I saw my old and deeply cultured friend, Nelson McCausland on BBC television last night. He and others were talking about the fact that Queen’s University are withdrawing their traditional financial backing for the Belfast Festival. This puts the future of the Festival at risk, something which appeared to appal Nelson: “It would be unthinkable that Belfast should not have a major arts festival”.
Mmm. Slow though I’d be to disagree with someone as cultured as Nelson, I find I can think of Belfast without a major arts festival – at least one of the kind Nelson has in mind. When I returned here from Canada in the late 1970s, I got quite excited about the many events of the Belfast Festival, in particular the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose work I’d grown familiar with when living in England. At the time, the Belfast Arts Festival was given support above and beyond the call of cultural duty. BBC Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh used to give over a chunk of its morning programme and solely devote it to people and events in the festival. People who spoke about the festival hailed particularly the courage of those groups like the RSC and others, who had made the trip from Britain despite the bad publicity that this place was receiving at the time. People attended events with a sense that they were aiding in the battle of presenting the north to the world as a place which refused to let terrorism get in the way of its appreciation of finer things.
But then, as the years went by, I found I was drawn less and less to the Belfast Festival and more and more to the West Belfast Festival – Feile An Phobail. Why was that? Well, not that there weren’t some outstanding (as well as some gawdawfully pretentious) performances at the Belfast Festival. But it began to dawn on me that while Feile An Phobail was emphatic in its inclusion of people and dramatic performances addressing the Troubles, debating the nature of the conflict and how it might best be dealt with in terms of the arts, the Belfast Festival looked at the Troubles, which were still raging throughout much of the 1980s – and looked away again. Not that the RSC and other companies didn’t produce sterling work – they did. But they acted and performed as though the Troubles didn’t exist.
It comes back to an old argument: should the artist address the pressing issues in the society around him/her, or should s/he focus on art for art’s sake and divert their gaze from what is happening around them? I think the answer to that came most tellingly when someone asked me how I’d react if I were told that a concentration camp prisoner wrote some very fine poetry while incarcerated, but addressed only issues such as the beauty of nature. You can see how such a poet might produce poetry of artistic merit; but there’d be something…one-eyed about pretending that s/he was not in a concentration camp. I could be wrong but I don’t remember going through the Belfast Festival programme over the years and seeing lectures or debates or plays or poetry or paintings that confronted the events literally exploding around us. On the other hand, it is impossible to remember the Feile an Phobail in any year when such lectures and debates and dramas didn’t abound, confronting the complexity of our political conflict and trying through art to make sense of it.
Which approach was right? Well as I recall the BBC was definitely of the opinion that the Troubles were best dealt with, culturally, by pretending they weren’t there. The Belfast Festival received saturation coverage; Feile An Phobail got minimal if any attention. Just as my thoughtful and cultured friend Nelson didn’t even see the major arts festival of Feile an Phobail as worthy of mention on telly last night.
So I’d respectfully disagree with my old chum Nelson, on this matter. If the Belfast Festival were cancelled next time around, I think I’d scarcely notice. I’m all for celebrating the arts, but when the arts avert their gaze from life because they don’t like what they see, I’d just as soon sit down and watch a good game of football on the telly.
Actually Jude a “good game of football on the telly” these days probably involves more amateur dramatics than the Belfast Festival, with a profusion of carnage and bodies crashing to ground seemingly mortally wounded, to rival the final scene of Hamlet.
Yes Larry – but then there’s always Lionel Messi…
Time and tide wait for no man (St. Marher, 1225)
As we pondered the sectarian, racist and misogynistic nature of Billy’s bully boys, the spray can philosophers were busy in north Belfast, more time and money was being wasted dealing with illegal flag protests and funding could not be found for an Arts Festival. The Arts Festival started in 1962, at a time when actors such as James Ellis were being actively discouraged from addressing institutional sectarianism through the medium of drama. There I was thinking that Mr Adams started all the bother here. Sam Thompson’s play, ‘Over the Bridge’ included a reference to the Billy Boys. The questions he posed about sectarianism remain as relevant today as they did in the 1960’s.
There will be a new moon 14 hours after reaching lunar perigee today, however, it would appear to artists throughout the world, that time for some, stands still in the north of Ireland.
But Nelson already has his NI festival (well subsidised by the Executive).
Its called the Twelfth of July – and he’s not bothered by Fenians wanting to attend it.
McCausland and his flat earth colleagues have been traditionally disapproving of , The Arts, especially theatre. There is something ungodly, in their view about people prancing about on stage , potentially under-clothed and perhaps even making scientific utterances of one kind or another. They see it as a Taigy thing really. All a bit heathen. Sure wasn’t it William Humphrey who recently said that the Lyric didn’t host any plays that’s would show things from the Protestant perspective. I mean, I ask you.
During your Captain’s Run today, Esteemed Blogmeister, one was reminded of one occasion when one travelled north to Belfast to dip one’s toe in the cultural waters of the Belfast Festival.
It may have been in the early Eighties and two outstanding events still cling to the wreckage of one’s Battleship Grey Matter: a classical music concert in the Whitla Hall and an interprovincial game of lardassical rugga on the Ravenhill Road.
There were at least twice as many in attendance at the first event.
These were the no-dough days of egg-chasing before the game completely lost the, erm, Captain’s Run of itself. The play for play days when many of the players were sufficiently egg-headed to pursue careers in medicine; now the professional rugga players’ typical acquaintance with hospitals is as an outhalf outpatient. Possibly called Con. As in Con Cussen.
On the way back to Dublin the following day Perkie’s inner Arty-pharty Allickadoo found himself sharing the upstairs of a double decker bus from Portydown to El Paso, with the moderately massively muscled stalwarts of the Munster Rugga Team. A bomb scare on the narrow-gauge track by narrow-minded nationalists with gnat-sized brains somewhere north of old Newry had compelled the Orange Blossom Special to be evacuated.
The inconvenience caused to Perkies’ crowded buinsess calender rather than being web offset by the cultural delight by getting to travel through Tandregee by bus rather than by train, was, instead, intensified.
Thump ! Thump ! Thump !
That would be Schrodinger, Perkie’s pet Pekingese thumping his tall on the carpet, demanding clarification. None of this pernikitey pussikin’s nine lives were even a glint in his Father Tom’s eyes at that time.
Well, to be as concise as p.: and in the interests of maintaining a narrative thread, travelling by train is of course far more interesting and indeed,instructive as a mode of transport through an urban setting than ditto by double decker bus. In the former one gets to poke one’s curiosity into backgardens, while all that greets one in the latter are front gardens a far more bland, tedious and antiseptic animal altogether.
And of course, more than most conurbations in a rural Norneverland, Tandragee has specialised in upping the fascination quotient of its back gardens. Not for nothing did the leprechauns call it ‘Tone re Gaoith’/ Behind to the Wind.(It actually rhymed in Plantation Times: Behind to the Wynd). Or, as some locals jocosely refer to it with a keen appreciation of self-deprecation: Bottom to the Breakwind.
Perkie’s inner philologist was careful not to draw his fellow Fusiliers in the Munster contingent to the leprechaun origins of Tandragee. This, after all, was the County Armagh a mere helicopter hop away from Los Ambitios de los Banditos.
The sotto voce word in the ear warning was still fresh in his head. Which an acquaintance of his (no names, no pact drill, oops, no pack drill) some short years before then, received when he happened to find himself one afternoon in downtown Crossmaglen, lost and speaking leprechaun. (Don’t ask).
-Willl ye shut yer cakehole, mon. And stop speaking the Irish,for J’s sake. Folks around here will get the idea ye’re an undercover Brit.
But, the Belfast Festival and its imminent demise or otherwise.
Should that doleful outcome come to pass, those on Laganside plunged into despondency at the prospect might take some comfort from what happened on Liffeyside.
Back in the much maligned Fabulous Fifties Dublin played host to ‘An Tostal’ / The Pageant which was a a restrained celebration of Ireland in Ireland. This was the predecessor to the Global Jamboree of Boneheaded Buckleppery which we take such pride in today. On account of how it turns all other nations on Planet Earth green with e.
But, of course, ‘An Tostal’ has not totally gone away, you know. And not just in downtown Drumshanbo / Droim Sean Bhoth/ The Ridge of the Old Huts in the County Leitrim, lovely Leitrim where it has survived to this very day, going forward as ‘An Ghostal’.
It has also endured in no petty, ghettoised fashion bur rather with great vigour in the mainstream monolithilic field of communications, aka, County Media. As ‘An Boastal’ and also, as ‘An Roastal’.
The former on the sports pages. From describing ourselves alone as ‘The Best Fans in the World’ which is as prime a cut of eejitry as Declan ‘Game for a Scaff’ Lynch aka Dec the Neck of the Sindo could imagine. He of course is the culturally cringing coiner of the e-word; but oddly, this particular example seems to have escaped below his Republican-loathing radar.
‘An Boastful’ is also buoyant in the egg-chasing pages where Canon Gervaise Thornley of The Unionist Times has designated J. Sexton and C. Murray as, without doubt, end of story, THE best 9 and 10 respectively in the world. Or it might have been numbers 10 and 9 respectively.
When both were called ashore during the Cardiff cave in last Saturday some cynic snidely commented with scarcely concealed glee: ‘that’s what comes from wearing the Crown of Thornley’.
Naturally, Perkie’s inner positives-taker was not ad idem with this nay-sayer. Rather, was it a sign that such is the world dominace of Dort-speaking Oirland in the rugga world that we could – AFFORD – to take off the two best 9 and 10’s on Planet. Egg
Canon G. Thronley is so ordained, incidentally, for his single-handed and Trojan achievement of securing the canonisation St.B.O’Driscoll, Even though the Rest of the Rugga World was a deal less impressed, as it failed to give BOD the nod even once as its Player of the Year during his long and overlong stellar and cellar-shirking career.
Odd, very. Odd indeed as the oval-shape of a rugga ball itself.
Mind you, the solar sun glasses which Canon G. Thornley took to wearing when watching St. Brian have not gone away neither. He still wears them when watching Numbers 9 and 10 and may even, if a rugga circled rumour which is rife has it, he is engaged in doing, erm, his Numbers 1 and 2.
Meanwhile, ‘An Roastal’ is going,to put it in Festival terms, from strength to s.in those pages and programmes devoted to the, erm, ‘Roasting of Republicans’.
Take Noel Whelan in The Unionist Times as recently as today,for a sample.
Go on, take him.
T.A.K.E.him.
Perkie doesn’t want him……besides, it’s a FREE sample !!!!!!!
Art and arts festivals ? What a conundrum that is .Writing as an ex-Fine Art student of long- ago, you soon understand that what the Great Public think that “art” is and what artists actually know it to be …. are two very different beasts.I find it hard to listen and watch this very abstract and intuitive science being discussed on radio and television programmes by people who might never know what they are talking about .They may be good at politics or making paper aeroplanes but they don’t actually “know” what art is. It’s like trying to discuss algebra with a zebra.An old long-gone friend used to say to me .”How come you can write and draw like this with a sort of facility and yet you can’t get your head around trigonometry? Well that’s just because that is who I am .I’m no better than anyone else but i’m just put together a little differently. It’s lying dormant like a benign virus in some of us . Sometimes it gets loose!!
What has to be realised is that an artist will create paintings , plays, books and poetry, simply because they selfishly have to do it and the circumstances of their creation are really neither here nor there. So you may spend your life as a sort of social lunatic ..as many artists do or did, but their surroundings may be totally immaterial to anything they might create. They may ,or very possibly ,may not be influenced by their surroundings. Some paint in tiny airless rooms with no other stimulation than their deepest thoughts.In the end , art is a very selfish endeavour that has to be done, like breathing in and out .
With that in mind , there is room for both the Feile and the Queens Festival .The poverty of our imaginations is the only barrier to finding the finances to fund both of these expressions .It shouldn’t be one or t’other. Money should be found for both and more . It is the lifeblood of any society and given the money that is wasted on all sorts of foolishness in Belfast over this past couple of years , the lack of funding for future festivals is a bloody disgrace.No ifs…no buts…
Eloquent as ever, PK. I tend to list towards the defence of the arts too – but there is good art and bad art, genuine art and phone art, people who love art and people who pretend to love art. I was at a symphony concert in Dublin last weekend. There was a modern Irish piece played that produced sounds during which a cat could have been vivisectioned and no one would have noticed. Yet the audience clapped and clapped and clapped at the end. Emperor/clothes/new come to mind…
As Leonard Cohen put it in some degree of self-deprecating jest …in his song /poem “Tower of Song”..
I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice
And twenty-seven angels from the Great Beyond
They tied me to this table right here
In the Tower of Song
…some people will never get that or the sweetness and playful humour in “art”…nor the dissonance ,that is sometimes part of the deal either, Jude…just sayin’……!!
I’m trying to figure if I talked about an original Irish piece that I heard in Dublin. This wasn’t dissonance (admittedly to my uncultured ear). It was lethal assault on the inner ear with forty-eight deadly weapons…
And as if on cue…
‘Art project in Derry could lead to drugs and orgies, claim ministers’
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/art-project-in-derry-could-lead-to-drugs-and-orgies-claim-ministers-31080553.html
You’ve gotta love those Presbyterians. Life here would certainly be a lot duller without them 🙂
Aye RJC …As usual the poor ould pagans are getting another battering from the Flat Earthers….the next thing you know he’ll be having a go at the Moonies….
Bonfires? Children around bonfires with KAT on their foreheads?
It would be a great shame if the Belfast festival came to an end or any arts festival due to the cuts coming in. Some people, usually ignorant people, think the Arts are a waste of money but it is seen now as a vital part of the North’s future economy. I recall that attracting big TV shows and dramas like “Game of Thrones” and other HBO shows to be filmed in the north brings in millions of pounds to the North’s economy. There is also a large film studio currently in construction in Belfast where the Titanic was built. My brother is currently in his 3rd year as an Acting student and he presently finds it easily to find part time employment on stage shows and has even auditioned for a part in “Game of Thrones” (not a big part, more of an extra lol but the money is still great, according to him).
Maybe Nelson could have his chums up at the Twaddell camp take a break at the nightly protest parades for a week or two, so the money used to pay the police could be redirected into saving the Belfast Festival? Or maybe cancel the protest for a few months so the money can be used to save Teachers jobs and help our hospitals? The redirected money would be going to MUCH more worthy causes than paying police to watch over a bunch of protestors in their Nike tracksuits, banging drums and playing the famine song, hammering community relations in the process…..
One was once told the following by a name not unknown in studio circles, Esteemed Blogmeister,
Among the technical heads who record all this ghastly contemporary stuff with a straight face which would not be of place on the dial of Albert Pierpoint, the hangman of the century, the term of choice is: ‘creaking gate music’.
“I saw my old and deeply cultured friend, Nelson McCausland on BBC television last night”
Houl on, is this that irony thing again? (I’m getting the hang of this!)
I am shocked and saddened that any right-thinking person like yourself, AG, would think that I was speaking anything but the blunt, unvarnished Ulster-Scots truth…
Dr C
Just a passing thought, but, by ignoring the troubles (so to speak) perhaps that served as some sort of escapism for the people (even though they’d have to go home via check points).
In tough situations people often long for normality and will clutch it wherever they can find it.
I used to work a lot in Africa and I was told of a Belgian Congolese station master who attended and announced the arrival of each and every scheduled train in his little marooned train stop for years whilst the country tore itself apart.
I’m not saying it’s the right thing to do (a bit too “keep calm and carry on” for my liking) but it’s an understandable enough mindset.
BTW, when is the West Belfast Fest, I would like to go sometime?
AG – I take your point. I suppose my criticism is aimed at the schedulers rather than the artists or attendees/attenders. I can see why people would want to have a sip of normality in a desert of the abnormal but I think art should help us come to terms with/understand life rather than give us a two-hour escape (that’s a generalisation but still true).
PS I forgot to mention, there were no trains when the station master did this, the tracks had been abandoned and infrastructure destroyed. (sorry, that was a key point….)
Surely, Jude, it should be Radio Ulster/Raidió Uladh(SéChondae)?
Maybe just skip the Raidió Uladh??
Art is the gentry watching the working class suffer.
Jude
Parochial nonsense, as I suspect you know.
I believe the library has thousands of books full of poetry, stories ,works of art, none of which even mention Bobby Sands. Burn em all, I say!
Maybe just stock a few thousand copies of ‘Before the Dawn’ and a couple of ‘Mein Kampf’ so we can do a comparative study in delusional self justification.
Well gio – I would never accuse you of being parochial…I haven’t suggested book-burning, as you’ll find if you read my blog vey very carefully. I was simply distinguishing between art which ignores the society in which it is presented and the art which sees its job as quarrying the society in which it is presented. There’s room for both, but when the situation in a society is cataclysmic, I begin to wonder at the art that consistently skirts round the nasty stuff.
Yep the west Belfast festival certainly brings culture to West Belfast alright not very high culture of course but if they like it that in the end is all that matters….perhaps if SF had a controlling input into the Queens festival your love of it would return? : )
Ach now neill – you don’t kid me – you’re not half the cynic you pretend. Have you been at any of the Feile events? If you had, you’d find that they cover a very wide spectrum – from Girls Aloud type stuff to local history to debate to drama and probably several other things I’m not familiar with. Besides, isn’t opera defined as a good joke by the upper-middle class at the expense of the working class?