Kilkenny is planning to refresh the parts other festivals just don't reach. "One of the biggest challenges is to keep it interesting and exciting," said John Purcell, chairman of the Kilkenny Arts Festival, at a party in Dublin this week to announce the finalised programme.
There will be an eclectic mix for this, its 30th year: traditional, jazz and avant-garde music, a children's programme and a world première of a stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde's letter, De Profundis, which he wrote over a three-month period in Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas. There's also a promise to cross art forms and "break new ground".
"Maintaining that freshness is the challenge," he said. "The ability to generate controversy and discussion and debate has continued and that's a healthy sign."
Claudia Woolgar, the new director of the Kilkenny Arts Festival, said she wanted to encourage people to see things that they wouldn't normally see by getting them hooked through what they know and then leading them to the unfamiliar.
Among those who came to meet the Kilkenny crew this week were Philip Judge, who will play Oscar Wilde in De Profundis, adapted by Joe O'Bryne, painter Bernadette Kiely and her daughter, Amelia Caulfield (10), publicist Alma Feeley and Annette Nugent of Temple Bar Properties.
Teenagh Cunningham, the festival administrator, also put together the children's programme. It has its own day-by-day event guide, and she hopes to attract up to 3,000 young people (not including those who'll attend the opening Tower of Light ceremony in Kilkenny Castle Park) to a series of workshops, film screenings, story-telling performances and theatrical and art events. The story-telling, a new feature of the festival, will take place in the county's libraries with Liz Weir, native American Dovie Thomason and UNICEF Canada's Storyteller-in- Residence Dan Yashinsky featured in the line-up.
The Kilkenny Arts Festival runs from Friday August 8th to Sunday 17th. For more information, tel 056-7752175 or see www.kilkennyarts.ie