Macnas celebrates its 21st birthday this year, but the party could be deflated by critics, including some of its founders, who say the group has abandoned its roots, writes Michelle McDonagh.
Macnas first came to national recognition in 1988 when its 20-metre-long effigy of Gulliver was washed up on Dollymount Strand and resurrected to march through the streets of the capital, as part of Dublin's Millennium celebrations. One of the iconic images of the past 20 years in Ireland, Gulliver made the front pages of The Irish Times, the Irish Independentand the Irish Presson the same day.
It was a time of innovation and adventure in the arts. What Macnas was doing back then was new, exciting, brave and healthily disrespectful of church and state. Macnas celebrated music and dance on the streets - long before the advent of Riverdance- along with parody, satire, imagination, colour and comedy, and all on a shoestring.Although street theatre has mushroomed in Ireland since, Macnas provided the blueprint when the company was established in Galway in 1986 by Páraic Breathnach, Ollie Jennings, Pete Sammon and Tom Conroy. The original founders had a vision. They wanted to revive the days of community celebration and to start an annual street parade or "carnivale" that would still be going strong in a thousand years, long outliving them. They wanted to be creative, but they bloody well wanted to have fun doing it.
As Macnas celebrates its 21st year in existence, with an exhibition and the publication of a book celebrating the company's history, as well as a parade at Halloween, it has been accused of losing its raison d'êtreand strongly criticised for failing to hold a summer parade this year. It has also parted ways with MacTeo, its corporate section, which has been bought out by former Sawdoctors drummer Johnny Donnelly, and will now operate under the name Arcana. This deal is seen as a positive move by both companies.
Macnas general manager John Ashton denies the company has lost its way, explaining that, like any other company or organisation, it has had to adapt and change with the times.
"When Macnas was set up in 1986, there was a huge pool of very talented but unemployed artists in Galway. It's a very different world we live in now and the majority of good artists in Galway are employed.
"The rules and regulations when it comes to health and safety and child-protection policies are very different than they were back then and we have to work within these structures. I do not believe the company has lost its way at all; artistically it as vibrant as ever, maybe we just don't shout as loud," he comments.
PÁRAIC BREATHNACH SAYShis predominant emotion towards Macnas is one of "abject disappointment and deep sadness at opportunities lost". He has refused to have any involvement with the new book on the company's history, which he feels will be a "whitewash". A man well-known for calling a spade a spade, Breathnach remarks: "The only honourable thing Macnas could do is close up shop. It's whole raison d'êtreis gone, it's been betrayed consistently over the last 10 years. The best 10 years of my life, the best energy I ever gave has been betrayed by gobshites."
He regards Macnas's failure to produce a summer parade this year for the second time (the first was in 2004) as a betrayal of the love and support the company has got from the Galway community over the years and of the principles of the company. "When we set Macnas up, we hoped the parade would last 1,000 years. They are quoting financial and artistic reasons for not having a summer parade this year. Last year, Project'06 (the alternative arts festival run successfully by locals as a one-off) raised €40,000 in seven weeks and put a fantastic parade together. I can't see why a professional well-paid administration can't manage to do it.
"Of all the things Macnas did, the parade was the most important thing for the community. The Macnas parades changed the face of Ireland during the 1980s and revived the St Patrick's Day parades." For Macnas "not to engage with the city that nurtured and cherished them is appalling", Breathnach storms.
The Mayor of Galway, Cllr Niall Ó Brolcháin, is calling on the city council to intervene to ensure a street parade goes ahead during the arts festival this summer.
Ashton points out that Macnas are putting on a parade this year, just at a different time of the year. If it had the resources, it would do both a summer and a Halloween parade, he says."There's only so much we can achieve in a year with the resources we have. I feel it's important to acknowledge the history of the company and the exhibition during the arts festival, celebrating 21 years of Macnas, will do that. I understand certain people are disappointed the summer parade is not happening this year, but it will happen again next year. We intend to alternate between summer and Halloween parades; they're two very different dynamics."
The book on the history of Macnas, which will be launched around Halloween and is being researched and compiled by former Macnas volunteer and National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) graduate Terry Dineen, will interweave a large selection of stunning images with personal experiences and feelings about the company over the years.
"We have been refocusing on community work and street performances over the last few years and I see us moving back into creating different types of theatre which will naturally develop from the street and community work we are engaged in. Macnas work all year round with communities and groups all over Galway city and county; it may not be headline-grabbing like the large-scale events we produce, but it's very important work," Ashton points out.
Macnas also has other problems to contend with. The group is currently in desperate need of a new home for its workshops due to the deterioration of the building at Fisheries Field that has been made available by NUIG since the early years.
INSPIRED BY SPANISHtheatre collective Els Comediants, who visited Galway in 1985, Macnas poked fun at everybody in the early days - the priests, the politicians, the shopkeepers and "the gombeens of Galway" who tried to stop the early parades because of the company founders' disrespect towards the Catholic Church.
Breathnach firmly believes in the need for a healthy disrespect and asks when, if ever, the current-day Macnas will comment on how the Celtic Tiger has destroyed the country.
When he left Macnas 10 years ago, it was touring the world with its hugely successful theatrical productions - why, he wonders, has this all been lost? Celtic Trilogy produced by Macnas in the early 1990s was the first non-verbal theatre in the country and has inspired a lot of other companies since.
As Breathnach comments, Macnas was an important theatrical movement and behind this was a deep sense of community: "We cared about the neighbourhood, community and town we lived in, unlike the token sense of community that exists today. In the early days, when there was no corporate embracing of Macnas, we depended on the help of ordinary people and local businesses. They gave us loans of money, lorries, houses and buildings to rehearse in, a whole range of help."
Despite a successful career as an actor and radio presenter today, Breathnach regards Macnas as "a bit like a teenage child you reared and saw great potential in, but that went off the rails. You would be upset and concerned but also hope they might cop on."
Another Macnas co-founder, Ollie Jennings, is appealing to the group and to the Galway Arts Festival to do all in their power to ensure Galway has a parade this July. "The July parade has been an integral part of Macnas and the arts festival through the years. It releases huge energy into the streets of Galway and no other town does parades as well as Galway does.
"Given that it's the arts festival's 30th year and Macnas's 21st year and given that the parade is traditionally a joint venture, the festival should make every effort to make sure it takes place," he says.
Jennings, who was manager of the Galway Arts Festival during the early days of Macnas, has great memories of those very special times. He recalls how himself, Breathnach, Conroy and Sammon sent off a brief one-page application for funding under a new Arts Council arts, community and education scheme in 1986 and, against the odds, were successful in getting a grant of £25,000 - an enormous sum at the time - to set up Macnas.
Their first big public project involved the staging of a mock Gaelic football match at the Connacht Final between Galway and Mayo in Castlebar. Jennings recalls the laughter rippling through the crowd - made up mainly of farmers. "Nearly everybody was on the dole at the time, so we established FÁS schemes where people could get the same amount of money as signing on. This was a vital part of how it developed. There were lots of very talented people working for Macnas at the time from artists to engineers," Jennings explains. He believes one of the main reasons Macnas survived past its first year was due to a bank manager called Tony Broderick in the Bank of Ireland at UCG who gave them credit at a time when nobody else would.
"During the FÁS dispute that went on for months, we had no money coming in to pay wages and he gave us an extra line of credit. We would not have survived if not for a friendly bank manager with a bit of vision," says Jennings.
