ARTSCAPE/Deirdre Falvey: The fallout from the Arts Council budget, announced just days before Christmas, continues, as the cuts - and increases - cause anguish and puzzlement in the arts community. One of the things to watch out for over the coming year is what will happen to the many venues around the country - as well as more established venues.
The country is coming down with spanking new theatres and arts centres built and opened over the boom years, many of which have had their budgets cut. This, allied with the cuts to non-venue based production companies, will mean venues may have difficulty finding product - that awful term - to put on this year. Will some art spaces be empty?
There are two ways of looking at the figures - and neither is made easy by the AC's website (www.artscouncil.ie), which is hard to find your way around, and near impossible to allow comparison with last year's funding. Looking at last year's grant and comparing it to this year, there's the percentage increase or decrease - and one arts organisation spent a deal of time compiling a table of comparisons (doing the rounds privately all week) between last year's and this year's funding to 144 theatre-related organisations. It makes stark reading.
Theatre companies in general lost out in a big way - in fact the Gate's cut, which has received much attention, is less than the cuts in many other theatre companies on smaller budgets - with dance and opera taking a particularly big hit. There are always exceptions - Rex Levitates got multi-annual for the first time, and Daghda got a 16 per cent increase to €480,000. Venues and festivals were cut though not quite as severely, and artists' resource organisations didn't do so badly.
The other way of looking at the cuts, and which this unofficial table doesn't take into account, is that with multi-annual funding, the comparable figure is not last year's grant, but what the company had been promised under the multi-annual commitment. A standstill grant on mult-annual funding can therefore be a significant cut.
A number of companies, including Artslab, Bare Bodkin, Bare Cheek, Brown Penny, Iomha Ildanach, Puca Puppets and Skehana, have lost AC funding altogether. On the other hand, Pan Pan theatre company got a 114 per cent increase to €150,000, Yew increased its grant by 40 per cent to €70,000, Guna Nua went up from €12,700 to €39,000, Focus theatre got a 21 per cent increase to €85,000, Read Company a 34 per cent increase to €17,000, Operating Theatre got a first-time grant of €20,000 and the newly established Theatre Forum got a first time grant of €150,000. Theatreworks' grant went up 40 per cent to €70,000 while Theatre Shop's grant went up by 81 per cent to €150,000.
No one is quibbling with these very welcome increases or start-up grants - but those who lost out are left wondering what they did wrong - and whatever the AC message is to those companies, it isn't communicating it effectively.
Call a spade a spade
With the 50th anniversary of Waiting for Godot upon us this week, thoughts invariably turn to the idea of the unstageable: this play, which many felt defied the rules of drama when it was first performed, is now being presented as a classic on the stage of one of Ireland's most established theatres, writes Karen Fricker. Clearly, stageworthiness is a relative, and evolving, concept. So who, these days, is pushing the boundaries of what can be shown on stage? Enter the Pan Pan International Theatre Symposium, with its headline production, I Bought a Spade in Ikea to Dig My Own Grave by the Madrid-based La Carniceria Teatro, which played at Project's Space Upstairs last Monday.
The production comments on contemporary consumer society by, among other things, showing its four-person cast in ever-more-extreme acts of consuming, regurgitating, and destroying food - eating, spitting out, and re-eating a Dunnes Stores heat-and-serve lasagna; blowing up a raw chicken; and, in a final action which Irish Times theatre critic Fintan O'Toole described as "stunningly disgusting", sitting on raw food including pizzas and sausages, and then forcing the food up their anuses.
Similar material has caused controversy in Ireland over the past year. During the International Dance Festival Ireland last May, the signature production of French choreographer Jérôme Bel featured two naked performers urinating on the Project stage. The show prompted several walkouts and a bit of commotion the next day on RTÉ's Liveline programme, with one particularly incensed punter complaining in writing to the venue and the Arts Council about what he perceived as a health threat to audiences posed by the urination. At the Kilkenny Arts Festival last August, the video show by American artist Paul McCarthy was temporarily shut down by gardaí because it didn't have a film certificate; the show featured images of people smearing food products on their bodies, masturbation, and excretion.
Despite this precedent, Pan Pan decided not to flag the extreme content of Spade in its brochure or through signage in the venue because, according to artistic director Gavin Quinn, they were afraid of creating any expectation of what the show might be like. Yet no one walked out of the packed audience for the Dublin performance of Spade and according to Quinn, Pan Pan only had one audience complaint, from a man who had been hit by a piece of exploding chicken (he was placated by the company's offer to pick up his dry cleaning bill). Dubliners therefore "have one up on" Madrid audiences, says Quinn; when he first saw Spade in La Carneceria's home city, he noted some 20 walkouts in a 200-seat theatre.
So why the low-key Dublin reaction to Spade? It could be because the show was programmed for one night only, so there was no time for a furore to build. It could be because it was playing to people who are used to seeing cutting-edge work: the Pan Pan Symposium is clearly marketed as an event for the adventurous theatregoer. And, just perhaps, it might be because audiences took the extreme moments in the context of the production as a whole: as purposely overwhelming examples of the kind of mindless consumerist behaviour that is the subject of La Carniceria's overall critique.
Wood works
The Jeanie Johnson may have seen some rough seas in her voyage to completion but the expected docking of the ship with a beleagured history in Dun Laoghaire today (until Tuesday) represents a homecoming of sorts for the sculptor and woodworker who created her figurehead. Dublin-born Andrew St Leger sculpted the bow carving in larch from November 1999 in his workshop. The figurehead is of Eiriu, the goddess of the mythical Tuatha de Danann (from which the name Ireland/Erin descended) and St Leger started with 24 pieces of larch 6ft x5ft x5ft, finishing the fine details on site beside the shipyard in Blennerville, and it was painted by Wicklow artist Susie Wheeler.
Unfringed in the mid-west
Tonight Lola Blau starring Camille O'Sullivan will be premièred by Co-Opera Theatre Company in Limerick later this month as part of the city's UnFringed 2003 festival at the Belltable Arts Centre from January 28th to February 8th. Both the touring opera company and the venue did badly in the Arts Council budget cuts, but the show is pressing on regardless with the directorial collaboration between Co-Opera's Michael Hunt and Mary Ann Kraus in a new production of the George Kreisler show following the life of a cabaret performer with O'Sullivan as the Dietrich-styled character.
The sixth UnFringed festival also features a show of both spoken word and classic tracks by songwiter/poet Tom Robinson, and The Performance Corporation's production of Voltaire's Candide, which won best production at the ESB Dublin Fringe Festival last autumn, and is nominated today (see pages 6-7) in the Irish Times/ESB Theatre Awards for best production, best director, best adaptation and best actor. Also on the programme is Michael Harding's Talking Through His Hat, comic David O'Doherty's Small Things and a series of workshops and seminars by UnFringed performers. Information from the Belltable 061 319866.