Seeking to understand its place in Galway and Galway's place in the world: Peter Crawley on the success of Galway Arts Festival's agenda

Last Friday afternoon, when the heavy heat of summer and a blanket of cloud had turned Galway city into an oppressive hothouse, the sun finally broke through on Eyre Square. There, on an inconspicuous corner of the expensively refurbished public space, a bright conversation was under way between two quite different performers from two distinctly opposed festivals.

Michelle Brown, a performance artist, whose show Here to Be Met - Native Galwegian was presented by the Galway-based live art project Enso for Project '06, chatted contentedly with Gary McSweeney, the leader of the Flying Pig Comedy Troupe, who had just emerged from his performance in the Galway Arts Festival. Sharing plastic cups of corrosively warm, sickly sweet red lemonade - served as part of Brown's act - their conversation wasn't exactly heated, but in a city whose arts festivals could feel at times like a Mexican stand-off, Brown and McSweeney were unusual ambassadors.

McSweeney for instance, had started his sketch show in the King's Head by declaring an elaborate, prolonged disassociation from the Galway Arts Festival (which seemed less than serious). He ended it with an equally elaborate endorsement of Project 06 (which seemed quite earnest). Brown, meanwhile, was in no way certain about her "native" status, diluted by seven years spent studying in Germany and Dublin. Together, they tripped through the platforms and pitfalls of their respective festivals and the benefits and gripes of arts in Galway. As their conversation slipped easily from local to global references, Browne and McSweeney were trying to understand their place in Galway and to understand Galway's place in the world.

This, of course, is essentially the agenda of Galway Arts Festival, and one that the inaugural programme of artistic director Paul Fahy is achieving quite admirably. Most curated festivals will absorb and reflect the personality of their directors, but Fahy, whose association with the festival stretches back some 20 years across several different positions, has been more conspicuous in his programme than most. At the end of the first week of the festival, for instance, he and several other surprised audience members were brought onto the stage of the Black Box Theatre to dance with the company of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago.

This happens every night, but Fahy's involvement was something of a private joke; the programme choice from the repertoire of the exuberant dance company had been assembled and arranged largely at his suggestion. In the progression of four distinct pieces, the elegance of dance was reaffirmed or excitingly subverted - a choreographer's inspiration might equally move to the oomph and flurry of Mozart or the big beat throb of club music. Populist without being simplified, viscerally exciting without losing the power to provoke thought, Hubbard Street Dance was the epitome of a brilliant festival show.

Another huge success has been the depth and breadth of the festival's expanded visual arts programme, in which the large-scale canvases of Hughie O'Donoghue's exhibition The Deep have proved the main attraction. Housed in both the Fairgreen Gallery - a huge, but temporary space beside Habitat, flooded with natural light - and the Áras Éanna Arts Centre on the island of Inis Oírr, O'Donoghue's themes of the sea and the wreck of the Plassy - all rusted skies, lime white surf, fathomless blues and concealed figures - is not conspicuously political, but its exhibition may be. Attracting 600 visitors a day to the Fairgreen, The Deep highlights the lack of a large-scale gallery space in Galway, and its success in the space shows how one might work.

Other areas of the visual arts are more directly politically engaged, some rooted to reality by the medium of photography. From Jan Garrap's Scars of David (at Aula Maxima) to the horrifically vivid photojournalism of three Israeli photographers and three Palestinian photographers (Conflict Inherited at Galway Arts Centre), images of Middle East violence are displayed in distressing cycles, from horror, to despair to the dreadful steel of revenge.

SUCH IS THE familiarity of some images, and the explicit carnage of other pictures that rarely make it into mainstream media, that the viewer might retreat subdued. Strange, perhaps, that the implied violence of Ori Gersht's The Forest feels more alarming. In his film a camera pans slowly through a Ukranian forest (once a refuge for his relatives in their escape from Nazi persecution) as individual trees crash inexplicably to the ground. There is no one there to hear it, apparently, but they do make a sound.

A similar political engagement fizzes and crackles through the theatre programme. The best of these shows, Mark Ravenhill's blisteringly satirical monologue Product, never pulls its punches, but it's often hard to discern who, or what, it's swinging at. "Movieland" - a country which Ravenhill himself has rarely visited - suffers most, conceived as an industry which cannot help trivialising the post-9/11 clash of civilisations into stock cliches.

An engaging and frank speaker at a public interview with author and academic John Deeney, hosted by Critical Voices, Ravenhill described Product as "an extended sketch with, hopefully, emotional and intellectual corners", which sounded about right. Ravenhill himself, provocative as his work remains, could be a product of cultural globalisation. "We don't use the word England any more," he said of his generation of English playwrights, explaining the international reach of his borderless concerns.

That slippery sense of national identity was just as much at play in King Ubu, the headline show of the drama programme, in which the Molotov cocktail of Alfred Jarry's splenetic farce became a less explosive concoction against the Irish voice of Vincent Woods' adaptation. Jarry's play was a messy piece to begin with, delivering two fingers to bourgeois conventions and, originally, lasting for just two performances. Directed by Monica Frawley, this significant undertaking for Fineswine Productions and its co-producers Galway Arts Festival doesn't have the same luxury; it aims to have an impact equal to the original but considerably more finesse and a significantly longer run.

One of the reasons it falls short may be that Ubu has lost the voltage of shock and so the power supply to Frawley's "total theatre" project is rendered erratic. Its cast, its costumes and several captivating set pieces are individually impressive, but nothing quite coheres, as though the demands of director-designer left Frawley overextended. Ubu's toughest challenge is simply to engage its audience over two hours, never mind enrage it.

Catastrophe, the Galway-based theatre company, have a reputation for site-specific performances, but one begins to wonders how far writer Josh Tobiessen and director Paul Hayes have pushed themselves when an audience for their new show Hole in The Ground is guided ineluctably, mysteriously, to the official festival club.

Cavernous and dark, the bar is an appropriately eerie setting for a ghost story. Tobiessen, however, is more interested in playing theatrical tricks - rupturing the conventions of a narrator, avowing then disavowing the presence of the audience - than concentrating on plot or consequence, and while the dead and the living seem to warrant quite distinct performance styles, it's not clear that the cast have agreed which is which.

Hayes keeps it moving with commendable briskness, however, and the hokum becomes infectious, much like Tobiessen's more bizarre lines about Galway: "All people do here is get drunk and kick sheep in the face for fun." I suspect that's not entirely true (indeed, native Galwegian Michelle Brown never even mentioned it).

Fun as sheep-kicking is, people seem to be more enthused by the music programme, one that generally verges on the safe and bland (David Gray, Simple Minds, UB40, Bell X1), alleviated by some winningly eccentric flourishes (the Bad Plus and the Tiger Lillies, with the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players still to perform).

IT IS ON the street, though, among the bustling crowds, that the impact of both festivals is most keenly felt. The GAF brochure might seem vague on the location of, say, street performers Teatro Pachuco - "Venue: streets of Galway" - yet here I am and there they are: two characters in coat-tails with honking saxophones for heads. There in Eyre Square are Les Sages Fous, with the consummate clowning and wondrous puppetry of The Bizzarium Street Aquarium. And, weaving through the throng where High Street winds into Shop Street, you may have found Paul Timoney and his band of anorak-wearing protesters. Part of Project '06, they proved suitably divisive, their controversial opposition to "ageing and death", someone's ex-boyfriend and, ultimately, themselves expressed via instant chants and erasable placards.

The first week of the jostling festivals culminated in two parades - Paraic Breathnach's Morning, Noon and Night for Project '06 on Saturday and Macnas's The Big River on Sunday (iwhich Paul Fahy reappeared, in the guise of a big fish). This could have been the most confrontational gesture of the week, but either through mischief or solidarity, several participants - indeed, some floats - featured in both processions. It could be that beyond the gripes and protests, the city of the tribes is not quite so divided after all. Or, perhaps in the events that stretch between two concurrent festivals, and from the local to the global, Galway's festivals have discovered that this town is big enough for the both of them.

•Galway Arts Festival continues until Sunday