Free beer and sax (1999)

BY GERRY MORAN

Well that was some week. Any week that kicks o with free beer and sax can’t be bad. at’s sax as in saxophone, as in the Copenhagen Saxophone Quartet who serenaded us with some Gershwin on a sunlit, Friday afternoon at the opening event of this year’s Arts Festival in MacDonagh Railway Station. is year’s Arts Festival leaves me with the best of memories. Bigger and better than ever there was something for everyone: An Ana Maria Pacheco painting for £55,000 in the Advance Factory, o the Ring Road or a Dammit Doll for £2.50 in the Art & Crafts exhibition in Mary’s Hall. Best value in town. is work of art is not for hanging on your wall but for banging o your wall! e little verse on the soft toy explains everything: If you want to climb the walls/Or stand right up and shout Here’s a little Dammit Doll/You cannot do Just grasp it rmly by the legs/ en nd a place to slam it And while you whack its stuing out/Yell: Dammit, Dammit,

Dammit”.

And dammit it was a hell of an Arts Festival: Paintings. Pottery, Poetry, Photography, Classical music, Ceili, Reggae, Rock and Jazz. And more: open air lms in the Market Yard, music recitals in parking lots and the Big Drum, the largest drum in the world and e Wishing Well which was eerily spectacular and straight out of the Twilight Zone.

And we had our Nobel Prize winner for literature, Seamus Heaney in Saint Canice’s with Liam Og O’ Flynn on the uileann pipes. Eight hundred people plus, stock still and silent, hanging on Heaney’s every word and O’ Flynn’s notes. And there was William Trevor’s gentle and poignant reading in the Watergate eatre, followed by a screening of e Ballroom of Romance based on his short story of the same name.

Yes, this was a festival with a di erence. A festival with imagination, with air. New ideas, new formats, new venues. And I loved the venues: railway stations, parking lots, advance factories, old mills. Not to mention our regular clutch of cathedrals, castles, abbeys, and priories. Something for everyone, for sure. Even my two girls, aged six and eight, enjoyed painting and pottery at the Kitten Club and the free children’s lms in our new Cineplex. In fact free is the operative word for this year’s Arts Festival, so many of the events were free. I very much enjoyed Petah Coyne’s intricately woven horsehairs in the Butler Gallery and the giant sculpted hares out in Kells along with the exhibitions of paintings and sculpture dotted throughout the old monastery and mills. And it’s nice to see the festival spread out into the county – to omastown, Freshford, Graiguenamanagh and Callan. And it was great to see so many local artists exhibiting in Mary’s Hall, the VEC, e Clubhouse Hotel and the School of Music. And sure the Arts Festival wouldn’t be complete without Ramie Leahy, Kathleen Holohan, Phyl Cleere, Mick Cantwell and up and coming Conor Langton, and Graham Carew.

I loved the enchanting, candlelit concert by Kilkenny Camerata in Saint Canice’s Sunday night, an absolutely memorable event. And then the grand nale, the centre piece of the festival: e Art of e Game, a celebration of the art for which Kilkenny is renowned: hurling. e parade through the town, the crowds, the colour, the pageantry, And nally the Irish Youth Wind Ensemble on top of the seventh oor of our new multistory car park A highlight in every sense of the word, soft evening light and the orchestra treating us to Orpheus in the Underworld on top of the world! As the conductor said: “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the seventh oor of the car park.” An original introduction to a classical concert if ever there was one. But then this was an Arts Festival teeming with originality, imagination and innovation. Long may it remain so.