Thirteen years ago, when he founded the Earagail Arts Festival, Traolach ╙ Fianβin injected the notion of an arts festival with, as he says, a "big rural ethos". It was his mission to place the arts festival within a rural context. In this definition, landscape is as integral to the festival as the people and performers. Mount Earagail is the majestic symbol of the festival, its pointed crown visible from all over Co Donegal.
The Marugeku Company, composed of Aboriginal and Australian storytellers and dancers, was the highlight of this year's festival. Its performers were drawn by the uniquely rural flavour of the Earagail Arts Festival, as they perform only in country settings. Crying Baby, their production about indigenous people facing European colonisation, struck a chord with our own post-colonial experience. Thus the scene was set for a very international 13th festival.
Steve Cooney and Liam ╙ Maonla∅ opened the show at An Grianβn Theatre in Letterkenny, as supporting act for Altan. The dreadlocked Cooney, having come up through Carolyn country that evening, broke into S∅dh Beag, S∅dh M≤r on his guitar, which he plucked like a harp. ╙ Maonla∅ followed with a sean-n≤s tune sung in deep broad tones with jazz-like accompaniment on a shining Petrof piano.
"Is there such a thing as a roadie?" joked Cooney, grappling for a plectrum to pluck the next song. ╙ Maonla∅ tinkled on the piano, magically the tune was found, and they leapt together into a jig.
Cooney told the audience about a recent gig in Dublin Castle at which they were refused water while the patrons knocked back champagne. The changing facilities were the loos. He said he liked the atmosphere in Letterkenny, though, and he began to sing: "I was told officially you'll get no tea, All I got was a pissing spot in a place they call the loo. Forget original sin and seek within . . . We're flying high above the money belt . . ."
Cooney played the didgeridoo for the next number, while ╙ Maonla∅, barefoot, sang in the style of the White Kokatoo, howling and screeching. Cooney's fascination with Aboriginal culture made his performance a fitting prelude to Crying Baby.
Altan were, as always, in full flight. Singer MairΘad N∅ Mhaonaigh said: "We're proud to be from Donegal, but we're wild nervous. Home is the hardest place to play."
They played three reels to begin with, and a new piece christened Rolling Water by Christy Moore, which is heavy and slow in contrast to the reels. N∅ Mhaonaigh played her fiddle loosely, dancing with it, while Ciarβn Tourish held his in the more rigid traditional pose. She sang 10,000 Miles for her parents. The mandolin and guitar were accompanied by a long wooden recorder, her sweet voice melting with the sound of it.
John Astin, the eccentric father Gomez Addams of The Addams Family, played Edgar Allan Poe in Once Upon A Midnight, which ran for two nights at An Grianβn. The lighting was spectacular. When Astin narrated a fantastical plot to kill his foster father, John Allan, he was lit from the side in chiaroscuro, like a Caravaggio painting. Astin looked suitably mad, dishevelled and nerve-wracked - like an American Peter Bowles.
His movements were detailed and fastidious. He colluded intimately with the audience as he confessed the sins and spoils of his difficult life. Poe came back to rectify something, to tell us why he wrote. The grotesque, macabre visions of his early childhood become the fodder for his writing: he wrote obsessively.
When Astin recited The Raven, he was nervous and neurotic, as Poe must have been to write such a poem. His recital of Eureka, Poe's philosophical treatise, brought all the passion and genius of Poe to the stage.
"As children we remember we have lived before until conventional world of reason awakens us from the truth. God exists as the universe of stars. Ultimately our identity merges into the universal consciousness. Nothing really dies."
As Poe was dying, his figure was lit with an aura, as he saw "the perfect whiteness of the snow . . . All the pain of my life, the struggle, the demons, coalesced into a perfect unity". Poe packs up and, as he leaves, says: "I have given you the truth tonight." Astin brought Poe to life and back to death.
Siyaya Arts from Zimbabwe played two shows in An Grianβn. The first was Umhlola, The Cry, a short play about the shortcomings of the Zimbabwean educational system. It made me wonder what the people of Zimbabwe would think if a theatre group from the Republic went to their country to perform a play about the disastrous state of our education system. Would there be much interest? I don't think so.
So we'll move swiftly on to the dance and music, at which Siyaya are masters.
Dlala Ma-Afrika was the second show, a celebration of music, dance and life in southern Africa. "Welcome to flight Siyaya 2001- don't fasten your seat belts!" said a very handsome male dancer. There were 10 men and three women participants.
Decorated in pieces of fur, the Siyaya men wildly kicked their legs up and made kossaks look like wimps. The women, who are large, were clad in scanty multicoloured costumes. The combination was electric when they did the courting dance.
Before the raindance, a dancer explained, the elder goes up to the mountain to ask for assistance in opening up the heavens. The drums are a communication, for the ancestors, with spirit.
For Africans, though, the human voice is the greatest musical instrument.
The power and volume of the Siyaya voices brought standing ovations from the audience, and the dancers went away beaming. Like the Aboriginals of Australia, they are faced with the extinction of their culture.
This is for different reasons, of course, but the struggle has the same intensity about it, and this dance and theatre company has the same devotion as the Marugeku Company to salvaging some of what is left.
Down in Ardara, in the Artist's Resource Centre, there was a group exhibition of four artists. The Glaswegian Pervaze Mohammed showed The Outlands, a series of photographs that expose a more hidden and sinister side of derelict hospitals.
It's The Days, Not The Years by Hugo Brito is a video depicting young people break-dancing to music that he composed. The subjects are three young Polish men living in Amsterdam.
Landmines - The Hidden Legacy, by the freelance photographer Gary Trotter, is a collection of photographs of mines and landmine victims in Cambodia, Mozambique, the former Yugoslavia and Somalia. Trotter's wish is to use his medium to increase awareness of this problem, which proves so devastating to post-war civilians.
Richard Wayman's exhibition, The Kurds - A Nation Without A State, is a photographic documentary made over a period of 10 years in a place where journalists were never welcome. Wayman risked being beaten and having his film confiscated each time he went to the Kurdish regions of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria.
This show is the fruit of his work, an attempt on his part to give some dignity to the endlessly persecuted and dispossessed Kurdish people. His photos are shot in black and white and are the most painterly images of war I have seen.
Two PKP (Kurdistan Workers' Party) soldiers take a break from fighting, sharing tobacco, their guns leaning against the wall. Wayman catches a moment of peace in war, brilliantly.
International Earagail? There's no doubt. And I haven't even had time to mention the Quixote production by Teatro Nucleo from Italy and Argentina, Roberto Pla from Colombia, John Herald from the USA or the State of Bengal from England . . .
