Galway Arts Festival:An impromptu performance by a Cuban band in a Galway pub brought salsa out onto the streets, writes Christine Madden.

It was the kind of synchronicity that has given Galway Arts Festival its reputation for a creative spirit of fun. On Sunday night after his performance, Eliades Ochoa expressed a desire to play again. Just a few days earlier, upon the arrival of a new piano at Neachtain's pub, owner Jimmy Maguire mentioned to festival director Paul Fahy that he'd welcome a musician coming in to test it out. What could be easier? Even the sun, this year's most elusive visitor to Ireland, turned up to allow those who could no longer fit in the kitchen-sized area within to salsa in the streets.

With Ochoa and Cuarteto Patria, his band, wedged into a corner with their instruments, at least 50 people jammed themselves into around 20 square metres of pub space on Monday afternoon to witness the impromptu seisiún of Latin music. Despite the sardine-tin conditions, people still found it possible to prise mobile phones out of their pockets to photograph, film and record the event. One rumour insists that a mobile-phone link was set up with a pub in Cuba and was being watched by its patrons over there. After the event, Ochoa and his compadres retired to McDonagh's Fish and Chips to seal their trad (Cuban) music session the traditional way.

• The crowd also went mad for Cesaria Evora's concert, which managed to transform the Irish-wedding atmosphere of the Radisson's ballroom into an exotic and sensual place. The "Queen of Morna", the special kind of Latin-infused blues at home on the island of Cape Verde, sang her soul out with her band - several guitarists, a drummer, violinist and master of several wind instruments - jiving behind her. Quite youthful on the stage, she'd never give away the fact that she's in her 80s. When the audience clamoured for her encore, she sang Bésame Mucho, and the crowd erupted.

• Mark Doherty and Bryan Quinn's Shhhhhhhh . . . !, a Galway Arts Festival production, gave kids a humorous taste of what it's like to be their parents. Playing a beleaguered dad trying to deal with the total innocence and instant-gratification vagaries of his infant son, Doherty tried to pacify his outsized child: a bearded Quinn in a shopping trolley disguised as a pram and wearing nappies medieval monks might have pulled on instead of hair shirts to serve the mortification of the flesh. He tried to get his wanton brat to sleep (so he could watch footie on TV), tried to feed it disgusting pap, and attempted to change its nappy - confronting the teeth-clenching frustration of dealing with these gormless little dears that brings parents to the point of sleep-deprivation and insanity.

• Innocence also figured heavily in Particularly in the Heartland. Created by the US company Theatre of the Emerging American Moment, the piece presented us with an unlikely family in Kansas, the parents of which had apparently ascended into heaven with a first instalment of the "Rapture". Several other characters helped and hindered them in their quest to be good enough for the next round, including: another child, a red-shoed survivor of a plane crash (who, wedged in her business-class seat, had landed in a nearby cornfield) and the unlikely ghost of Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968. They name their drop-in Dorothy (Kansas, ruby slippers, fell from the sky, geddit?) and end up becoming a family of sorts.

The production evinced many skilful moments (particularly from Kristen Sieh as Anna), but begged a great many disquieting questions. The company may believe in the "emerging American moment" that gave them their title, but it is in no way as benign as their affable production portrays. This rather well-established moment supports an encroaching, stifling atmosphere that references US culture to US culture with a disturbing innocence about the rest of the world and the formidable consequences of ignorance. The fact that this production works as a string of loosely connected sets with scant narrative force - not objectionable in itself, and often visually arresting - means nevertheless it never builds up a momentum through which to examine and question this innocence. On the contrary, it revels in it instead. A pity, as the players seemed well able to do more.

An element in the second half of the piece, in which the actors, in character, allowed the audience to ask questions about their family and further their understanding, was executed superbly as improvisation. The piece needed more of this skill applied with critical evaluation - as Dorothy said to Toto, "I don't think we're in Kansas any more".

• The Wizard of Ozturned up again, albeit in disguise, in Julian Gough's reading from his book Jude: Level 1. Apart from one of the best first lines in history, the prologue to his book, which won the UK National Short Story Prize this year, made for good reading, as Gough performed his story with the witty assurance of a stand-up comedian. "The most difficult thing about readings is figuring out what to wear," he confided, twirling about his sparkly silver scarf. He explained he had been trying to capture the Celtic Tiger and its "wangst" (self-indulgent anxiety) in his book, although, being the beast it was, it would be better to shoot and stuff it - "it's a moving target".

• In a powerful lament for moving targets - in every sense of the word - the Brodsky Quartet presented the highlight of their programme, composer Paul Barker's In Memoriam: For Those Who Fall in Times of War, in St Nicholas's Church. Joined by clarinettist Joan Enric Lluna, the quartet presented a poignant piece of music dedicated to the Sarajevo String Quartet, which was designed, in the composer's words, to propose "reflection instead of reaction".

Composed in 2003 in response to the prospect of a superpower again waging war for murky reasons, the four-movement piece elicited tremendous playing by the quartet, who pushed at the edges of possible sound from their instruments to convey the suffering, helplessness and misery of those encased by war with no way out. But the musicians did more: while maintaining their concentration on performance, they managed to convey a sense of understated theatricality, coming forward and disappearing behind red barriers, sometimes wandering the stage mournfully like exiled ghosts.

And once again, the Galway festival managed by chance to provide a moment of performance synchronicity. Behind the Brodsky Quartet, over their backdrop, a stage light aimed at the ceiling attracted a sequence of white moths, drawn like fluttering sleepwalkers out of the darkness. As they flashed for one last living moment in the hot white beam from the lamp, their search for light extinguished them in a puff of smoke.