COME in your thousands, bainigi taitneamh as, the stage will never die!" Tucked into velvet seats in the grand old Gaiety Theatre, there can't have been many whose hearts didn't swell with pieties about the magic of live performance and its tradition in our capital city, after seanachai Eamon Kelly's opening speech for this year's Dublin Theatre Festival. In his buttery Kerry tones, he gave a beautiful evocation of the visit of mummers to a remote homestead for the feast of St Brigid, holding aloft hollowed out, turnips lit with candles, which portrayed, not a gentle saint, but some fierce Druidess from pagan times".
His story showed how drama has always been central to rural as well as urban Irish life, and this was its propagandist aim. It was brave to stand up in front of the high powered audience for the gala performance of Slava Polunin's Snowshow, and state that although ordinary people were always the raw material for theatre in Ireland, "I've never seen an ordinary person at the theatre". Was this the fault of the education system'? Was it too expensive (here he made the plea, "Bring back the gods")? Or did ordinary people just feel out of place among people who consider themselves to be "from another layer of society", he asked.
The art of the Russian clown, Slava Polunin, comes from a similar folk well spring to that described by Kelly, and thankfully the Gaiety audience proved able to laugh and roar like Kelly's "ordinary people". Readers will be relieved to know, however, that our Taoiseach, John Bruton, did not join the fray in the front row of the dress circle, which saw Minister Michael D. Higgins and the Dublin Theatre Festival Director, Tony O Dalaigh and Arts Council Director, Patricia Quinn flailing at the huge coloured balls the Russian clowns released into the audience. After all that exercise, the invitation to the Festival Club at the Coach House, Dublin Castle proved attractive, and Angela de Castro, Slava Polunin's fellow clown, made it there before most of the punters. Although she is from Brazil, she finds she can work very easily with Polunin. "Our clowns inhabit the same universe. They are very small in this big space, very stupid." It's the human condition, folks.
There wasn't so much as a free cocktail sausage on offer and there hasn't been a smidgen of hospitality from the Festival this far. Perhaps the lack of a named sponsor is being felt. This writer would have murdered a canape by this point, having spent tea time tantalisingly across the way from Burdock's chipper on Werburgh Street, in the Garden of Delight cafe and bookshop, where the Project is hosting a series of talks as part of its season of experimental theatre and performance.
Catherine Ugwu, Deputy Director of Live Arts at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London gave a spirited talk on internationalism in contemporary culture, stressing the importance of live performance in a world where dialogue is increasingly rare, and is only tried in politics when every other avenue has failed". It was the role of artists, she said, to teach us ways of communicating without violence. She explained how the Institute of Contemporary Arts had lost its traditional audience about five years ago when it distanced itself from its inheritance of performance art and prioritised content, not aesthetics.
Tomorrow's talk will be given at 5 p.m. by Tim Etchells, director with Sheffield's Forced Entertainment theatre and performance group, and is entitled "Words For A New Theatre". Be prepared, however despite the Garden of Delight's non-hierarchical, ethnically diverse and formally experimental fare, tradition in the form of great golden fish and chips looming through the picture windows may prove a terrible vortex.
