Fantastical owls, snoring giants, stilt-walking sandmen, spooks and ghosts and horses resembling "night" mares . . . just a taste of what the celebrated street theatre company, Macnas, is offering at this year's Galway Arts Festival, which will be formally opened by actress Pauline McLynn tonight.
Entitled Cargo de Nuit, the parade next Sunday will be the first staged by the company in the western city by dark. The plot involves night pirates who are attempting to steal the sun in a world where daylight has been banned and even artificial light has been outlawed. It will be followed at 11 p.m. by a spectacular fireworks display illuminating Galway Bay by the French company, Groupe F.
Irreverently translated as "things that go bump in the night", Cargo de Nuit involves more than 450 people, and the work of some 16 community groups. A rollicking bed, complete with gooseberries, promises to leave little to the imagination, and the audience will even experience nightfall - literally - when a net drops out of the sky. It is directed by Dominic Campbell, and the design is by Tom Conroy. Stepping off at 10 p.m. from Victoria Place, Cargo de Nuit will make its way by Upper and Lower Merchants Road, Spanish Parade, Wolfe Tone Bridge and Claddagh Quay to the Swamp or South Park.
Wheelchair users will be given access to a special audience area at the Swamp, and Macnas suggests that parents with small children also go directly there. Members of the public following from the city centre are asked to "dance as they go".
Dancing and leaping and running about this week in the Taidhbhearc theatre are the members of Cornerstone Theatre Company, formerly Bloodstone, who are staging Chekhov's The Seagull for the festival. The director is Mikhail Mokeev of the Moscow Arts Theatre, who is in Galway with the assistance of the Russian government and the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Mokeev, a former nuclear physicist, is described as one of Russia's most innovative theatre directors. He founded the Chelovek theatre in Moscow and is currently artistic director of the Ulysses Theatre Company there. It is not his first visit to Ireland; ten years ago, he came to Thomastown in Co Kilkenny to give master classes.
Mokeev has set the production in the 1930s for two reasons: "the feeling of nostalgia at that time, and the fact that everything occurs before a major catastrophe, such as a world war." He is a teacher of the Stanislavski method, and constant improvisation and refined interpretation leave the cast little room for lunch breaks. The Seagull opens on Wednesday and runs to July 25th; tickets can be booked through the Galway Arts Festival office at freephone 1890 566 577.
Tonight, a 21-piece strong band from Soweto, South Africa, will play their only Irish concert in Galway's St Nicholas's Collegiate Church. The Buskaid Soweto String Project was established to help youngsters from a background of apartheid find hope and courage amid deprivation, squalor and despair. Tickets may still be available from Zhivago's music store at (091)509960 or 767686.
Among the visual arts listings in the festival, the work of Barrie Cooke is on display at the Galway Arts Centre in Dominick Street, following its opening at the weekend by the Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney. The literal translations of Burren people and their surroundings are the dominant theme in a celebration of the work of Limerick artist, Joseph Quilty, which has opened in the Kenny Gallery, Middle Street and runs until July 25th.
Finally, the arts atmosphere engulfing the city may be proving too much for An Cead Cath, the 1st Battalion at the Army barracks at Renmore, Dun Ui Mhaoiliosa.
Among events planned to mark An Cead Cath's 75th anniversary is an exercise to be mounted by the Naval Service flagship, LE Eithne.
Le Eithne's troops will leave Galway docks next Sunday and sail north to Rathmullan in Co Donegal, where the 133 soldiers of all ranks will disembark. Under the command of Comdt Pat Quinlan of Salthill, their task is to secure a number of ports in Donegal, and thereafter "support the battalion group in clearing strong enemy points". The exercise - the first to involve the entire battalion of some 500 from the Western Brigade - will last for 100 hours.