FLASH DANCE:COMMUTERS ARRIVING at Connolly train station in Dublin yesterday morning may have been momentarily mystified to see a bunch of teenagers spontaneously burst into dance for three minutes on the station concourse.
Blink and you might have missed it, but the “flashmob” – featuring students from Streets Ahead Dance School in Santry – was publicising the line-up for this year’s Kilkenny Arts Festival.
Highlights of the festival, which runs from August 7th to 16th, include Peter Brook's Love is My Sin, a staging of Shakespeare's sonnets; and Le Concert Spirituel led by Hervé Niquet in St Canice's Cathedral with a repertoire of 17th- and 18th-century French sacred music.
Other performances include New York's Mabou Mines with Lucia's Chapters, about Lucia Joyce; Krapp's Last Tapewith Fergus Cronin; and a collaboration between traditional music and contemporary dance by Rex Levitates, Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, Kate Ellis and Iarla Ó Lionáird.
There is a wide music line-up, from eccentric seven-piece Hazmat Modine to Serbian pianist Alexsandar Madzar to Icelandic group Amiina with Katie Kim.
There is also a craft strand at the festival for the first time, which will feature Sterling Irish, 11 young Irish craftmakers who are working in the UK.
Roy Foster delivers the Hubert Butler annual lecture, while writer and Irish Timescolumnist Garrison Keillor reads from Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Woebegon. Irish artists including Corban Walker, Gary Coyle, Isobel Nolan and John Byrne, meanwhile, are showing at the 17th-century Rothe House.
www.kilkennyarts.ie
