FROM one room comes the hum of a sewing machine. From another, the rhythm of drums. An actress is going through her paces in a third while in a fourth a drill is droning.

The location is a small, semi derelict school in Carndonagh on the Inishowen peninsula in Co Donegal on a blustery Sunday afternoon.

The intense activity in rooms off the building's draughty corridor is in preparation for a carnival in the town next Sunday, based on the Celtic legend of Bricriu's Feast. Under the guidance of four art professionals, local youths are making costumes, masks and props and working on the music and choreography for the street performance in which Bricriu turns the three chieftains of Ulster upon each other.

More than 130 school children and adults will be transformed into warriors, ugly giants, druidic beasts and spectres for the event, which is the flagship of the cross Border arts organisation, Beyond Borders.

For the past three years, the group has brought a team of art facilitators to Carndonagh, about 20 miles from Derry city, for the month long arts workshops which culminate in the extravagant street pageant.

The project's eight board members will have extra cause to celebrate at this year's event as they have just been awarded £159,300 from the EU's Special Support Programme for Peace and Reconciliation. This is in addition to £24,000 in grants from the arts councils, North and South.

The EU funding is for the development of cross border, cross community and cross discipline arts initiatives over the next two years.

The programme will include three drama projects involving womens, youth and special needs groups in Derry and Donegal, a storytelling project for the elderly, with members of the Chest Heart and Stroke Association in Derry and Carndonagh General Hospital; an environmental art project involving women's groups in both areas and a conference, in cross Border and cross community art education processes.

This, programme, says the group's co ordinator, Sinead McSheffrey, is a natural progression of Beyond Borders' work to date in striving for equity of arts provision in Inishowen and Derry.

It has also allowed the group to appoint a part time co ordinator and a FAS worker in Carndonagh. In Derry city, it will soon appoint a full time administrator/book keeper in addition to McSheffrey's full time post.

Beyond Borders was set up in 1993 by a group of young workers in arts organisations in different disciplines in Derry city and Carndonagh who wanted to formalise the strong links between their two areas.

THEY were determined to remain in the north west rather than drifting off to more established cultural centres such as Galway, Belfast or Dublin. The group received £120,000 in funding from the EU's Kaleidoscope Fund and both arts councils over its first three years.

Beyond Borders, says McSheffrey, was chosen as a title to reflect the group's desire to work beyond geographical, social, cultural and political borders, as well as crossing artistic boundaries and working beyond local resources.

"There was the feeling that we needn't be hung up by the idea of the geographical border," says Hugh Mulholland, the project's visual arts programmer and director of Derry's Context Gallery.

"We were about bringing together people for whom, in their working and cultural lives, it was not a significant boundary. But the Border still is an issue and it is one of the things that influenced our thinking and the thinking of artists who took part in the programme in the first few years. They were looking at Beyond Borders as a source or a starting point for their work."

Beyond Borders' work so far has largely focused on organising professional training workshops for artists, teachers, carers, community leaders, young people and the unemployed.

In addition to enhancing the cultural skills of local people, this work, says McSheffrey, led to the formation of around 12 local community arts groups, including the Yarn Spinners storytellers, Le Choile community theatre group in Inishowen and the Minky Hill theatre company in Derry.

In visual arts, Beyond Borders has organised public art projects, arts conferences and an annual art exhibition by young contemporary artists called Beyond Borders Plus.

The organisation's aim has always been to use arts activities as a tool for community development, says McSheffrey, whose expertise is in theatre.

But is the group not concerned that the new EU funding, with its emphasis on cross community relations, will lead to the dilution of the art element of its work in favour of social work?

"No," insists Mulholland, "I don't think we'd achieve anything by doing that. We are not social workers. We use the arts as a way to raise issues or questions, and it's self exploratory. It's the groups and the communities that define how the facilitators work and they are not social workers either. . . the only thing that's going to happen is that more people, more community groups are actually going to come into contact with a professional level of skills."

The community relations side of the project will, adds McSheffrey, evolve naturally from the arts activities rather than being "forced".

She says the aim of the forthcoming phase of Beyond Borders' work is to build on the networks, already established with community groups and organisations, target communities on both sides of the Border for productive cultural programmes and, ultimately, to facilitate joint projects between the two communities.

This joint projects element will follow extensive consultation and "backyard" work with the individual groups in their own areas, says McSheffrey.

"People need to build up skills and also their confidence before they start showing work to each other and also it gives them a chance to say, `look this is us', and then the other group can say, `look this is us'. Let's see what common ground we have, let's see how we can develop this."

THE cultural cross fertilisation that the programme will bring will have significance not just for Protestants and Catholics, but also for urban and rural dwellers and Northerners and Southerners, she adds.

The disturbances of last summer's marching season, which have strained community relations in Derry, have, says Mulholland, added additional impetus to the work of Beyond Borders.

"The summer events underline the fact that there are communities that you actually need to go out to and identify, and those are not the Cole who would automatically take up the offer themselves. We need to go directly to those groups and then try to work within that kind of constituency."