The hoardings are up all over Belfast: Victorian covered markets, redbrick warehouses and riverside depots are discreetly embellished with the trademark stars of the European Social Fund. Renovation, restoration, and redevelopment are the key words, as investment pours in to a reawakening city. The massive expansion of this year's Belfast Festival at Queen's is another kind of urban renewal, a consciously bold incursion into the fragile space cleared by the ceasefire.
With its budget doubled to more than £1 million, increased sponsorship, support from Belfast City Council as well as (UK) National Lottery funds, the 16day festival has been able to bring in work by companies and artists of international stature, from Robert Wilson (November 20th22nd), to Merce Cunningham (November 27th-29th) to Bill Viola (until November 29th).
Yet, while the Guinness Jazz mini-festival (see left) was the main attraction of the opening weekend, other events were surprisingly sparsely attended. There were three visitors to the Bill Viola video installation in the Ormeau Baths Gallery during the hour that I was there on Saturday afternoon, while Silviu Purcurete's Phaedra, for which people scrambled, begged and borrowed for tickets at the Dublin Theatre Festival, on Sunday night only filled four-fifths of the Waterfront Studio Theatre (an unsuitably small venue for this piece, which depends for its impact, to a large extent, on the choreographed undulations of its huge choruses.)
The danger inherent in the breadth of this year's programme is that it will all be too thinly spread, and, while attracting audiences from outside Belfast for the big international names, will not generate a groundswell of local support. But this is a transition year for the festival, of course, with all the risk that this implies. One of the innovations of the new programming director, Sean Doran, is a strong literature programme, which kicked off on Friday evening with an eloquent and surprisingly optimistic address by the US-based English essayist and cultural critic, Christopher Hitchens. Commissioned by the festival to reflect the spirit of the opening concert at the Waterfront Hall, Mahler's Resurrection Symphony (see review below), his set theme was "Suffering, Faith and Redemption", to which he prefixed the words: "We, Ourselves". Obviously carefully chosen for the context and timing of this festival, it was reflected in many of the events of the opening weekend.
In a discursive, epigrammatic lecture to a less-than-capacity audience, Hitchens spoke enthusiastically about the current renewed confidence in the North, the loosening of the grip of old enmities and the "internationalisation of the question of the Six Counties". Alluding to Wilde, Heaney and MacNeice, he argued that the future for Northern Ireland lay in becoming "the adopted child of the US experiment", a process which was already well underway, and which would introduce multicultural and pluralist perspectives. He spoke about the responsibility of memory and the need, for both individuals and nations, to forget and discard certain things from their past in order to develop and move on; to engage in a discriminating, selective amnesia, respecting the past, recalling suffering through art and literature and looking to "our common future". He characterised the US as a society constantly searching for alternative histories, offering not just a better future but "the promise of a better past". "The larger sky can be a solvent of ghetto-like difference," he concluded, and, although he received a warm response, it was clear that not everyone in the audience shared his benign view of American dominance.
The dissolution of national and sectarian hostility was also referred to by Martin Amis, who read from his latest novel, Night Train, on Saturday evening, and responded generously to questions from a very interested audience.
He referred to the late-20th century as the last period in "an atrocious adolescence", a "delinquent, juvenile" period of history. But now that our ecological consciousness had been raised, we were on the threshold of "a second enlightenment, a revolution in consciousness in which we see ourselves not as nations, but as occupying a planet together". Our expanding knowledge of the universe would make us "pull together as a species", he suggested.
When asked why his fiction tended to focus on aggression, competitiveness, and racial and gender-based hostility, while he championed this new era of global consciousness and co-operation, Amis acknowledged that it was "difference" that excited him as a writer, and that, to an extent, he wrote as a devil's advocate. "There's also the fear that, if you're not careful, an intolerable sentimentality will engulf you." This fear explains why Amis veers disconcertingly in his public appearances between ironic, offhand flippancy and sincere humility.
Humility was one of the responses evoked by the American artist Bill Viola's mesmerising video installation, The Messenger, which alone would make a visit to Belfast this month worthwhile. Originally commissioned last year for Durham Cathedral, it is a large projected image sequence of an illuminated figure moving slowly to the surface of a pool of water from the depths, accompanied by low rumbling and gurgling sounds. As he breaks the water's surface his eyes open and he releases a long breath, and the sound reverberates dramatically. After a few moments he inhales, sinks back into the depths and becomes a disintegrating, shimmering cluster of light.
It is an extraordinarily resonant piece of work, mysterious and meditative. While it conveys an abstract awareness of time and space, it is also intensely sensuous. With its associations of birth and death, of baptism, cleansing and healing, it evokes the entire cycle of life, as seen in a vision or a dream. While technically superb, the technology is only a tool; for Viola "the development of the self must precede the development of technology". Yet he has managed to bring substance, and even monumentality, to the medium of video art. It is fitting that such an inspiring work should be in Belfast at this time - lets hope that it will get the audience it deserves.
The Belfast Festival continues until November 30th, and will be covered here again next week. Booking from: 080 01232 665577/ 666321.
