What was your favourite arts experience of the year? Was it seeing something Joycean...or being bowled over by Rough Magic's 'Improbable Frequency'...or trawling through Bob Dylan's back pages...or seeing Planxty again? Arminta Wallace finds out who favoured what in the arts 2004.
Olive Braiden
Chairwoman of the Arts Council
What really struck me this year was how much art of all kinds is available - theatre, poetry readings, lectures on the arts - you could be at something all day, every day. And not just in Dublin; here at the Arts Council we get stacks of invitations from every county. In fact, the first thing I really loved this year was down on Valentia Island - Opera Theatre Company's production of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, directed by Dorothy Cross. It was such a great collaboration of visual artist, baroque orchestra and wonderful singers; and the fact that it was in a slate quarry - it was magical. And the music is beautiful. That really stood out as a different and important event.
More recently I was at the University of Limerick at the TG4 Gradam Ceol awards, a fantastic concert. The Chieftains were there, and Tony MacMahon, and a woman from Monaghan who's a terrific sean-nós singer, and they all played together at the end, which was totally irresistible. The enthusiasm and energy were amazing, and the place was packed - the concert hall holds 1,000 people, and it was booked out. Tony MacMahon also played with the Kronos Quartet on one of their two nights at the O'Reilly Hall. I've been a big Kronos fan since the beginning - they're so laid back and so attractive as people because they don't change themselves to any audience. I had seen them years ago, and now they've grown old but they look exactly the same, you know? A pair of jeans and a sweater. Really classy west coast America.
I thought Rough Magic's play, Improbable Frequency, which was at the Dublin Theatre Festival and is going into the Abbey, was fantastic - and it was unusual for Rough Magic, because it was a musical, a satire. I love Death of a Salesman and all those major theatre pieces, but this was something new and really excellent. One festival which I've always enjoyed is the Dublin Writers' Festival. This year it was particularly good because they had people from all the accession countries. I also enjoyed the American author, Tracy Chevalier, who read from her book, The Lady and the Unicorn. I love listening to writers reading from their own work - it adds such an extra dimension - but the other thing about this festival is that it's a great opportunity for people to get to things. They have readings at 11 o'clock in the morning and events all through the day - and also they're very cheap.
I loved lots of other things: Shining City at the Gate; Dublin by Gaslight at the Project. I've always loved the Project; again, you can run in at lunchtime and there might be an exhibition on. I love places where there are a few different things you can do. But my all-time favourite is the IFI, where you can have a coffee, buy a postcard, even go to half a film in the afternoon.
John Kelly
Broadcaster
I got to travel a lot this year, and being thrown into other cultures as opposed to my own was quite remarkable. I went to Beijing with the China/Ireland Cultural Exchange, and while there are obviously ongoing issues in terms of political culture, in terms of meeting people and doing things it was wonderful. The night we arrived it was straight back to 1977 in a place called The Get Lucky Club where a band called Brain Failure were doing Clash numbers. A young band with leopard-skin patterns in their hair - the last thing you'd expect in China. By the same token, at the Conservatory of Music we went from room to room, and in each room there was some instrument you'd never seen or heard of before being played, and it was just gorgeous music - very like the blues, a lot of the time. I suppose the strangest cultural memory of all was being on the Great Wall. We travelled a long, long way to get to a particularly remote spot with a spectacular view - but I was still able to phone Enniskillen on my mobile phone and talk to my mother.
I also got to West Africa this year, to Senegal; and to Estonia because of the EU enlargement. Then I did an American bluegrass trip to Kentucky and Tennessee. The American Deep South is much more of a culture shock than China. A strange place, when you really are in the sticks. Although once you're sitting in a bar with these guys with no teeth and shotguns, they're actually dead on - and they're amazed that you're interested in the music, because to them it's not heritage, it's just the music that they play at the dance.
The cultural highlight of my year was being with all those thousands of Irish people in the Stade de France for the World Cup soccer match between Ireland and France - particularly at the moment when the Irish outsang the French for the Marseillaise. That was just unbelievable. Everybody knew the tune; people were faffing away at the words; and the French were looking around going, "What is going on here?" It was all positive stuff, and just fun from start to finish.
Concert-wise I saw Tom Waits in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago, which was an adventure. In terms of books, Bob Dylan's Chronicles was a revelation for me. I'm a big Dylan fan, but you never hear him talk - you don't know what he thinks, you don't know what he does in his spare time - and then suddenly you're reading this book. I couldn't put it down and I can't wait for the rest of it. I thought Paul Auster's book, Oracle Night, was great, and I enjoyed Sean O'Reilly's The Swing of Things. And finally, not all that long ago Seamus Heaney gave a lecture on Paddy Kavanagh in Drumcondra. Sometimes art is almost nutritional: you're kind of worn out with chores and work and nonsense, and suddenly here's a man who has thought about things. Or a band or a song or something just comes at the right time, and your heart is lifted by it. You get inspired and switched back on again by someone else's observations, and by someone else's belief in the process and in art.
Colm Tóibín
Novelist and critic
On the 16th of June 1982 Anthony Burgess came down the stairs of the Shelbourne Hotel shouting, "Turn on the radio - have you heard what's on the radio?" It was the RTÉ Players doing the famous non-stop reading of Ulysses. He thought it was amazing, and he went on all day about it - anyway, it was released on CD by RTÉ this June and it's a national treasure.
Earlier this year at the Liceu in Barcelona, the last two operas of Wagner's Ring cycle were performed with an almost austere precision and beauty. I think that to experience the Ring properly you have to be over 40: all that business of Wotan's regrets and yearnings matter to you much more, somehow. There's an extraordinary scene in Siegfried where Wotan wakes Erde and Erde tells him that - well, that it's over. And you get levels within levels of emotion welling out of that.
In Dublin, Opera Ireland's production of Orfeo and Eurydice set a new standard of excellence for opera production in the city. Visually, the design was terribly strong; it had an enormous integrity about it; and David Bolger's choreography lifted it up yet another level. It was astonishing to watch and has got to become a sort of benchmark production - anybody who sees Orfeo again will say: "Well, why wasn't it like that one?"
On disc, there were wonderful recordings by two American singers. The mezzo, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, worked with the theatre director, Peter Sellars, on two Bach cantatas; she performed one of them wearing a hospital gown and the other, My Heart Swims With Blood, wearing an enormous red scarf. She has an extraordinary emotional range - there are moments where you just stop dead in your tracks and say: "This is the most beautiful music I've ever heard." Anyone who has heard it just thinks it's amazing - even people who prefer disco music. So Lorraine Hunt Lieberson is the current big thing - and the next big thing is the contralto Stephanie Blythe, whose debut disc of Bach and Handel last year was really extraordinary.
In theatre, Corin Redgrave's King Lear at Stratford was utterly fascinating - he played Lear as a middle-aged man, hearty and outrageously irresponsible, and you couldn't take your eyes off him. I went and saw four plays in three days - Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Macbeth. Lovely work. Going to Stratford beats every other form of activity, really, and the whole area around there is beautiful. The Romeo and Juliet was utterly flawless, making clear how beautiful the structure of the play is. And by the way, the sword fighting at Stratford has to be seen to be believed. In Ireland, three new plays combined brilliant texts with exciting productions - Stuart Carolan's very, very dark Defenders of the Faith at the Peacock has left a very clear footprint on Irish theatre as somebody who is going to produce very good work; Mark Doherty's Trad at the Galway Arts Festival is a way of taking aspects of Beckett and seeing if they could be used again - and it makes it pretty clear that they can be; and Arthur Riordan's Improbable Frequency by Rough Magic for the Dublin Theatre Festival was just impeccable. The production seemed to me expensive and surprising, and some of his rhymes and couplets are as good as you'd get in the classic days of the musical.
Colm Toibin's novel, The Master, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2004
Philip King
Independent film producer
My book of the year is definitely Bob Dylan's Chronicles. So much has been written about Bob Dylan by others, but this is by the man himself. It gives a sense of the voltage of a creative energy at full spark, but you also see the other side - the desolation that happens when the muse leaves you. For me it was like peeking into somebody's diary, and it all rang true. He talks about his first encounter with Woody Guthrie and says it was like he was flung across the room; his encounter with folk music, he says, informed everything that he did. That was a big thing, for me to read that - in a way, it spans my life, this book.
The next thing that I thought was important was the 50th anniversary of rock 'n' roll this year. That's All Right Mama was recorded by Presley in Sun Studios in 1954, which is supposedly the beginning of rock 'n' roll. Dylan spanned that period, so it was interesting to look back - and the period was book-ended by the recent death of John Peel. He was a constant guardian angel for rock 'n' roll since I first listened to him in the 1960s, and he died in the 50th year of rock 'n' roll.
Which leads me to Planxty getting back together. I made a film of their run in Vicar Street; but that's not why I'm talking about them. I first saw them in 1971, supporting Donovan at the City Hall in Cork, and they have been the soundtrack to my life right through that period. They also introduced Irish music to a whole new audience - and while they were always brilliant in what they brought to bear on the music, they are now master craftsmen. That really beautiful filigree thing that they do together, there's an Irishness in it, but there's a great nod to England in it as well - to Sweet Thames Flow Softly and the big English ballad collections. For their current tour they're sold out all over the place - no advertising, no posters, no nothing, and they'll probably play to 60,000 or 70,000 people. And personally it has been a very life-affirming thing. I mean, to see that music goes on through tragedy and ups and downs and all the things that have happened in our lives - and the band's lives - since we first heard The Raggle Taggle Gypsy in 1970. I found that very uplifting and . . . well, just important.
Sitting on the traditional arts committee, a review of the state of traditional music in Ireland . . . I found it frustrating but ultimately hugely invigorating to listen to what the public has to say. Sometimes in the discussion of what we would call "high art" our unique voice is lost in the mix - so to have been part of that was very exciting for me.
Philip King's documentary on Planxty will be shown on RTÉ television at 6 p.m. on St Stephen's Day. His programme, An Nollaig sa Daingean (A Dingle Christmas), will go out on Christmas Day on RTÉ1 at 6.30 p.m.
Rose Parkinson
Director Galway Arts Festival
I saw an awful lot of good stuff this year, but a good deal of it was outside the country so I'm not going to go on and on about shows that hardly anybody might have seen - I'm also going to stay away from Galway Arts festival stuff, for obvious reasons! But there's one play that I saw in London which I really have to mention because it was amazing. It was called The Elephant Vanishes and it was at the Barbican, a co-production between Complicity and a company from Tokyo.
It's based on the stories of Haruki Murakami, and it was truly mind-blowing. First of all the stories themselves are mental. Then add a hi-tech staging with video screens whooshing across the stage and projections going on to the back wall and a guy walking down the side of a fridge . . . surreal.
At the Dublin Theatre Festival I loved Cheek By Jowl's Othello at the Tivoli, directed by Declan Donnellan. I've seen quite a number of productions of Othello, but this was probably the most powerful. They didn't use a set, as such, just used the whole space right to the back walls - no frills or fluff - and at the start he had the whole cast of 20-plus on stage, which generated this hugely powerful image. And that power never let up through the whole production; there was a little weasel of a guy playing Iago and a mountain of a man playing Othello. It was just wonderful.
My initial list was all theatre, but I did get away from theatre, actually, and came across other things which were extraordinary for different reasons.
There's a book called Waiting to be Heard, a collection of essays by high school students in San Francisco, published by Dave Eggers's McSweeney's in collaboration with the Isabel Allende Foundation. It contains fiction and non-fiction by about 30 kids of 16 or 17; the theme was "Peace and the World" but all the stories are about violence because that was what meant more to these kids. Eveything from gang violence through September 11th to domestic abuse. Really heartbreaking stuff. And then there's Colm Tóibín's The Master, which I'm reading at the moment. It's riveting; once you pick it up, you can't put it down, so I'm loving that. I'm a Tóibín fan rather than a James fan, but it's a real insight into James and will make me go out and read an awful lot more of his work. My final thing is actually a play by the young writer Stuart Carolan, Defender of the Faith. It's his first play and it's explosive stuff. I got hold of it at the beginning of the year in script form and was blown away; it was subsequently staged in the Peacock during the year. I read first plays by young writers all the time, but this one is amazing - accomplished, intelligent, dark and angry but also very witty. For a new voice to come along like that is kind of rare - and absolutely priceless.
Theo Dorgan
Poet
Having written a book of poems about the sea, I'm still trawling around second-hand bookshops picking up books on the subject - and one which really made an impression on me is called 1421: The Year China Discovered The World by Gavin Menzies. Apparently five Chinese blades roamed the entire planet in the 15th century and mapped it; and here's this book which, chapter and verse, step by step, lays this fact out incontrovertibly, tracking it back to maps that Henry the Navigator's Portuguese pilots had and used. And yet we stubbornly refuse to shift our paradigm of the world. That's what I've been thinking of - why doesn't the paradigm shift? It's extraordinary in what it says about the epistemological challenge.
I'm always on the lookout for first poetry collections, and Denise Blake's Take A Deep Breath is an interesting debut. At the other end of the scale was the monumental Familiar Strangers from Brendan Kennelly. I'd be afraid for this book to get wet in case it swelled to the size of a house - it has the feeling of a condensed brick, like something an Arctic explorer would take with them. It really is. There's just so much in it. You can literally open it at random and read: "It was nice of death to stand aside a while/ and make a little space . . ." I loved Doris Lessing's Collected Essays, and I had fun with Peter Cunningham's The Taoiseach. Oh, and Dylan's Chronicles has been at the bedside all year.
Which leads me to the most played albums in the house all year: Christy Moore's box set. A great chronicler of the Irish heart and soul over the last 20, 30 years, he has dipped in and out of everything that has shaped and troubled us.
The two plays that really struck me were Festen - the Polish play at the Abbey - and the Russian Twelfth Night directed by Declan Donnellan. In both of those what was extraordinary was the ensemble playing and the sheer precision of the staging. It made me think very hard about how easily and glibly we lost the permanent company at the Abbey, for instance. I hadn't expected to find myself thinking that there is a good deal to be said for building ensembles - not least the idea that people have time to learn, that once the curtain goes up they're all in it together and that one weak or careless or unthinking performance damages the whole. To see people play for each other, delighting in their skills but not their egos - that was interesting.
What is also interesting is Cork's programme for Capital of Culture 2005. It's going to be quite an extraordinary year. In some ways the programme book would be my book of the year, in the sense that it is full of so much promise and diversity. Instead of rounding up a committee of the usual tedious experts to tell us what's good for us, they literally extended an open invitation and said "Come - tell us what you'd like to do." I thought that was very brave and very risky, and I hope that the future Capital of Culture programme will follow that lead, and trust the people who make and care about art to make and care for their cities of culture.
Theo Dorgan's latest book is Sailing for Home (Penguin)
Mannix Flynn
Actor and author
I spent an awful lot of time looking at visual art this year in my capacity as board member of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The huge surge in galleries right across the country means you'll always find something of interest, and a lot of what I've seen this year was very good: John Shinnors at the Taylor Gallery was superb; the Chinese show up at IMMA is really excellent and the McClelland collection from Northern Ireland is very, very interesting. But one of the finest pieces of work I've seen is a show at Draíocht in Blanchardstown by Eddie Cahill. What's on the walls out there is the story of what's happening to that community - and to communities the length and breadth of the country. It's called Black Boxes, after the black box of an aeroplane - portraits of young women, beautifully executed. It's like Edvard Munch's The Scream, except without the scream because the scream has been completely internalised.
I also liked the little retrospective of Irish 20th century art at the National Gallery. It was almost like a small movie, and the cold concrete of the building - or warm concrete, depending on which way your aesthetic goes - broke the romanticism of the work and gave it a modern feel. So I was very pleased with that - and surprised to come across it on my way out of the German exhibition upstairs which, again, is very good. People dreaming about the ideal of a happy future; the idea that our real journey is an inward journey. Which contrasts quite nicely with the very materialistic journey we're having in this country at the moment. Because you can see the results of that journey at the Edward Cahill exhibition out at the edges of Dublin at Blanchardstown shopping centre.
As far as theatre is concerned, I think it's worth nothing that the Abbey theatre's crisis impacted on theatre right across Dublin - put a damper on things as if to suggest that theatre was doomed, whereas it was merely the Abbey and, may I add, merely the Abbey boardroom. But theatre practitioners have been working away, and I think they need a round of applause for continuing in the face of all that negative publicity.
The play that actually entertained me - despite the fact that I have long since given up on being entertained in the theatre - was Corn Exchange's Dublin by Gaslight at the Project, directed by Annie Ryan. It wasn't trying to be smart or clever or deep, but the whole thing gelled. They didn't miss a beat.
Nell McCafferty's autobiography, Nell, is a brave book - funny and sad, warts and all. Anybody I gave that book to was the better for it. That's a book written by a person who's letting go of resentment, a person who has come to terms with their life and with themselves.
Culturally, the best news of 2004 was the news that the Irish Government managed not to put God in the EU constitution. That we're going to have a secular Europe after all - despite being the land of saints and scholars and whatever else, despite all the years of abuse and hiding behind the God business. That the ones who everybody thought would enforce the Catholic God and the Christian God in Europe, didn't.
Mannix Flynn will perform his one-man show, James X, at the Everyman Theatre, Cork, as part of Cork 2005 - European Capital of Culture
Eithne Healy
Chairwoman, Abbey Theatre
When asked my cultural highlights in 2004, I first of all imagined I had seen or heard nothing outside the Abbey Theatre - however, on reflection I do have some wonderful memories tucked away in my head. I had a good year: the highs were very high and the lows very low, with hardly anything in between.
My main focus was abbeyonehundred. The "Abbey and Ireland" season formed part of an excellent Dublin Theatre Festival. Reading the Decades, which took place every afternoon in the cramped rehearsal room, was fantastic, with us all squashed in and the magic which was created by the actors and directing teams.
Downstairs in the Peacock there was a superb production of Portia Coughlin by Marina Carr - no fidgeting, no coughing, the audience as spellbound by this dark play as I was - and how we all talked to each other about the experience as we went out into the rain and wind in Abbey Street.
Also at the Dublin Theatre Festival, Declan Donnellan's Twelfth Night, so stylish, so simply staged, I cannot remember the Olympia stage looking so beautiful.
Then there was my first experience of Handel's Messiah on Fishamble Street at the now-annual celebration of the first performance of this gigantic piece of music. Proinsias O'Duinn conducting Our Lady's Choral Society: the neighbours, the children, the tourists, non-singers like me - we raised our voices and our hands to the sky. It was fun and uplifting and everyone should experience it at least once.
I realise now I had a few great firsts this year. I was lucky enough to go to the Ireland-China Festival. It was a privilege and a joy to sit with local audiences in packed houses and experience their reaction to the Gate Theatre production of Waiting for Godot and the gala concert of traditional music where, among other wonderful artists, Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill delivered a spine-chilling set. The organisers of this great event spoiled us supporters both in Beijing and Shanghai. We loved every bit of the culture, the people, food, sights. We even did the Great Wall - a truly cultural experience.
In the world of visual arts, the opening in October by President Mary McAleese of the Glucksman Gallery in the grounds of UCC must be on everyone's list of highlights.
This breathtaking new building is an artwork in itself. In summer it is almost hidden by the trees and you can just see the sun glinting on the expanse of glass. In winter it is more visible and in all seasons it is stunning. To quote The Times, "it is the best piece of public architecture in Ireland for decades."
Well done, Cork - as a former Irish Times drama critic used to write at the end of a good review, "Go see".