Older creative spirits in the Bealtaine Festival are challenging the assumption that genius manifests itself in early life

PABLO PICASSO WAS 26 when he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the same age as Orson Welles was when he directed Citizen Kane. Artists like these could make a 30-year-old feel like he was past his prime, bolstering the notion that creativity peaks, or at least must make itself known, in youth.

David Galenson of the University of Chicago believes otherwise. His book, Old Masters and Young Geniuses, argues that there is another, often unrecognised, form of creativity that can take a whole lifetime to mature and manifest itself. "We've come to assume that genius manifests itself at an early age," says Galenson, who explains that anyone who believes the kind of wisdom accumulated with experience is at odds with the creative impulse is missing the whole picture. "Cézanne was a great painter in his 60s because he was wise, because he had great judgment about what to do and what not to do."

Galenson also points to sculptor Louise Bourgeois, whose artistic output really only began to hit the radar well after she hit retirement age, and Alfred Hitchcock, who made his most acclaimed films, Psychoand The Birds, when he was already in his 60s.

If the possibility of such late-life artistic output informs Galenson's theory, it is also the driving force behind Bealtaine, the annual arts festival celebrating creativity in older age, which begins on Thursday.

"It's against the story that people have an early peak," explains Dominic Campbell, the festival's artistic director. The first of its kind, Bealtaine has been running for some 13 years now, and this year expects around 50,000 participants in the 1,500 events which are taking place all over the country throughout the month of May.

These include dance shows, writing workshops, art classes, theatre and musical performances, all centred around older people and harnessing their particular creative energies.

IN ITSELF AN innovative concept, Bealtaine has attracted a number of home-grown ambassadors, among them Robert Ballagh, Tomas MacAnna, Jennifer Johnston and Eugene McCabe, who have added their names, so resonant in the world of Irish arts, to this festival celebrating the creative contributions of older people, defined, according to Campbell, in relative terms, sometimes as "anybody who's 10 years older than you are yourself".

Actor Eamon Morrissey has been a Bealtaine ambassador for just a year, but next month sees him taking to the road as a mentor, giving workshops to drama groups in Cork.

"It's a first for me, I haven't done it before, so while we're all getting a bit long in the tooth, for me it'll be like the first day back at school," says Morrissey, who at 64 has been a working actor for nigh on 50 years, but finds age bringing a new depth to his craft. "I really do think I'm better at it since I've got older, and it's not simply because of the experience," he says.

"I think it's genuinely that you have a different attitude great enrichment and friendship with like-minded people, and liberation in a sense," she says.

IT'S ALSO AN opportunity for older people to tell their stories, the richness of their lived lives becoming works of art in themselves. It was this sense of the untold stories of the old that led to this year's Bealtaine contribution by songwriter Sean Millar, Silver Stars, a performance of older gay men's lives in song that takes place at the Project in Dublin.

"When these men were young, their sexuality was literally forbidden by law, so that whole story hasn't really been told," says Millar. "It's the marginalisation of the marginalised. They're marginalised anyway because they're gay and then they're marginalised within the gay community because they're old."

The Project will also be hosting a new work by choreographer Ríonach Ní Néill, a cross-generational dance performance called Palimpsestinvolving her own Ciotóg dance company and Macushla Dance Club, a gathering for older people which Ní Néill hosts weekly in Dance House in Dublin. For this young artist, working with older people has been particularly inspiring. "Our most active members are in their mid-80s, and they give me a run for my money," she says.

Through Bealtaine, the energy she encounters in her Macushla sessions has been given a forum. "Because of the Bealtaine festival, there's a platform for us, a kind of a normality about it, and it was something that made it a concrete aim for people to get involved in," she says.

For Ní Néill, much of Bealtaine's force lies in its unlocking of decades of creative and artistic energies that were denied expression during economically difficult and socially repressive times. "I think possibly because people from older generations did not have outlets, not like we do, especially in the arts, to express themselves, I find that there's this huge pent-up creativity," she says.

"I am pelted with ideas every single day. It's stunning creativity, so in that respect there is a huge well spring that the Bealtaine festival helps people tap into that they didn't have an access to before."

WHETHER THIS PRODUCES a Bourgeois or a Hitchcock, or even a Cézanne, remains to be seen, but for Campbell, there are huge benefits to be gained from making art after a lifetime spent making a living.

"People get involved in the arts for all sorts of different reasons," he says. "We might not all be Seamus Heaney or Patrick Scott, but we can all get involved at a level that works for us. And really that's what Bealtaine is about."

The Bealtaine festival runs from May 1-31,  www.bealtaine.com