Maybe it was all the references to Homer's Odyssey in Macnas's show, The Lost Days of Ollie Deasy, and in their parade on Sunday night. Whatever the reason, the gods have been smiling on the Galway Arts Festival this year. The great artistic director in the sky has sent hours of sunshine and levels of heat that would be remarked upon even on a Mediterranean coast. The three virtuoso stilt-walkers from the Australian street theatre company, Stalker, were taken by surprise: they had to be given a carpet to protect their limbs from being scorched by the burning concrete at the Spanish Parade, as they rolled and backflipped in the midday sun.
Not that audiences have been abandoning the shows for the beach; far from it. So far, attendance levels are up on last year and all the events are selling out. An extra performance of the Irish Repertory of Chicago's Long Day's Journey Into Night has been scheduled for Saturday to meet the demand. When the only thing that people can be heard complaining about is the heat in the venues, the festival's organisers need not have any anxiety. For Rose Parkinson, the new artistic director, the overwhelmingly enthusiastic audience response so far is a relief and an endorsement. Risks taken have paid off: the very expensive show (Sideman) from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company has had full houses - and deservedly so.
With a budget of £770,000, the Republic's biggest general arts festival has to meet very high expectations, and to justify its core Arts Council grant of £175,000.
The change in emphasis in this year's programme, with a move towards text-based rather than physical theatre, seems to have been very successful. "Judging by the bookings, audiences were ready for that," Parkinson says. "We've almost broken even financially," says festival manager, Fergal McGrath, "and there's another week to go. There's a feeling of regeneration about this festival."
Like last year, the Millennium Festivals committee funded the weekend's free outdoor events, which "couldn't have happened otherwise," McGrath says.
It is these performances, which people stumble upon around town, that generate a sense of excitement and involvement. In the shop window of Moons, four Blue Boys, beautifully made pale blue dummies in loose-fitting suits stare impassively. Or do they? If you stare long enough, you succumb to the moving statues syndrome. "He's moving, I swear, I saw him." "He's looking at me, see the dirty grin on his face." A fascinated crowd permanently surrounds the window, waiting for some action. Sometimes they're rewarded. This playfully intriguing installation/performance by Neil Thomas from Australia is both instantly appealing and highly sophisticated.
The window of Charlie Byrne's second-hand bookshop is given over to a celebration of the Beat poets, in acknowledgment of one of the festival's highlights so far, Beat and Beatitudes: Revisiting Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation. Written and directed by jazz vocalist Kurt Elling, with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company performing, this was an inter-disciplinary evocation of the words, dreams and volatile lives of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso. John Mahoney and Tim Hopper brought poems such as Sunflower Sutra, Kral Majales and On Neal's Ashes to life, reminding us that these words only really speak to us when they're performed. The emotional intensity, the scatter-gun use of language, the wild energy of the Beat poets, had a lyrical beauty when experienced in the context of tumbling jazz melodies. What can seem undisciplined, self-indulgent and prolix on paper was integrated into a soundscape that gave the writing a context and a rich texture.
This was a memorable evening at the Town Hall Theatre, only marred by a rather didactic intervention by Elling, in which he debated whether the influence of the Beat poets was a creative catalyst for the new freedoms of the 1960s, or whether their influence was ultimately malign and destructive. This discussion seemed out of place in the middle of the performance and undermined the seamless unity of words and music that preceded it. A final recording of Ginsberg's own voice accompanied by his atmospheric photographs recreated the spell.
Matching images and music is a delicate business; there's a danger of the music swamping the images or too heavily sign-pointing a message or a single interpretation, as many film scores demonstrate. In another of the festival's adventurous, interdisciplinary presentations. Michael Nyman's score, The Commissar Vanishes, accompanied archive photographs from the former Soviet Union. Collected by David King, and assembled by film-maker Chris Kondek these images were projected on a huge double video screen in UCG's Aras na Macleinn on Saturday night. Alluding to the use of photography in Stalinist Russia for propaganda purposes, the sepia images showed faces being airbrushed out of photographs: either by being whitened out, blackened or defaced.
As the photographs were repeated in sequence, we saw a haunting record of the lives of the disappeared, of the forgotten faces of the Communist revolution. While the cumulative visual effect was powerful, the pounding piano chords and menacing strings of the Micheal Nyman band overloaded the experience and were both repetitive and excessively tendentious. The audience would have responded to the profound tragedy conveyed by the images without being bludgeoned into it.
The Blind Boys of Alabama had a message to convey also: "Praise the Lord", was certainly one of their imperatives, the other, a close second, was "buy the new CD". The audience - or congregation - in the Augustinian Church was swinging delightedly to the Blind Boys' soaring gospel choruses, but for some of us, the combination of "Hallelujahs" and hard sell was a little hard to stomach. At the other end of the scale, two modest, superbly gifted traditional harmonica players, John and Pip Murphy, a Wexford duo, seemed abashed at the reception they got for their beautiful lunchtime performance in Roisin Dubh's. The complete unison of their playing, the mellifluous tone they created, which sounded more like fiddle than harmonica and the haunting waltzes and reels they chose had people from their 20s to their 70s riveted to the spot.
The range of age-groups is striking this year: at Cookin', a romp in a kitchen presented by PMC Production Company from Korea, children roared with laughter at the drumming, dancing and juggling antics of the tireless cast. Inside the Archipelago tent, a "luminarium" brought by the UK's Architects of Air, babies crawled while their parents lolled in the curved nooks and crannies of the tent, amid tunnels bathed in jewelled colours and decorated with pentagonal chinks of light like medieval stained glass. Some of us (yes, I admit it) went back four times to appreciate the simplicity of the idea - and its imaginative power.
Perhaps Archipelago fills the gap left by the Big Top; without its canvas turrets overlooking the river, something seems missing. But all's well: as if Teatro del Silencio realised that you can't have a Galway Arts Festival without a tent, they have obliged. Their show, Alice Underground opens tomorrow night in their travelling castellated tent, and to make sure there's absolutely nothing left to complain about, they're actually going to create rain inside it.
The Galway Arts Festival runs until Sunday. For information phone 091-566577, e-mail info@gaf.iol.ie or see www.galwayartsfestival.ie
