To celebrate the City Arts Centre/ Grapevine's 25 years in business next Wednesday night, former Arts Council chairman Ciaran Benson will launch a book of photographs from the early days. All the old faces that flowed through the spaced-out crucible of the early Grapevine are there, youthfully clowning on the street, or pursuing right-on causes like nuclear disarmament: Franz, the deaf clown (back for a performance at the City Arts Centre over Christmas),the holistic haircutting and performing of Raymond Keane (now with Barabbas) and Charlie O'Neill (now with the PCC, specialising in political/humanitarian advocacy design work); dance-teacher/choreographer Kalichi and his Liberation Dance Workshop (still teaching Tai Chi in Dublin); and even director Sandy Fitzgerald's vegetarian dog, Pip. Others are even better known: Olwen Fouere, Susie Kennedy and the late, great Thom McGinty, perhaps more famous as the Diceman.
The only person who has remained with the centre since the very beginning is Sandy Fitzgerald. He still presides as executive director in a monastically neat office with his Apple Mac, Rollodex, telephone, and a couple of post-its impeccably gummed to the desk. Behind him is an astonishing view of the traffic spilling over the bridge past the Customs House across the river. You can feel the vibrations in the floor.
Grapevine moved into the new building and adopted the more odourless title of City Arts Centre in the mid-1980s, when they bought the building for about £260,000 with the help of the Arts Council, some investment in the basement studios from U2 (new recording equipment is finally coming in next month) and "sponsorship in kind" from the Allied Irish Bank - as Sandy says, "basically giving us the loan, but not that they waived any interest."
The centre ran into real trouble with repayments for many years, seriously restricting both development of the building and their own in-house programmes. However the last Arts Council finally dug them out by repaying the debt over three years.
Over the 1990s, from the point of view of the centre's public profile, the work of Tommy Weir in the gallery, and Declan Gorman in the theatre, put the place on the map - despite Gorman's problems with the architecture, not least the six cast-iron pillars in the middle of the space (they were finally removed earlier this year). But both the gallery and theatre have now moved away from "platforming" new professional work. Sandy: "We've developed our policy to challenge the conventional system, in which artists have very definite perspectives on their own work, and behave in certain ways, which are often far removed from issues within their own community. In fact, a lot of it is about getting away from that environment. We're trying to find alternatives, ways of addressing issues of pluralist culture and different forms of cultural and artistic expression."
Although the gallery was quiet this year, the theatre now pulls large audiences, thanks to the centre's database of youth, community, disability and other organisations. Among the shows were the winning script from the Very Special Arts playwriting programme, Wheels in Motion (now on tour); Elizabeth Pugh's one-woman play I'm Not Finished Yet for Women's Day; The Spell of the MegaMall from Theatre Omnibus in conjunction with disabled associations in Clare; the UK group, Shebang with their four-hour interactive show for kids with learning disabilities. And importantly, a visit by Augusto Boal, an influential international figurehead of community drama from Brazil.
Other internal developments include the drastic reduction of the over-reliance on FAS schemes, and all core positions are now staffed. And now that CAFE (Creative Arts for Everyone) has moved out, all activities are in-house, but for Very Special Arts, a national affiliate of the American organisation for disability.
Certainly with the debt lifted from it, the Centre can look forward to an open future - and indeed since it arrived in Moss Street, the future has risen up all around it: the green-lit BladeRunner-scape of the Financial Services Centre, or the glittering Ulster Bank HQ across the road, with its long sweeping wheelchair access ramp, which blots out most of the daylight from the gallery.
"We've only been clear of the deficit from last year, and we've turned our attention back to our structure and remit. We now have a team structure of six people: General Management, Music, Education - which covers both formal training courses like Music MAP, to less formal local projects with the City Quay primary school, like the local kids' Samba band, the Whizz Kids. Then there's Catering, and Communication. Then Public Programming, which comes about from consultation with the whole team . . .
"But there's no single person programming the gallery, or the theatre. That was a conscious decision, because we felt there was this tyranny of space, whereas now we're programming a centre, breaking it down into mini-festivals to map out the year: like say, around International Women's Day, the South Docks Festival, the Theatre Festival fringe, the kid's season at Christmas, the DIY music festival, and next year we're introducing World Stories, integrating other cultures coming into the city, and coalescing that into some kind of event."
Now that the building is valued at many times what they paid for it, it's a serious piece of collateral owned by the Grapevine company, a non-profit company limited by guarantee. "We find ourselves in the middle of the Docks Development on a prime site for, say, a corporate headquarters, but we're not going to be passively sitting here while things around us change dramatically. We've put in proposals to the different consortia, to link in with resources such as White's community centre here, and the Church and parochial house, and the School. The ideas are centred around seeing culture as a cradle-to-grave sort of experience, a resource with a community ethos rather a commercial ethos - but I think a lot of it has dropped out of sight.
"But I'm more excited by the very positive response from Trinity, their community college in Pearse Street in the old IDA centre. They're very interested in an arts provision. We didn't expect such enthusiasm from the Provost, and the professor in charge of the Community College. We've had a very interesting meeting of minds, and we've set up a working group to commission a study, and if all looks well, that'll be our next big phase of development, although of course we'll have to sell it to government and get financial backing.
"Education is always very much at the heart of what we do, but once you say `education', people think of chalk and blackboards and desks, we really need another term for it like `cultural development', because culture is really about having a future, and if kids are at the core of it, then the whole perspective changes."
The whole issue of community arts has certainly been a vexed area, not least within the professional arts community, with more cynical commentators dismissing it as "all balloons and face-painting". Sandy scarcely bridles: "I'd like to see that cultural debate take place on many levels, because it's in abeyance at the moment. Community arts has largely been accepted as a category, but it's not well understood. It will come back to the surface again, when the wheel turns and funding gets tighter - which it will do."
So how would he himself define community arts, in terms of what the Centre is doing? He takes a long pause. "Well, this year, we've seen an interesting mix in terms of where artistic vision and the community ideal meet, rather than where they separate. I can see artists engaging with the way we work, and that's not to fall into therapy or social work - and it's a thin line at times. But it's about cultural development, both personal and communal; about finding out what symbols and actions and ideas are important to people collectively . . .
"There was nothing really in Ireland when we started, but there is a huge community arts movement out there now, but it's very disparate, and often run on short-term EU schemes. Some of it is called community art because it's local, although it may have no overall ethos . . .
"A lot of our thinking in the 1970s would have come from England, where there was a very strong movement at that time, with a very vocal philosophical line driving it, built around leftwing thinking and Marxism. A lot of it was married to ethnic or urban projects: the women's and gay movements, the black movement, and not least, Ken Livingstone and the GLC.
"In Ireland, things started happening with the North Inner City Centre Community Action Programme and Mick Rafferty, the people who really brought Tony Gregory to power. A lot of that grew out of the housing movement and the civil rights marches up North, and that became a very strong community action force, working within one of the most difficult communities in the country. They began to carve out a path for themselves, and they embraced community arts from very early on.
Other touchstones he mentions were the inner city Looking On festival, and Peter Sheridan's work with the Inner City Workshop, devised and performed by local people - "that was the first really strong example of community arts in Dublin - the fusion of artistic talent and people that want to tell their story . . .
At the ripe old age of 47, he muses: "One thing everyone will say about the Grapevine is that they went through some kind of learning experience - also from my point of view, having come from Cabra and leaving school at 15, with a very poor Inter Cert. My thinking has very much gone from that outward-looking perspective, of battling with forces out there waged against you, of confronting them on the street and marching, and if it came to throwing the stones, you threw the stones. Now I feel the real revolution is a personal one, that things don't change because you oppose them, that you have to change, because all those forces are within you, all that baggage and pissed-offness and anger, and so it's a very human-centred thing we do now. I think a lot of humanity has left what people are doing, and you see it in the kids, particularly with this Celtic tiger idea, and it's a very pessimistic experience . . .
"What I often say about community arts, is that fine art - as it has been understood over the last 500 years, since the Renaissance I suppose - is an oppressive force, with regard to culture in general. Community arts in the 1970s was a reaction to that idea of cultural hierarchy, it was trying to find new models to break out of that mould, to be a liberating force. And even now, it's still a very young area. I think it's going to take another 50 years to really define itself - which I find really exciting .. ."
