ArtScape: It's shaping up to be a busy year for traditional music, writes Siobhán Long. Long overdue financial support from the Arts Council - €800,000 in 2005 - will increase to €3 million this year. Some €1.5 million will be allocated to traditional arts revenue grants, with a further €500,000-€750,000 going to projects under the Deis scheme, launched by Liz Doherty in the latter part of last year.
According to the Arts Council, Deis funding will be made available on a monthly basis, to allow a wide range of applicants to access it throughout the year. Deis has already funded a diverse range of traditional arts activities, ranging from a children's trad arts camp to securing archive recordings and the development of instrument banks.
Over the coming weeks alone there are a host of music festivals jostling for attention, including Temple Bar Trad (which launched its inaugural festival on Thursday); Killarney (The Gathering Festival, February 15th-19th) and Ballyferriter (Scoil Cheoil an Earraigh, February 15th-19th), both in Co Kerry; and Buncrana Traditional Arts Festival in Co Donegal (March 31st-April 2nd).
The emphasis of each festival differs, with Temple Bar offering a mix of concerts featuring musicians who rarely play in Dublin (including a reunion concert last Thursday with Skara Brae) as well as instrument masterclasses and an Irish culture workshop. Killarney's Gathering Festival has established a reputation for its gargantuan set dancing nights, when hundreds of dancers create a kaleidoscopic effect in the huge surrounds of the INEC. Ballyferriter will concentrate its energies on cosseting the Corca Dhuibhne style of playing, with workshops on instruments including box, fiddle, pipes, flute, song and dance. Buncrana promises a similar approach, with homecoming sessions from Altan's Dermot Byrne, Ciaran Tourish, Kevin Doherty and the Arts Council's traditional arts consultant, Liz Doherty.
Does all this activity signal the ultimate revival in traditional music, and will the Arts Council funding secure its long-term future? We can only wait and see.
Well worth the wait
Minister for Arts John O'Donoghue showed he knew how to keep an audience in suspense on Thursday. The Minister was due to launch the Irish Museum of Modern Art's programme for 2006 at lunchtime in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, writes Aidan Dunne, but in the event a Cabinet meeting detained him longer than expected and assembled artists, curators and journalists were left to chat among themselves. A waiting lunch, never mind the launch, seemed a distant prospect but eventually the Minister appeared and trotted with commendable briskness through a speech outlining a packed year for Imma.
The highlights include a major retrospective of the brilliantly coloured paintings of the popular English artist Howard Hodgkin, which opens in February; a survey show of the sculpture of Barry Flanagan, famous for his playful bronze hares, in June; and in October, a retrospective by Michael Craig-Martin, the renowned painter and installation artist known as the godfather of the Damien Hirst generation of Young British Artists. In April, Magnum Ireland features photographs taken in Ireland since the 1950s by some of the agency's best-known photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eve Arnold and Josef Koudelka.
Irish art and artists also feature strongly. From May to the end of the year, a representative selection of work by one of Ireland's most celebrated artists, Louis le Brocquy, will be on display to mark his 90th birthday in November. Also opening in May, Irish Art of the Seventies features works from the existing collection and new acquisitions from the PJ Carroll Collection, which was for many years country's leading corporate collection of contemporary Irish art. Another major acquisition, James Coleman's INITIALS, will go on display in the summer.
O'Donoghue said this year's programme follows a record year for the museum in terms of visitor numbers. During 2005, the Jasper Johns, Laurie Anderson and Tony O'Malley exhibitions "struck a real chord with Irish and international visitors". Imma director Enrique Juncosa was generous in his praise of the Minister, saying that a second consecutive increase in budget, plus growing co-operation with major foreign museums, contributed to an increasingly ambitious programme which meant, he acknowledged, more work for Imma's staff.
Collaborative ventures with museums elsewhere are particularly important and have been a hallmark of his directorship. The Howard Hodgkin retrospective, for example, was co-curated by Juncosa and Sir Nicholas Serota, director of London's Tate museums, and it will be shown at Tate Britain later in the year before travelling on to the Reina Sofia in Madrid. There is also more local co-operation: the Barry Flanagan exhibition is a joint venture with the Hugh Lane Gallery, and during it Flanagan's hares will be let loose not only in Imma's grounds but also in the revamped O'Connell Street.
Prizes for keeping it short
The Frank O'Connor Short Story Award, initiated during Cork's year as European Capital of Culture, is to be continued but with a reduced prize fund, the Munster Literature Centre has confirmed to Mary Leland. Cork City Council has agreed a grant of €50,000, which was the amount of the prize last year (funded by O'Flynn Construction), but this year the award will be €35,000, with €15,000 going to the centre for administration costs.
The prize is for the best collection of short stories published in the English language between October 2005 and September 2006, and although reduced, the money still makes this the most valuable acknowledgment of the short story in publishing. The Munster Literature Centre is expected to bear the rest of the administration costs from its 2005 surplus of about €20,000.
It intends to allocate a budget of €6,000 for PR costs, aimed at highlighting the size and significance of the award, which director Patrick Cotter believes City Hall will continue to support in the future. He is now assembling a panel of judges, whose decision, based on a shortlist of four titles, will be announced on September 24th. While the presentation event itself will also be reduced from the gala dinner of last year, it will remain the highlight of the Frank O'Connor Festival in September.
However, that festival's own prize for an individual short story, somewhat confusingly named in honour of O'Connor's friend and colleague, Seán O'Faolain, remains at €1,500. This is considered a "reasonable" amount for a short story, according to Cotter, who is not dismayed by the €10,000 offered in the Fish competition in Bantry. The Seán O'Faolain prize earns about €5,000 for the Munster Literature Centre on the basis of an entry fee of €10 and, as an important source of finance for the O'Connor festival, has to remain self-funding.
Why is it that everybody seems so focused on anniversaries this year? Cultural icons generally tend to have a number of anniversaries, marking everything from birth, death and marriage to first symphony, last novel and first trip to the shop to buy a loaf of bread. But this year, it seems people have gone particularly anniversary-mad. Aside from Beckett's centenary and Mozart's 250th birthday, it's also Rembrandt's 400th and Shostakovich's 100th. It's also apparently 40 years since Flann O'Brien died, and 100 since Cézanne threw off his mortal coil. And of course there's no better way to celebrate our long-departed artists than by buying loads of CDs, books, films and prints, reason those who produce the many commercial anniversary tie-ins.
Giselle, the hit of 2003's Dublin Theatre Festival, has been nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award - in the Best New Dance Production category - in London. The show was originally co-produced by Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre and Dublin Theatre Festival, won an ESB/The Irish Times Theatre Award and later went on to play at New Haven and the Barbican, London. Michael Keegan Dolan's follow-up show, The Bull, divided audiences and critics at last year's Dublin Theatre Festival, with some raving about it and others feeling it had lost the run of itself. The Olivier winners will be revealed on February 26th.
Five young Irish pianists were selected last month to take part in the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition, May 5th-19th. Ranked as one of the world's top five competitions, it attracts musicians on the threshold of an international career. The five Irish competitors - Peter Tuite from Dublin, David McNulty from Belfast, and from Derry Cathal Breslin, Ruth McGinley and Michael McHale will join 40 other pianists from Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, Australia, Malaysia, the US and a number of European countries.