Galway Arts Festival: Slatwas crossing a number of barriers, the Macnas parade was making a welcome return, and the music was hitting some high notes over the weekend, writes Deirdre Falvey.
The phrase "multi-disciplinary performance installation" might provoke an apprehensive sigh. Link it to the subject of feral children, and the whole thing could go dangerously self-indulgent. But Slat, which has been a work in progress for several years for Trevor Knight, here emerges as a mesmeric and challenging hour-long immersion in the world of a wild child.
In Knight's programme note he quotes that the essentials of Japanese Butoh dance are "to throw out all conditions as a human and open another dimension through opening resonance between inner dead", and his collaboration with visual artist Alice Maher and Butoh dancer Maki Watanabe has intersected with his fascination with the documented stories of children brought up by animals in the wild, and later "civilised", or of others subjected to abuse of an extreme nature, or raised in confined circumstances (such as a true story about a child raised under floorboards to escape the Nazis).
In Slat, Watanabe is transformed into a squirming, writhing creature, wildly dancing, or unfurling herself very, very slowly from a protective ball, or cowering in fear from the cacophony of noise and music of the civilised world. At one stage, she looks up at the audience, ranged on a steel platform above her on three sides, peering down at her, and her face is filled with horror and fear.
The voyeuristic setting - like the pits of Victorian times in which freaks were stared at - is designed by Paul Keogan, and that cacophony is the sound creation of Knight and three others moving about under the audience standing on the steel platform, with an ebbing and flowing of hints of the familiar and the strange, banging, clanging, or subtly fading, allowing the child to relax.
Vocalist Julie Feeney is an amazing, eerie addition to this very gutsy, basic sound. Later in Slat, the girlchild climbs the steel structure, and, dripping and quivering, snakes her way along the outside of the bar, inches from the faces of the audience. It is intimate and unsettling, as is the entire experience, which lingers long after leaving its subterranean world.
• This year's festival is operating without the parallel protest festival that was Project 06, and you could argue that one of the results of last year is the presence of more work from Galway in the programme. And instead of two parades (last year), at one stage it looked like there would be none; Macnas initially decided (bizarrely, in its 21st anniversary year) against having a summer parade this year (opting to repeat its successful Halloween parade) but relented under pressure. The result was lively and colourful, and with a theme of how 21st century Ireland has been defiled, highly suitable in a city where the tap water is still not drinkable. Indeed, the large green ninth wonder of the world in the parade was, apparently, Crypto (the cryptosporidium virus).
Aside from the pulse of the Macnas drummers, the tone of the parade was different, due in some part to the evocative recordings of old musical numbers, from Al Jolson to 1940s bebop. It got a good reaction on the street, though it may have been slightly smaller than previous years, and some hardened parade-watchers felt it could have done with more percussion sections, and more signature floats. Indeed, one large float was "lost" through breakdown early in the parade.
But the real positive fallout for GAF from Project 06 is the change of festival club venue, from the subterranean De Burgos club (cosy, wintry and full of nooks, but not great for a summer arts festival) to the Rowing Club down by the river, complete with large waterside area, a venue that was a big draw last year for Project 06.
• Mikel Rouse isn't a name that elicits immediate recognition in this part of the world, but his brand of Americana plucks the strings of pop-culture familiarity. The composer-singer-director's Music for Minoritiesshow at the Radisson pitches him and his guitar in front of a large screen, with an occasionally over-dominating backing track and a formally structured selection of his material. The films behind him, which he describes as "romantic channel surfing", include choppily edited snatches from US TV news, snips of interviews with real people in New York and Louisiana, and artfilm-style filmed inserts, presenting a cluttered and overlapping visual and aural backdrop.
At first you look to find the specific parallels with his material, but it's the cumulative effect of the visual melange that lingers. The minorities in the title are not racial but rather refer to the lack of individuality in the offerings of corporate media. Rouse is from Louisiana and based in New York, and his Delta-blues influenced songs - such as America's Belief, A President Up my Sleeve, Rubber Feet- are a quirkily humorous and sometimes more serious take on America. It's a striking show, and very enjoyable, even if the formal structure seems to preclude direct engagement with the audience until the end.
• Projected images again figure in The Projector of Dreams, a four-person dance piece presented by Pillowfight Productions and written and directed by Tanya McCrory (Galway's dancer-in-residence) and Sven Werner. The production invites audiences to join "Grace and the people she encounters as they search for everyday poetics within their private and public selves" - which provides a neat framing device for a selection of contrasting dance pieces which Grace dreams from her natty cardboard bed, under her brown wrapping-paper duvet. The performances ranged from the elegant and the humorous to a vigorous four-strong dance and Van Morrison's Sweet Thing, but the staging was unnecessarily clumsy and, aside from the delicate butterfly fluttering off stage at the end, the projections didn't seem to add much, other than distraction.
• In what was generally a strong musical programme, a highlight of week one was apparently Steven Isserlis. Sunday night had the Radisson audience in a latino sway when Eliades Ochoa, the last sonero and a star of Buena Vista Social Club, led his band Cuarteto Patria in a terrific set. And the NUIG quartet in residence, Contempo, had a series of concerts with guests in the Augustinian church through the first week of the festival. Sunday's concert featured Dermot Dunne on accordion and pianist Jane O'Leary. The marriage of string quartet and accordion was a happy one, first delicately and subtly in James Wilson's 1967 Accordion Quintet, which he described as a career highlight, "unlike anything else I'd done". Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina's In Croce(1978), written originally for cello and organ (and later accordion), was by turns ethereal and frenzied, with the high, relentless sound of the accordion meeting the lower cello and building to a wild energy. The quartet then joined composer Jane O'Leary for the first Galway performance of the Piano Quintet she composed for them. The four short movements explored the resonance of strings and its echo on the piano, some created by O'Leary, standing like a surgeon at the piano, manipulating its innards. Three contrasting and satisfying pieces.
• The festival continues until Sunday. There will be more from the Galway Arts Festival on Thursday's Arts page. www.galwayartsfestival.ie
