ARTSCAPE:NEXT YEAR HOLDS fewer mysteries than it did a week ago, writes Deirdre Falvey.
By now many, if not most, Irish arts organisations know where they stand in relation to 2009 Arts Council funding, and it will undoubtedly be a challenging, and in some cases demolishing, year. While some will be devastated by particularly harsh decisions, others will seek to make the most of a period of retrenchment and find ways to be creative.
Finally, after several months' delay, the seven new Arts Council appointees were announced. They, along with the six remaining members, create a council with a good spread across art forms and geographic areas that is also a powerhouse of talent and experience. Sheelagh O'Neill, from Dublin, would be the least familiar face, perhaps; the niece of Dr Hilary Pyle, she and her husband Shane O'Neill (chief strategist of Liberty Global and chairman of UPC Ireland) are based in London and collect art.
Pat Moylan as chairwoman is seen as a strong choice. While she has operated in funded arts, she has had striking commercial success and is very independent; the combination of hands-on arts experience and a strong business sense bode well for a sector which is, along with everyone else in the country, facing a difficult and uncertain future. Looking at the political optics of it, aside from Caroline Senior of Garter Lane Arts Centre's Waterford connection, Louise Donlon is based in Portlaoise, where she heads Dunamaise Arts Centre, in the Taoiseach's constituency. Heck, Moylan also slightly ticks a Waterford box (she chaired Red Kettle Theatre Co till recently), though she is not known as a Fianna Fáiler. Tania Banotti says "given how pressing the whole issue of touring is, it's great to see venues outside Dublin recognised with the appointment of Donlon and Senior. They've also worked at the coalface for years and will be wonderful additions to the new council."
Minister Cullen sounded very pleased with the appointments. He said he took his time "to get the balance right. And they have been very well received I think, especially the chair. I didn't want to do it in bits and pieces, and the national economic crisis got in the way as well. Every sector is bearing some pain,but the arts weren't singled out."
• The Anna Livia Dublin International Opera Festival, the brainchild of the late mezzo soprano Bernadette Greevy, has issued a terse statement announcing the company is being wound up, writes Michael Dervan. "Owing to the down-turn in the Irish economy," said chairman Peter McCormick, "we, the Anna Livia Dublin International Opera Festival, have been informed that we will not be funded for 2009."
The festival was held in 2000-2002, 2007 and 2008 (with a stopgap "fringe festival" in 2006), and, although it never succeeded in securing Arts Council funding, it was initially funded by the Department of Education and Science, and later by the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism under the heading of cultural tourism and finally under arts.
The unusual means through which the festival accessed the public purse caused raised eyebrows and not a little envy in the world of opera, as well as the wider arts community. The initial grant of £300,000 (€380,921) was awarded the year before the first festival took place, and at the time, in 1999, that amounted to a greater pre-performance subsidy than either Opera Ireland or Wexford Festival Opera received from the Arts Council.
Anna Livia's declared ambition of fielding casts that were "predominantly Irish" was never realised, although it did offer major roles to younger Irish singers, the most memorable performances coming from Giselle Allen as Salomé in Massenet's Hérodiade, Alison Roddy as Magda in Puccini's La rondine, and Sharon Carty as Maddalena in Verdi's Rigoletto.
In better times, Greevy's unfailing commitment to one of her pet projects, and her fearlessness in pursuing its interests at the highest level of government, might have managed to keep the festival afloat. In the current climate her resilience would have been tested to the full. The Anna Livia Dublin International Opera Festival will now exit the stage as possibly the first major artistic enterprise to have been fatally compromised by the current recession.
• But some good news from Cork, where the Patrick Murray Bursary will continue next year, writes Mary Leland. The €14,000 award, in honour of the late theatre designer, was presented to its inaugural recipient, Deirdre Dwyer of Waterford, by Tony award-winning designer Bob Crowley at the Everyman Palace Theatre. Dwyer, who spoke of the bursary as "a gift from Pat Murray", is a graduate of UCC Theatre Studies and is doing a theatre design post-grad at Cardiff's Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Crowley spoke of design as a discipline that demands ambition, fortitude and single-mindedness.
Cork-born Crowley won five of his 10 nominations for Tony awards in the US, and remembers his days painting sets for Pat Murray while still a pupil at Coláiste Chríost Rí on Capwell Road, Cork. "But he would hate me to be pious about him, so I won't be," said Crowley, who admitted that any time he had pondered a career in theatre design,
Murray reminded him that he was good at graphics.
Crowley, whose early work with Everyman was recalled by director Pat Talbot, said that the first time he had ever heard of Pat Murray was a childhood visit to a Christmas crib, made entirely of tinfoil, in the window of the
RD Cleaners on the Grand Parade. "It was the talk of the town", he said, remembering "a professional in a city where there weren't any others". The next Patrick Murray bursary will be advertised in January.