The Cork Midsummer festival manifesto discussion debated the target of a national theatre of Cork, and throughout the festival itself theatrical innovation flourished, writes MARY LELAND
THE Midsummer Festival voices come to Cork from all over. It was Claudia Woolgar of the Source Arts Centre in Thurles who put a stop to festival director William Galinsky’s gallop at the festival’s manifesto discussion last Thursday. Following through on his policy of making the festival expand in content and importance – even if, this year, it has contracted in duration – Galinsky had gathered a representative discussion group on the theme of a national theatre of Cork. As the speakers included Eileen O’Reilly of National Theatre Scotland and John McGrath of National Theatre Wales, his proposals, coming as the festival itself neared its final performances for 2009, need not be described as far-fetched.
And while the impatience with which they were expressed might be all Galinsky’s own, the ideas themselves grew from conversations with people such as Johnny Hanrahan of Meridian, Tony Sheehan of the Triskel Arts Centre and Tony McLean-Fay of the Granary Theatre. But Woolgar has heard conversations like these before. “Be careful,” she warned, “because this is a public journey, and should be seen as a target rather than an announcement.”
As a target, then, the core proposition is that Cork should aspire to being a centre of theatrical excellence as a natural evolution of what the Midsummer Festival has been promoting over the past five years or so, that as such a centre it should in fact decentralise, that it should continue to develop a collaborative production structure and, as has been the experience in other cities, that the participants should use the city’s relative smallness as an opportunity to take chances, to experiment and to challenge.
It’s true that risk, experiment and challenge have been central to the programming, not least because the Arts Council grant of €187,000 had to do the work of €1.5 million. As Galinsky said, this was a year in which “we’re getting more from our associate artists than ever before, but we’re definitely giving them less cash”. All the same, Pat Kiernan of Corcadorca told the gathering that, however the intention or ambition were to be defined, it was important that it should emerge not as a reaction to the economic circumstances but independent of them. Echoing Kiernan’s insistence on simply getting started, Mike Griffiths of Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre advised: “If you want a national theatre of Cork you have to behave as if it already exists.”
But it doesn’t, and when the issue of the recent cancellation of the new BA degree in theatre studies at Cork School of Music (a constituent college of Cork Institute of Technology) was raised, on the basis that such a course should promise much-needed training in performance, direction, writing, design and light and sound technology, the question was deemed outside the agenda set for the discussion.
There were some tentative comments: Mike Griffiths thought that the closer the theatre industry was to training the better it was for the industry, and Tom Creed remarked that colleagues at Rough Magic would love to work with students, “but we’re never asked”. It was decided, however, that this was not the time, or the occasion, to discuss the removal of the CIT course, a response that seemed to dilute the conviction with which the idea of Cork as a centre of theatrical excellence was being promoted.
THIS WAS ALSO a festival year in which theatrical innovation seemed to flourish. So far, it is true, no home-grown event could match the ingenuity of Slick, from Vox Motus of Scotland, but by giving the chance to see this production the festival fulfilled a crucial developmental function for local practitioners, and by holding group discussions nearly every afternoon the programme also offered the kind of exchanges through which new partnerships are built.
These discussions were not all one way, for even if Corcadorca is still seen as leading the way in creative and site-specific production, others are catching up, especially in imaginative terms. It is as if something free-flowing but connected is going on among companies whose very limitations make them more daring.
This current also charges the collaborative atmosphere and the shared energy moves even wild ideas along so that they are shaped into something presentable.
It's not easy to articulate transfusions of this kind, and Tom Creed (also producer of Mimicwith Ray Scannell) was another who insisted on some moderation. "These ideas of a national theatre of Cork are still quite chaotic in form, and I'm not sure we should be trying to do everything without asking aesthetic, structural and political questions in order to define the intervention we're trying to make," he said.
Yet the interventions are becoming more obvious. Director, author and teacher Philip Zarilli was in Cork to meet Gaitkrash with a view to a production for the 2010 festival. The potential fruitfulness of such an arrangement was made excitingly obvious by the company's work this year. The Cabinet of Curiousitiesmounted raw, calcified or bottled anatomical specimens in tallboy alcoves, with each dead item manipulated by living hands and those in turn posing in slow, questing gestures, arranging a liver on a butcher's hook or else opening on an unfolding crimson rose. The voiceless theme is probably a take on the 18th- and 19th-century pseudo-scientific vogue, but it is a developed theme, worked with precision by Regina Crowley and Bernadette Cronin and scored with equal care by sound artist Mick O'Shea.
INEVITABLY THERE is a scattergun element to the festival, from the street-scene items such as the Storytelling Caravan for children to artist David Sherry's Complaintsinstallation, from the Street Performance Championship to the ever-popular Spiegeltent. There were the thrills of Sol Picó's Catalan dance company and its fight-club choreography, accentuated by the accompanying live rock band.
While Luckat the Boardwalk with Megan Riordan was a welcome visitor, one of the very few mistakes was the relocation of The People's Republic of Gerry Murphyfrom the Everyman Palace bar to the theatre's auditorium. This move imposed a quarry-blasting amplification on director and composer Roger Gregg's production for Crazy Dog Audio Theatre and banished all the subtle intransigence of Murphy's poetry as a result.
Despite the manifesto panel's refusal on Thursday to engage with the issue of formal tuition, mentoring and early development are now significant strands in the festival programme. Out of Order, for example, is another venture for 2010, this time bringing a host of youngsters together in a 12-day workshop directed by Pol Heyvaert of Belgium at the Granary Theatre.
The possibility of making new audiences, as much as new theatre, is part of the festival's brief, a point noted by Tony Sheehan, who found unexpected patrons visiting Triskel for the performance by Marc Copland. Good for Triskel, but at other venues innovative and rewarding events come in small portions. Corcadorca's MedEiacould accommodate only 100 people a night, Hammergrin confined itself to 20 at a time, Cabinet of Curiousitieswas much the same, Red Lola only needed to fill the small Triskel auditorium while both Slickand Midsummerfrom Scotland were comfortable at the intimate Half Moon theatre.
Whatever might evolve from the Cork Midsummer Festival under the direction of William Galinsky, he, and the best of those involved with him, will be attuned to the comments of Sabrina Reeves of the Bluemouth team, which brought the marvellously unifying Dance Marathon to Cork. Explaining the group structure, the administrative as well as the creative philosophy, and the company’s communicative alliance with funding and civic authorities, the consensus in the end was that, whatever they achieved, “it’s just about doing it well”.
