jose), Jamie Rock (Captain of the Guard), John Molloy (King of Spain), with Bill Golding as narrator, and Our Lady's Choral Society and the RDS Opera Orchestra under the baton of Proinnsías Ó Duinn.
Booking and information from the RDS on 01-6680866.
• Cork City Council's €2 million arts and culture strategy budget for the next three years includes a group of new allocations totalling €450,000 and aimed at providing bursaries, grants and supportive funds over a variety of projects and practitioners, writes Mary Leland.
Introduced on Tuesday by the lord mayor, Deirdre Clune, this new division covers individual artists (four bursaries at €5,000 each), three arts-led residencies in city communities at €4,000 per individual and €8,000 per organisation, a €15,000 scheme for professional projects across all disciplines and a travel and mobility fund available to artists, curators and administrators developing or delivering arts events.
The smaller print of a very stylish information brochure advises on deadlines and promises support for the business of making applications, and there seems little doubt but that the council, guided by arts officer Liz Meaney, is trying to make good the promises of a supportive continuity of initiatives and relationships stemming from the Capital of Culture year 2005. This could also mean the addition of a public art co-ordinator and a communications co-ordinator to the arts office staff over the next two years.
Joe Gavin, the city manager, also hinted at renewed negotiations with the Arts Council on the vexed issue of dance accommodation in Cork after the startling dissolution of the Institute for Choreography and Dance.
Such losses, and the approaching creation of Cork's own "docklands" developments, indicates the importance of the city council's renewed lectureseries "Creating a Cultural City", the first of which will be given by Lucy Neal at the City Hall on Tuesday, June 27th at 7pm.
Neal, independent arts producer and co-founder of the London International Festival of Theatre is famously innovative in her approach to the arts as cultural and developmental influences on urban spaces. Although the chairman of the council's arts committee Cllr Kieran Lynch said on Tuesday that it is artists who make Cork look good, Neal's approach could be crucial - if applied - to a city where architects, rather than artists, are calling the visual shots.
• Surely some mistake? Could it be that in its news report on the Tonys, TV3 followed up news of Ian McDiarmid's win with footage of him in Faith Healer - but which was actually Frances de la Tour in The History Boys? Boy, but he's changed since the Dublin run at the Gate.