Kathy McArdle pauses for breath. "Go on, ask me something else," she urges. The 35-year-old artistic director of Project Arts Centre is eager for the challenge of programming and managing it in its new home, which opens on June 12th - on the site first occupied by Project on Dublin's East Essex Street 34 years ago.
The reinvention of one of the oldest cultural facilities in Temple Bar at a cost of £3.5 million represents the final stage of Temple Bar Properties' development of the area. With two flexible performance spaces, fully equipped exhibition galleries and foyer, bar and office areas, artists and performers will have facilities that the founders of Project could never have envisaged.
The centre reopens in a cultural and social climate that has altered beyond recognition from those early days. Struggles with the physical conditions and the sense of survival in adversity are no longer at issue; inevitably, there are fears that the spirit of radical questioning will also be diminished.
McArdle, who succeeded Fiach Mac Conghail as artistic director seven months ago, is conscious of Project's iconoclastic past and its emphasis on the centrality of the artist, in all disciplines. Her own involvement with Project began through Rough Magic theatre company, for whom she worked as an assistant stage manager in the 1980s. "Nothing was impossible in Project," she says, recalling moving bucketloads of mud and sand onto the stage and building a treehouse. "Project has always created work that is contemporary in its exploration, allowing artists to excavate and probe. Artists are the true contemporaries, concerned to reveal the patterns and forces at work in the world. They tell us things before we are ready to hear them. They're more finely tuned than the rest of us."
She sees her role as primarily curatorial. "I want to create space for the idea of what's contemporary, of new content. Artists are going to have to create new forms to express it. The relentless search for new relationships between form and content can be hard for us to take. It may potentially be quite shocking.
"I don't know if I'm going to be able to do it or not," she says, laughing. "The building is pure potential, but until things begin to activate, you don't know how it will work."
For McArdle, the appointment to Project draws together a number of different strands of her previous work. Her commitment to making the arts accessible across social barriers developed through years of theatre work with youth, community and children's groups, including Wet Paint. This culminated in her appointment three years ago as Outreach/Education Director at the National Theatre, with the aim of opening the Abbey up to different audiences. She is keen to bring this awareness to Project.
"I've no desire to compromise the artist, but I want to remind everyone that this is an arts centre. I'd like us to focus on the person who comes in to experience the work - the member of the public, and to make sure that the transaction between the person and the art work is powerful and meaningful.
"Contemporary art, in every form, is in danger of becoming only accessible to a small group of people, the middle class, and this is not healthy. I want to find new audiences for Project, from 13-year-olds to 65 year-olds, as well as reviving its old, very discerning, audience."
She aims to make performances affordable to all, with concession rates of £5 for students and unemployed. She's also in dialogue with Dublin Corporation about involving community groups and youth projects in outreach work. "Temple Bar is not the world," she says, laughing.
"Working with Wet Paint was an eye-opener for me. I encountered levels of disaffection among young people in Dublin that I hadn't envisaged. I also learned that drama was an empowering process for young people. I was slowly growing into an awareness that the kind of upbringing I had just wasn't available to everybody."
As a child in Castleblaney, Co Monaghan, McArdle was immersed in drama, both at home, with her eight younger siblings, and at school, where her father, Tom McArdle, was her teacher. He and his twin brother, John, were the driving forces behind the Ballintra Players, whose amateur drama productions are still the stuff of folklore in the area. Both McArdle's parents were teachers and when her father decided to plunge into television production in RTE in the early 1970s, he commuted to Dublin during the week, while her mother continued teaching at the local primary school. "My mother was very liberal, very progressive, very strong," McArdle says proudly.
Her route into theatre originally was via stage management, on the advice of Frank McGuinness, who lectured her in Maynooth, where she studied English and Mathematical Physics. McGuinness became her unofficial mentor, suggesting that she might become a theatre director. He advised her to apply for the Lennox Robinson Scholarship at the Abbey Theatre in 1986 to pursue an informal training in theatre. "That was such good advice," she says. "It was really valuable to learn about every aspect of staging before considering becoming a director. I now have respect for everyone who makes the work."
After stints with Team and Rough Magic, McArdle returned to university to do an M.A. in Anglo-Irish literature at UCD, where, under the late Augustine Martin's supervision, she researched Patrick Kavanagh's archive and edited an unpublished novel by him which she called The Gap between the Hills. An academic career beckoned, briefly. While it's clear that McArdle had the talent to do anything she wanted, she soon realised that university life was not for her.
"I did some lecturing but found that one-directional communication doesn't satisfy me. It would have been a lonely, cloistered existence: books and ideas are not enough for me. I need to engage with people and the world around me."
She began to devise and direct, with Team, Rough Magic, Amharclann de hIde, among other companies, gaining experience and confidence. "When I started directing with Drumlin Youth Theatre, I didn't know the basics about presenting actors on stage, but I had lots of ideas. Once you have the energy and the life in theatre, you can organise it quickly enough."
Energy and life ooze from McArdle. She is a passionate, spirited communicator, with huge dark eyes and a hearty laugh. Recalling the moment she knew that she wanted to work in the theatre, the night she saw Tom Murphy's The Gigli Concert in 1983, her eyes fill and her voice chokes: "I will never forget it as long as I live. It was extraordinary to see the magic of transformation. I had never experienced theatre that was so simple. I wanted to be part of that collaboration."
Dialogue is crucial to McArdle. To accompany Project's visual art, performance and contemporary music programmes she is introducing Project Press, a publishing imprint for critical and polemical writing, essays and exhibition catalogues. Its first publication will be Paul Johnson's Choreographer's Notebook, to accompany his three-year work-in-progress, Without Hope Or Fear, which will open Project's new auditorium, the Space Upstairs in July. There will also be series of discussions, workshops and open rehearsals.
"We need more debate about what art is," McArdle says, "about its role as a critical, interrogative force. I rail against the increasing commodification of culture. The more closely associated corporate bodies become with art, the emphasis is on product: an object or a play, which is packaged. This nullifies the challenge of art - the critique it contains is diminished."
"To counteract this, I want to devise programming which allows space for artists to intervene. It will be a skeletal programme which will have dynamic tensions within it."
Can art continue to be as challenging as she would like it to be in the context of the comfortable, state-of-the art facilities of the new Project? In response, McArdle refers approvingly to comments by one of Project's founders, Colm O Briain, in Temple Bar: The Power of an Idea, about the challenge posed by the quarter's new cultural facilities: "He talked about the end of the `leaking building ordinance' and the need for the arts sector to come of age. Now that the area no longer epitomises an alternative, bohemian lifestyle, the art itself needs to have a much sharper focus. The site of the struggle is in the making of the work, which will need a new rigour.
"Of course, artists are always creating splinters and rejecting venues, and Project will be trying to bring them in - there's a tension there. And there's a tension in me about that also: I'm attracted to the underground, the subversive. You can't institutionalise energy. Maybe we'll demolish Project in five years' time. If it's a dead duck it would be right to demolish it. When things are dead, you let them die. Standing still is death to creativity."
The Project Arts Centre reopens on June 12th with an exhibition of work by international artists called Somewhere Near Vada, which acknowledges the spirit of work by Project artists since 1966. These include Marcel Broodthaers, Adam Chokzko, James Coleman, Tacita Dean, Anneke A. de Boer, Fischli & Weiss, Gary Hill, Bas Jan Ader and Zoe Walker
