Outside the town of Sligo, the curved rock of Ben Bulben rises, like a frozen wave perpetually about to break. The unique shape of the mountain is matched by the towering presence of Knocknarea to the west, a mountain crowned by the flattopped cairn said to be the tomb of Maeve, Queen of Connacht. Its shoreline is pounded by some of the best surf in Europe. Its green rocky heights fall in a sweep to the sandy Atlantic strands of Rosses Point and Strandhill. It's a dramatic landscape in every sense.
Maybe this setting helps to explain why Sligo has become the cultural and theatrical capital of the northwest - the landscape is inspirational. For a town of 20,000 or so people, the amount of cultural activity that is going on suggests a local renaissance is in progress. As a home of the visual and dramatic arts, as a centre for music and literature, Sligo is unrivalled in the region. What is surprising is that all this activity has gone largely unnoticed outside Sligo.
An exception is Blue Raincoat Theatre Company. Founded in 1991, the Sligo-based group has gained a national reputation over the past decade for its individual style of mime and dance-influenced physical theatre. Although it has toured to Dublin only three times, it is the first independent company to be invited under a new scheme into the Abbey's Peacock Theatre; Alice's Adventures in Wonderland opens there this week, while Alice Through the Looking Glass opens the following week, each show running in repertory on alternate weeks, until August 12th.
Both are representative of the Blue Raincoat style. There is a story told in each production, but not in a straight or realistic way. As Jocelyn Clarke, the writer and critic who adapted the pieces for the stage, says, this is not the kind of purely literary theatre that has distinguished the Irish theatrical tradition up until now.
"They're not only developing a new kind of theatre but also a new form of theatre. It's not the theatre of dramatic literature, but the text as just another element, which one uses, with the body. I'm interested in that collaboration of theatre, rather than just being the playwright in the corner."
If this sounds like the author is dead in Sligo then no one has told Dermot Healy, Pat McCabe or Leland Bardwell - who have chosen to make their homes in the area. The visual arts also offer their fair share of local residents, with artists Sean McSweeney, Barry Cooke and Nick Miller living in or around Sligo. For Una McCarthy, director of Sligo's Model Arts Centre, this has as much to do with the wonderful light that the Sligo area offers to artists as it does with the fact that Sligo is "a bit off the beaten track" and that "it is the best kept secret in Ireland".
That secret may be a secret no more when Blue Raincoat company comes to Dublin. It's part of a new initiative by the National Theatre, says the Abbey's artistic director, Ben Barnes. "Peacock Partners" is intended as an annual collaborative project in which the expertise of the National Theatre is made available to an innovative independent theatre company.
Under the scheme, Blue Raincoat Theatre Company will be bringing its two "Alice" productions to the national stage for the first time. Jocelyn Clarke, who adapted both shows, has long been a champion of the troupe.
"Blue Raincoats have been doing extraordinary work in Sligo for almost 10 years now," says Clarke, "those who travelled up from the very beginning have really enjoyed it and have come back, very much like Druid in the 1970s, with stories of what great things are being done in Sligo. These productions will just be the Blue Raincoat's third time in Dublin. It's about time that more people saw their work, particularly people in Dublin, where so few travel from the city to see theatre."
Co-founder of the company, Malcolm Hamilton, explains it grew out of the thriving amateur scene in the town. In addition, the Hawk's Well Theatre ensured that there were visiting touring productions to be seen from the late 1980s on. That, and the now defunct Sligo Arts Festival, meant that "the climate had been changed for the arts and anything seemed possible," says Hamilton. "Out of that atmosphere things like the Blue Raincoats and the Model Arts Centre came," he says.
It was in this climate of possibility that Hamilton and Niall Henry set up the company in 1991. Henry had just returned from a theatrical training in Paris, while Hamilton had been active in the emerging local arts scene in Sligo town. Having known each other in school, and with a common interest in the theatre, they joined forces and the Blue Raincoat Theatre Company was formed - taking its name from the song by Leonard Cohen. In many ways, it was Druid Theatre in Galway that inspired the two men. Druid had shown that a serious, world-class professional company could thrive in the regions. The Blue Raincoat Theatre Company would be to Sligo what Druid was to Galway back in 1975. But the Sligo-based group would go beyond straight naturalism. In a new theatrical landscape they would forge an individual style and identity all their own. According to Niall Henry, that style is based on solid theatrical rules, but has other important elements too.
"What would be different in an Irish context about a Blue Raincoat show is that although there is a very strong physical and visual context to the pieces, usually there is a play with a beginning, middle and end, and a story to it. It is neither just a visual piece, nor a straight play. The attempt is to arrive at both, in a sense. Something that is beguiling to the eye, and that, at the same time, would also follow the traditional basic theatrical rules of drama."
For many in the Dublin audience, this will be the first encounter with the Blue Raincoat's theatrical style. Indeed, the cultural richness of Sligo in general remains largely unknown further afield. As Una McCarthy, director of the Model Arts Centre, sees it, this may be an infrastructural problem.
"We are pretty distant from Dublin," says McCarthy. "Despite the times that we live in, it's pretty hard to get to Sligo. The infrastructure is not great. We're in the northwest and it has been left alone for so long."
The up-side of isolation has meant that Sligo hasn't been over-saturated with tourists. While central government continues to let everyone down with regard to infrastructure and public transport, the northwest remains particularly neglected. Getting the train there is possibly a worse experience than would be encountered on any eastern European railway, but while the track is being upgraded, the northwest has been left out of plans for a decent road network to link it to the rest of the country. All this isolation makes it even more remarkable that such a thriving cultural life has sprung up in the area.
But part of the success of the cultural sector in Sligo can be put down to the special assistance that its location has brought. Sligo can avail of various schemes that have been set up to assist Border areas. As Tara McGowan, company administrator with Blue Raincoat Theatre, says, "it's a dream time to be an arts administrator here". Malcolm Hamilton agrees: "Because we're here in the Border counties there's a lot of structural funding and from the International Fund for Ireland - we've become very good at getting money and filling out forms."
With such assistance, the Blue Raincoat company is renovating its performance space, The Factory, adding studios and making the venue more audience friendly. With funding from similar sources, a more radical scheme is being carried out at the Model Arts Centre, where an entire old building is being transformed from the ground up, into a world-class gallery and exhibition space. At a cost of £3.5 million, the new building will provide a home for the Niland Collection of paintings, which is currently held at the county library. The new Model and Niland Centre, as it will be known when it opens in the autumn, will first and foremost offer a home where the collection can be stored in a correct environment. As Una McCarthy says, the collection will also have space to be developed in its new home.
"What makes the collection so significant is the number of Jack B. Yeats paintings that are in it, and the others by his father. There are 37 in total. It is primarily a collection that looks at the first half of the 20th century in Irish art: Paul Henry, Sean Keating, Louis le Brocquy. It's a collection we intend to develop."
But the new centre will also act as a base, as it always has done, for a lot of the other artistic activity in Sligo. Apart from the permanent collection and a series of galleries for visiting work, a performance space with a capacity of 120 will cater for readings and other events at the centre. It will be possible to project 35mm film, a restaurant will provide a social focus, and a series of studio spaces will allow artists to create work in the same building as it may be exhibited.
With plans for an education programme based in the centre and an artists' residency, the new Model and Niland promises, says Una McCarthy, to carry on where the old centre left off.
`THE old Model Arts Centre was primarily an exhibition space, but also a laboratory space, where people could test and try out ideas. There were also other things, apart from the visual, that emanated out of the Model Arts Centre. For instance, Force 10, the literary magazine founded by Dermot Healy; a baroque music festival, a contemporary music festival; we have the New Music for Sligo competition. And we also run an annual literary festival, Scriobh. The centre has been a cauldron of activity and arts organisations have always used it as a base. That's something we'll be extending when we open the new building."
All this activity may be expected for a town the size of Galway, but for a place the size of Sligo it is really staggering. Una McCarthy agrees that there must be something akin to a mini renaissance going on. The annual Yeats International Summer School, the Iontas competition and exhibition of small art works - the list goes on and on. In the theatre alone, Blue Raincoat company has led the way, but there are other theatre companies in town besides them. Dha Ean is an example of a new company, while Sonas is another that comes to mind - a company that ex-Waterboys musician and Sligo resident, Steve Wickham, is currently working with.
In music, too, the place is buzzing. Home to one of the country's leading traditional bands, Dervish, Sligo may not be as famous as Co Clare for trad, but Dervish manager Felip Carbonell assures me "there's plenty of traditional sessions in pubs, it's booming really". A native of Majorca, Carbonell says it's as much the quality of life as the music that attracted him to Sligo.
But the question remains, if Sligo has so much going for it, why hasn't industry been attracted, why hasn't Sligo become a booming economic base for large multinational companies in the way that Galway has? While some sections of government departments have been decentralised there, why haven't other large employers been attracted?
No doubt the poor infrastructure and the subsequent isolation of the northwest have not helped. But where vibrant cultural activity leads the way, very often industry follows. Manager of the Galway Arts Festival, Fergal McGrath, is clear that this happened in the case of Galway, and its success story.
"Galway is one of the powerhouses of the west of Ireland, the success of the arts would be a major contributing factor to the success of Galway as a city for both tourism and industry. While we weren't founded to make an economic impact, we're now aware of that economic impact."
A recent statement by Galway Chamber of Commerce in support of that city's arts festival recognised as much, and in a competitive labour market, many Galway-based companies use imagery from the festival in recruitment drives, selling Galway as an attractive place to live and work.
While Sligo has not been as successful as Galway, the advantage of that is that the pace and quality of life has remained favourable. Maybe after Blue Raincoat Theatre Company takes Dublin by storm, more people will begin to check out Sligo for something more than just a good weekend's surfing. This wave might be about to break.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, adapted for stage by Jocelyn Clarke, and the company's companion piece, Alice Through the Looking Glass, will be performed in repertory at the Peacock Theatre, from Thursday, July 13th (preview Wednesday, July 12th) to August 12th.