The aims of Dún Laoghaire's Festival of World Cultures were lofty, but not all of its cultural alliances were a success, writes Peter Crawley
At the risk of dismissing an entire culture and a language spoken by close to a billion people, on the first day of the Festival of World Cultures a new Chinese opera was demonstrating the most unmusical tongue on earth. This language is English.
Though the Chinese Theatre Circle guided us with careful exposition through a plot both reassuringly simple (boy meets girl, boy loses girl on becoming emperor, boy takes girl as favoured concubine) and bewilderingly complex (boy is unable to fund the navy adequately, boy is counselled by radical scholars to execute his aunt, the Empress Dowager Cixi, during the Boxer Rebellion), there are few easy ways to float lyrics about the difficulty of drafting reformist constitutions.
Yet Intrigues in the Qing Imperial Court, the first full-length Chinese opera ever sung in English, set the tone of a festival that transforms the seafront town of Dún Laoghaire into a truly global village each year. The company hails from the culturally hybrid island of Singapore, and playwright Leslie Wong introduced a curious tension into an ancient Chinese art form, quoting liberally from Shakespeare and mingling Chinese folk with classical themes from the western canon. The show itself may have been a chore, but the ideas behind it were right at home in a fusion-happy event.
In its fifth (and biggest) year, the festival last weekend sidestepped "exotic" cultural exhibition, concerning itself instead with the point where cultures collide and collaborate. One would have been hard-pressed to track down a performance of, say, straight-up Brazilian samba last weekend. But if you were looking for some traditional north-eastern Brazilian music nestled into an electronic pulse with infusions of house and sprinkles of hip-hop, along came a perfect example.
Chopping up an accordion sample on his laptop in the cramped Purty Kitchen nightclub, then reconfiguring it across a queasy bass line and bustling horns, DJ Dolores may begin his mangue beat in Brazil, but it globe-hops happily through Jamaican reggae and francophone hip-hop. His beats and samples splice together abrasively at first but resolve into an intercultural chatter, a Tower of Babel around which we dance.
On Saturday, Ojos de Brujo, Barcelona's energetic exponents of nuevo flamenco, were still more propulsive, their open-air performance in Newtownsmith Green offering an invigorating coalescence of galloping guitars and ferocious beats couched in rubbery electronic rumbles. If only their much-vaunted political convictions had the sophistication of their music.
Instead, the tempestuous Marina Abad bookended her bristling raps with an expressed desire to knock President Bush "off his horse". One song was dedicated to "a world without borders, with no traditions or nothing," an enthusiastically endorsed sentiment, although it would make both this mestizo music (and this festival) pretty redundant.
The day was rounded off by an Italian folk arrangement courtesy of Dublin singer-songwriter Declan O'Rourke's Galileo, his mature croon a little too gentle against the distracted mill of the Kingston Hotel. Unfairly, audiences tend to consider that free gigs are worth exactly what they pay for them.
Not so with Karen Underwood, the Chicago jazz singer who found her voice with Cork band The Flying Monkeys and who found an audience so engaged that there was barely breathing space left in the Portview Hotel. Her soulful treatment of You Might Need Somebody hovered out across the night air, already humming with the spill of world beat from the 40ft Bar, and mingled with the less enticing Bollywood treatment of Stand By Me by Calcutta's Usha Uthup.
More convincing musical and cultural sutures were formed in the fierce turntablism and urgent rapping of Senegalese hip-hoppers Daara J, whose rallying cry is "are you still alive?" and whose liberation from the postures of American hip-hop to include reggae and dancehall styles is still more life-affirming.
Against this, the punk intensity and thunderous breakbeats of the UK's Fun 'Da' Mental on Sunday tended to dominate a collaboration with the eight-strong choir of The Mighty Zulu Nation, the Durban group largely swallowed by the chug of an undiscriminating mixing desk.
"There is too much war!" yelled frontman Aki Nawaz, bellicose in his peace-mongering, although he declined to say how much war would be sufficient.
That Nawaz was far more politically astute in an earlier panel discussion (on the place of indigenous music in a globalised culture) pointed up the oversimplification of politics in world music. The aim is lofty - to transcend cultural divisions and bring people together through music - but the weekend's messages rarely went beyond the ideas that George Bush is bad and that children are the future.
The festival culminated in the incantatory sounds of Mercan Dede back at the Purty Kitchen, with the Turkish-born DJ whipping up the sounds of a didgeridoo on his turntable, parachuting wisps of flute into the mix while improvised flurries of clarinet interleaved with the beat of the darbuka. This modernised Sufism pushed dancer Mira Burke into greater spins of abandon. Dede's sound is a calm suspension of disparate elements, but his tendency to conclude with a Eurovision-worthy crescendo began to arouse suspicion, as did Burke's final whirl, when her flowing garb was illuminated with a glowing neon trim.
In this festival of ethnic fusion, any world culture, irrespective of origin, can be susceptible to fads. Such cultural alliances may appear bold and adventurous, but rarely are they permanent.
One Indian vendor in the Global Village market understood the shifting tastes of inter-culturalism too well.
"Have you tried chilli with ice-cream?" she asked a customer.
"Is it an Indian thing?" replied the sceptic.
"No, no," the vendor said. "It's just a new craze."
