Cork begins an exciting year as European Capital of Culture in January,writes Mary Leland.
Yesterday Cork unveiled what amounted to a tasting menu of the programme for its year as European Capital of Culture, which begins in January. It was the outline of a sophisticated, comprehensive and, above all, exciting response to the challenge of the year.
The programme's multimillion-euro budget, coupled with the almost €200 million that the city council is channelling into capital development, means this is to be a brilliant moment for Cork - and a moment when the city must do brilliant things. On this showing of 40 of the expected 130 events - the others will be unveiled in October - Cork is on its way to civic and cultural transformation.
The physically renewed city will be awash with artists of all kinds and from all countries, invited to fill a range of residencies. It will resound with the music of quartets, orchestras, choirs and trumpeters (in one of the first events the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland, conducted by Takuo Yuasa, will give a gala concert). It will welcome national and international chess grandmasters. It will glow with a month-long festival of contemporary dance, during which its citizens will, with luck, provide an "urban choreography" by discovering, reading and obeying 10,000 message-laden rings.
Going by the language of the organisers, this is a high-concept world in which concerts become musical interventions and events are contextualised, workshopped and "visioned". It has an abundance of "gestural opportunities", and "additionality" - that is to say, not just an event but also everything it brings with it - becomes an essential measurement in matching bang to buck.
The organisers have come up with some headline-snatching ingredients, some of which almost defy description. The anticipation should be heightened by the launches later this year of the festival's strands.
Staggering the announcements should, at least, help to energise what has so far been an underwhelmed citizenry. Cork 2005, the independent company set up to organise the year's events, partly has itself to blame.
By keeping its cards so close to its chest for so long it created a distance between the year and the people whose support it most needs. It also decided to draw up some of the programme itself and ask the public to suggest the rest of the ideas - more than 70 per cent of the events, in fact. But there is already a sense that some local artists have fallen into the gap between the organisers' choices and those of the public.
Cork 2005 also had to confront a problem of perception by getting across the message that, although it would not base its judgments on money, it was not a funding agency. Instead, through investment in some cases, management and partnership arrangements in others and sponsorships in others again, it could help artists and cultural groups to engineer their own funding.
Last night, when the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, John O'Donoghue, formally presented the city with its title of European Capital of Culture, he was accompanied by John Kennedy, Cork 2005's director, and Kennedy's programming team of Mary McCarthy, Thomas McCarthy and Tony Sheehan.
Their interim selection carries some personal weight. Mary McCarthy, for example, as former director of the National Sculpture Factory, can't help rejoicing in the acquisition of a pavilion by the architect Daniel Libeskind: 270 metres of illuminated, dreamlike space. Libeskind, the designer of the master plan for the buildings that will replace the World Trade Centre, in New York, will also deliver a keynote address - a coup to rival the visit of a touring international symposium on trends in European and Asia-Pacific architecture.
There is shared pride in the visit of the Kronos Quartet from San Francisco; as well as performing at St Fin Barre's Cathedral it will link up with Cork International Choral Festival.
A European quartet week, led by the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet, will offer rush-hour concerts as part of its programme.
There will also be an "art music" collaboration of "sound, technology and location", Cathal Coughlan's musical settings of poetry and Iarla Ó Lionáird's involvement in a strand called Ethnic Voices and Contemporary Music.
From Barcelona comes the Sol Picó contemporary dance troupe; there will be a month-long programme from the Jean-Pierre Perrault company of Montreal. Iris, from Daghdha Dance Company, is to be Cork's new ring cycle, directed by Michael Klien with Davida Teilingo.
Theatre includes a new Conall Morrison script for Storytellers, The Plough And The Stars from the Abbey, the trumpet-based Apocalypse from Mark O'Keeffe with Glasgow's Theatre Cryptic, more Samuel Beckett from Gare St Lazare Players, an epic from Johnny Hanrahan and the five-month Relocations series, led by Corcadorca, which will turn Cork into Italy with The Merchant Of Venice and be partnered by companies from Poland, Scotland and France (the last bringing its own circus and orchestra).
A concentration on children and childhood events and memories will dominate July, from the New Young Europeans photography project to the Eurochild anthology developed by Euro-École in Nantes and Tigh Fili in Cork. Community events include television projects and a film made by homeless people with the help of Cork Simon Community. Five thousand knitters will also, in an unusual project, reproduce an aerial map of Cork city.
As Cork's year as cultural capital coincides with the 50th anniversary of the city's film festival, its film strand will be enhanced with outdoor screenings, the showing of what are being billed as the world's 100 best short films, and the publication of an anthology of cinema criticism. The year's sports tournaments will be given lasting significance by a sporting history of the city.
The literary strand, one of the largest in the year, is dominated by Translations, a project that involves Cork-born poets collaborating in the translation of work by poets from EU applicant nations and producing in each case a volume of poetry. Conal Creedon's completion of his Second City fiction trilogy and the animation of Leabhar Mór Na Gaeilge, the Great Book of Irish, by uniting the artists and poets who contributed to the collection are added to two literary festivals and a series of public readings.
A James Barry exhibition at Crawford Municipal Art Gallery - which also hosts the splendours of 400 years of Cork silver and gold - has already sparked expectations; to this is now added a three-month residency by the novelist, painter and art historian John Berger, whose collaboration with Marisa Carnino has at its core an exhibition of drawings and an anthology of Berger's critical writing.
The Crafts Council of Ireland will use the new Glucksman Gallery at University College Cork for its ethnic examination of arts and crafts. There are several photographic events, including Boundaries (on billboards) from Dara McGrath; Cork Vision Centre will become a kind of embassy where, in an echo of the National Gallery of Ireland's New Frontiers show, the 10 EU accession states will display creativity from the culinary arts to music and film. The unveiling of maritime paintings of the Port of Cork will tie in nicely with the Meitheal Mara festival, which will involve rowing clubs from Ireland and abroad.
That festival is an example of how a small group with a big idea can bring it to fruition through Cork 2005's management. Another is a proposal by Cork Traveller Women's Network to recreate a full-size barrel-top wagon.
Cork 2005 cites the Libeskind pavilion as an example of how sponsorship can work: it comes to the city through a private donor, as a gesture of civic-minded business leadership. The team is still coy about identifying sponsors, even the big-name national sponsor with which negotiations are said to be almost complete.
Other organisations - Irish language and music groups, University College Cork, Cork Institute of Technology, the city's theatres, sports groups from harriers to pigeon racers, commercial art galleries and professional and industrial bodies - are making their own plans. The European Association of Archaeologists is holding its conference in Cork next year, and the European Commission's Living Landscape conference is also coming.
Despite some people's lack of enthusiasm, the sense of anticipation is growing, not least because Cork is taking on a new look. Propelled by the relative imminence of 2005 the city's capital-expenditure projects have been grinding their way through the streets under the direction of Joe Gavin, Cork's city manager.
Its completion will be something of a triumph for him - as, indeed, was helping to win Cork its term as European Capital of Culture. The year's programme will give his tenure a particular coloration: through 2005 the fusion of civic and cultural identity is expected to take physical and, crucially under the ethos of the cultural-capital scheme, permanent shape.
Many of the spending plans were in train anyway, of course, but Cork's hard-won European role lent such an impetus that the civic atmosphere has become an attractive element in the structure of the cultural programme.
That programme is still captive to timing - no date can yet be fixed for the planned displays of fireworks and pageantry, for example - but overall the city is benefiting from the sense of freedom that being the cultural capital brings. Each city is at liberty to arrive at its own understanding of the term. "What we have imagined for Cork 2005 is always appropriate to the scale of the city and its hinterland," say the organisers. "We have no longing to be elsewhere."