A range of people tell Kate Holmquist about their favourite artistic experiences of 2005, from stage and screen, to book, gallery and the airwaves
Mary Cloake, Arts Council director
There were so many really, really good pieces of work this year that it would be impossible for me to choose personal favourites, and for that reason I would like to focus on the fact that this was a year of phenomenal and affirming success for the Irish arts abroad. At the Edinburgh Festival, Trad, by the Galway Arts Festival and Room Service, by dance company CoisCéim, both won Fringe Firsts. Room Service is a brilliant show that takes place in a hotel room with a very small audience, which makes it interesting. Dublin by Gaslight, by the Corn Exchange, got great reviews in Edinburgh. As a result, these shows are going, variously, to Adelaide, Britain and New York. The Irish architecture firm, O'Donnell and Tuomey, came close to winning the 2005 Stirling Prize for the Glucksman Gallery, which also proves we have so much to be proud of. John Banville won the Booker and Harold Pinter, an honorary Irishman considering he was on his way back from Dublin when he heard about it, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In music, Gerald Barry's new opera, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, premiered at the English National Opera. I'm a big Fassbinder fan and Barry's adaptation had a lot of insight. I also liked the way the orchestra was in a hollow in the middle of the stage, which was very clever perceptually, in that it said something about the relationship of the action on stage and the music. We also had Tom Murphy's play Alice Trilogy at the Royal Court and Frank McGuinness's Speaking Like Magpies in Stratford. A little nugget I have to slide in here, from the point of view of the traditional arts at home, was the showcase in Dingle, The Given Note, which brought together the very best of traditional artists in a specially-convened ensemble for a concert that was a once-in-a-lifetime experience of virtuosity. Looking ahead, I'd say the Venice Biennale is one event with a huge potential for Irish artists. The establishment of Culture Ireland, a new body to promote the arts abroad, has a very important role in promoting the vibrant activity that's now happening.
Paul Fahy, Galway Arts Festival artistic director
I really enjoy visual and physical-based work on a grand scale, and it is a joy to come across something that lingers long in the memory long after you have seen it. A lot of what I saw in that arena this year was dance, and to see Balé da Cidade de São Paulo perform three epic choreographic pieces in Holland working with a company of 30 dancers was wonderful. The show was one of the most energetic, exciting, beautiful and physically-demanding dance performances I have seen in ages. Also in dance and in complete contrast to the Brazilians, I enjoyed Sylvie Guillem and The Ballet Boyz. To see a dancer as remarkable and in control as Guillem performing a 12-minute solo more or less on the same single spot of the stage was mesmerising. Irish actor Brian F O'Byrne's portrayal of a priest in John Patrick Shanley's play Doubt set against the backdrop of a Bronx Catholic school in the 1960s in the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York was just fantastic. It was great to see Irish work do so well in Edinburgh this year from Mark Doherty's Trad to DruidSynge to Alastair MacKenzie playing JPW King in a brilliant production of Tom Murphy's The Gigli Concert. I also thought Olwen Fouéré's transformation in to the character of Antonin Artaud in the performance installation Here Lies in Galway was utterly compelling and illustrated what a brilliant physical performer she is. Antony and the Johnsons at Dublin's Vicar Street in July was the most enjoyable gig I attended in 2005 and their album, I Am a Bird Now, is constantly on my CD player. His voice is utterly unique and each song feels like it is part of a greater movement or symphony. Completely opposite to that, and being a little nostalgic, it was wonderful to hear Janis Ian sing, accompanied with just her guitar, songs old and new in a very intimate setting to an audience of about 150 in Castlebar. In visual arts I absolutely loved Eve Sussman's video installation 89 Seconds at Alcazar in Kilkenny's Butler Gallery which was based on the Spanish painter Velázquez's masterpiece Las Meninas. It captured the moments before, during and after the sitting of the painting as the artist worked, and was beautifully lavish to watch. I'm not the biggest fan in the world of video art but this particular piece was really enlightening and a brilliant illustration of how good video work can be. Another visual highlight were the opening moments of Peter McKintosh's lighting and set design of Brian Friel's The Home Place, which was like watching a painting come to life. But perhaps leaving the very best until last, I think the single greatest achievement on an Irish stage this year or indeed on any stage was Marie Mullen playing five epic roles in DruidSynge. She was and is just stunning.
Wolfgang Hoffman, Dublin Fringe Festival director
I didn't see as much as usual because I was spending time with my gorgeous 16-month-old son, Noah, but what I did see was magnificent, so it's hard to choose the best. In Bucharest, I saw Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as interpreted by the theatrical genius Silviu Purcarete with his ensemble company from Craiova. It was playful, surreal and highly visual, so it was not necessary to know Romanian to understand it. The set consisted of mirrored cupboards on wheels with garden gnomes on top. There's a lot of voyeurism, entrances and exits in the play, so the mirrors allowed the audience to see the goings on both on stage and off stage, while the cupboards were used as entrances and exits. Super-strong acting in all the roles, minor and major, and the jokes had the audience in stitches, they were so cleverly built up and then in a series of "ah ha!" moments the whole puzzle suddenly made sense. In New York I really had a spiritual experience at Ashes & Snow, a photography exhibition on Pier 54 (built for the Titanic which never arrived) in the nomadic museum, which is an amazing, Cathedral space designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban and made entirely of stacked shipping containers and vertical cardboard tubing. The photography was by the Canadian Gregory Colbert and depicted animals interacting with humans. People were swimming with elephants, a woman slept in an elephant's arms, a woman danced with an eagle. The space and the exhibition were overwhelming.
Aideen Howard, Abbey Theatre literary director
I saw a fantastic exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York with my daughter, Sally (four): the original illustrations of Maurice Sendak. It was interactive with videos and a reader corner for kids. One of the best plays of the year was Elizabeth Kuti's The Sugar Wife, a new play by a young woman - which is what we need to see more of - that is finely written and thoughtfully put together by the Rough Magic theatre company at the Project. Brian Friel's The Home Place at the Gate affected me enormously. It was a really heavy play that was really lightly written. The documentary from Hummingbird Productions about John McGahern on RTÉ television was a nice piece of journalism, a rare close-up of McGahern and a tender look into the life of the writer. The highlight of my summer was hearing the Tibetan singer Jung Chen Lamo at Airfield House - one of those spine-tingling experiences, both wonderful and bizarre, conjuring up a sense of a foreign place in a lovely and unique setting.
Enrique Juncosa, Irish Museum of Modern Art director
Currently at the Tate Modern in London (until January 8th, 2006), the retrospective of Canadian artist Jeff Wall is the biggest exhibition of his work ever staged, and it's extremely important because so many artists subsequently have been influenced by his work, which started in the 1970s. A near cult figure, Wall creates huge 3m by 3m photographs, which he then frames in light boxes. The effect is imposing, which particularly suits the Tate Modern, making it one of the most handsome shows I've seen there - although the show began in Basle and was also at the Venice Biennale. Wall's photographs look like film stills, are very suggestive, compelling and mysterious and leave a lot to the viewer's imagination. Photography is supposed to be objective, in news coverage for example, but Wall works with the idea that photography can be entirely subjective. I had a good time at the world premiere of Gerald Barry's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant at the English National Opera. It drew controversy with some reviewers declaring it a masterpiece and others hating it, but I thought it was fabulous because it was so weird and different. The whole production was visually beautiful and he had a clever device of a voiceless servant who you were always waiting to hear speak, which created suspense. After an absence of almost 20 years, Dead Can Dance are back and I saw them perform with an orchestra at Radio City Music Hall, New York, and also at Vicar Street in Dublin. Dead Can Dance are two people: Brendan Perry, who lives in Cavan, and Lisa Gerrard, a singer/composer known for her film scores for Gladiator, Whale Rider and others. Their strange world music is better than Enya, more arty and easier to listen to. I can't understand their made-up words but it doesn't matter, because growing up in Spain I could never understand the English lyrics to pop songs anyway.
Mary McCarthy, Dublin Docklands Development Authority
I have not forgotten the very powerful and visually stunning Umwelt, by the French dance company Maguy Marin, in Fête de la Danse at the Institute for Choreography and Dance in Cork. Female dancers performed banal, repetitive actions seen through glass doors. It was existential and so profound that I've often reflected since on the colour and vibrancy of performance transforming the banal into the extraordinary. I felt privileged to hear the genius of the Charles Lloyd Quartet at Vicar Street last April. Again, I was in awe of the level of genius on stage at the McCoy Tyner concert at the Guinness Jazz Festival - perfect delivery. Ape Opera House, by Austin McQuinn, was an installation in a "found space" in Cork. An examination of the role of the ape in our culture, it drew in the viewer in a particular way. Paul Seawright's photography exhibition at the Kerlin Gallery was an example of how the artist can reveal the hidden detail in everyday life that not everyone sees, while the Venice Bienniale had many examples of how viewers can find themselves in a space that removes barriers and challenges their perceptions so their thinking opens up in a new way. The viewer has to work harder because there are no absolutes to receive, but I think the Irish audience is becoming more open to this kind of thing.
Rosaleen McDonagh, Playwright
The thing I really loved this year and was so important to me was the statue in Trafalgar Square in London, Marc Quinn's Alison Lapper Pregnant. We are in a society where "our" [disabled women's] aesthetic does not fit in to "their" construct. It was very empowering to see a naked, disabled woman on "the fourth plinth" in the middle of London. When you come back to Dublin after that experience, you realise again that it is so up its own arse, so youth-orientated, superficial and materialistic. If I had read Zadie Smith's novel On Beauty at 19, I would have made better choices and had better relationships with men. It's about gender, sexism and racism in inter-cultural relationships, but doesn't read like a political novel. It's hilarious and entertaining, demonstrating how the mainstream, Caucasian culture will accept a black woman only if she conforms to white culture, so it's about cultural aesthetics as well as racism. I know that feeling, as a Traveller, that you have when you are going out with a settled man and begin to feel that you are betraying bits of your own culture. Seeing Joan Baez in the Bob Dylan documentary (by Martin Scorsese) gave me hope, the way she has continued to work for peace and human rights. Bob Dylan was just Mr Rock'n'roll, accepting no responsibility and thinking he only had to write the music. Baez didn't sell out like Madonna has with her new album, Confessions from a Dancefloor, so I thought, "yeah, we're doing the right thing by fighting for what we believe in."
David McKenna, RTÉ Television executive producer, music and arts
I haven't been close to tears in a theatre for a long time, so Garry Hynes's production of Riders to the Sea came as a shock. It proved beyond any doubt that Marie Mullen isn't just a great actor - she's like MacGowran doing Beckett or Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (another discovery this year) singing Bach. She just plugs you straight in to Synge's heart. On the other hand, Susan Fitzgerald's homage to Marie Kean in Arthur Riordan's Shooting Gallery was wickedly hilarious - and her appearances in Albee's The Goat and Tejas Verdes at the Project showed her fantastic range. Down in Bantry, at West Cork Music's Masters of Tradition festival, Matt Cranitch and Seamus Creagh tossed off whirling, slightly astringent polkas, and Martin Hayes and Denis Cahill played a set of such intensity that we all just soared to our feet at the end. Michaël Borremans's paintings in the RHA Gallagher Gallery were disturbing and witty as well as beautiful to look at, and the Ashford Gallery downstairs introduced some very absorbing new painters such as Philippa Sutherland. Gerald Barry went to places that opera - and music - doesn't usually go in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant: it was demented and exhilarating. Rachid Taha from Algeria mixes punk and rai - he rocked Dublin and Cork for one night each and on my car stereo for about three months. There was an Algerian connection as well in Michael Haneke's genuinely shocking exploration of domestic and colonial guilt and trust, Caché, in the French Film Festival at Dublin's IFI. Like all of Haneke's films, you stand around afterwards in a bit of a daze, wondering how he did it. And the movie's main character was a TV arts programme host, so that brought it quite close to home - well, the office. [The writer has produced The View.]
Annette Nugent, Marketing consultant
One of my definite highlights of 2005 was meeting architect Daniel Libeskind, renowned for his competition-winning scheme for the New York Ground Zero master plan, in Cork. Not only did his Eighteen Turns pavilion at Fota House entertain visually (and it's still there by the way), he was a captivating and inspiring speaker at his sold-out public lecture at the Cork Opera House. Beyond Cork, a cultural highlight with a difference took place in The Ark Children's Cultural Centre in Dublin during the summer. Save the Robots, featuring workshops, performances and an extraordinary exhibition that investigated the idea of robots in film, fantasy and art, attracted as many robot-fascinated adults as children to The Ark. It was an inspired look at the fusing of science and art . . . not to mention loads of fun! Musically, Note Productions brought an incredible line-up of jazz, world and contemporary classical music concerts to Ireland in their Contemporaries Concert Series. My highlight was the Marc Copland and Gary Peacock concert - the quiet beauty of the duo's performance created an almost church-like atmosphere in Liberty Hall, and it was a joy to see such masters play live in Dublin. Outside of Ireland, it has to be the Venice Biennale. As a "cultural tourist", it's wonderful to see contemporary visual arts successfully attracting such large visitor numbers, and it makes me think that we have some work to do in Ireland to bring Irish contemporary arts and culture to visitors' attention in a meaningful way. Content-wise, two of the most memorable exhibits for me were video artist Pipilotti Rist's soothing site-specific projection onto the ceiling of the San Stae Church at the Swiss pavilion, and in total contrast, fashion designer Hussein Chalayan's video work in the Turkish show. The latter's weird story and other-wordly screen presence of Tilda Swinton were most unsettling.
Shane O'Toole, Irish Architecture Foundation
Irish people are paying more attention to where they live and how they live. Millions are travelling abroad and noticing architecture and good surroundings are one of the ways a culture can define itself. The Glucksman Gallery at UCC is a dreamy place to have an encounter with the visual arts - a floating box among the tree tops by the south tributary of the River Lee, like a treehouse for adults. Sensationally, an Irish team, O'Donnell and Tuomey, did not win the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) Stirling Prize for the Glucksman, even though they were hot favourites. Richard Murphy, a leading Scottish architect, went down on his knees apologising to the Irish people on behalf of the Scottish nation. The Arsenale at Venice Biennale was curated by a woman this year, Rosa Martinez, which gave it a completely different feel. A section of the Arsenale was taken over by the Guerrilla Girls, a group of political feminists who did a witty take on the position of women in art: 98 per cent of nudes are female and 98 per cent of artists are male. The Germans had a really funny faux art installation, some of the art real and some not, where paid actors were going around saying "this is so contemporary, so contemporary". There was an empty room where, if you gave your opinion, you were refunded your entrance fee. (I was a coward I'm afraid.) It was all about stopping being a voyeur and becoming engaged. At IMMA, The Defastenists - a group of artists around Padraig Moore and Gay Farrelly - had a provocative, young and energetic exhibition. That kind of optimistic team spirit is rare in the art world these days. My best theatrical experience was the Champions League final in Istanbul, where I went from wanting to walk out at half-time with Liverpool losing 3-0 to AC Milan, to seeing Liverpool win on penalties in the most amazing, fairytale turnaround. It was actually a work of fiction, not a work of sport at all. All the dramatic elements were there - the players, the high stakes, the back story, the Italians who had never lost a 1-0 lead in their history, never mind a 3-0 lead, and a participatory audience, all watched by the prawn-sandwich eaters in the background who were merely observing the show. It was like watching a Greek tragedy, with the final score the very definition of deus ex machina.
Simon Perry, Irish Film Board chief executive
The Irish film that impressed me most this year - and the reason I chose to take this job with the Irish Film Board, actually - was Perry Ogden's Pavee Lackeen (winner of the Satyajit Ray Award for the best first feature when it premiered at the London Film Festival). About a family of Travellers, it focuses on how a young and vulnerable girl is trying to get by. It made me think there's a new kind of artist working in Ireland with a completely fresh eye, rather than some of the stupid, derivative, gangster films we've seen. Another film that impressed me was Michael Haneke's Caché (or Hidden), an uncompromising look at human behaviour with the theme of the camera at its centre. I saw some great photographic exhibitions this year. Rineke Dijkstra, a Dutch photographer, does very arresting and austere, starkly-lit photographic portraits of adolescents looking directly at the camera. There's a vulnerability to these young people that appeals to me. In the exhibition I saw at the Jeu de Pomme in Paris was an amazing portrait sequence of a girl, an Albanian refugee. The first photograph of about 15 was taken in 1994 when she was a little girl, and the last taken 10 years later when she was a young woman. Dijkstra's work reminds me of the work of Robert Capa, famous for his photographs of ordinary people in the midst of war. At the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, I saw some of his work, including his famous photo of Pablo Picasso on the beach holding an umbrella for one of his mistresses or wives, and another of people sitting at a cafe in Berlin drinking coffee, surrounded by bombed-out buildings. There's a wit and observation of vulnerability that I find appealing. Why do images of vulnerability appeal to me? I've never had children - my marriage ended without that happening - and I would really like to. This was the year I discovered Finland, which is very lovely and has a rich culture, including many great, female painters. I had my first sauna bath - heating up in the sauna and then running down the hill to the sea, then back into the sauna again. That was the most powerful cultural experience of the year, definitely.
Richard Wakely, Theatre and dance producer and presenter
The Dorothy Cross Retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art was the highlight of the year in the visual arts in Ireland. I also loved an exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, which I nearly didn't go to because it was about football and you don't usually associate football with art. The show looked at the impact of football on the world and how various societies interact and benefit from having football central to their cultures. All kinds of media - textiles, painting, video and so on - were used by artists from around the globe and football became a political metaphor. I was most affected by a video installation by a Swiss artist in which two teams in business suits competed on the pitch, complete with flowing footballer locks, mobile phones and briefcases. The concerts of the year for me were Patty Griffin and Tift Merritt, both bluesy, rootsy, southern beauties in the Americana genre. There's a revival in the US of the singer-songwriter and it was great to be able to hear both these artists in Dublin.