Review: Camerata Kilkenny
Camerata Kilkenny was founded in 1999 by Irish international harpsichordist and organist, Malcolm Proud and Swiss violist Maya Homberger. They have a very strong connection with the festival having given their debut performance here at the 1999 Kilkenny Arts Festival. Since then they have performed all over Europe and Ireland.
The ensemble played a range of works for us by German composers Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann, two of the great Baroque composers.
The programme was beautiful and exquisitely performed.
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Preview: Friday, August 12
It's hard to believe there's only three days left but that doesn't mean there'll be any let up in the quality and diversity of the acts.
Here's our checklist of everything you need to see today.
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Review: Hanggai
Hanggai arrived in to the Set Theatre as an exotic, unknown quantity to most people. Highly recommended by Music curator Gerry Godley (take a bow!), nothing prepared us for what we witnessed.
By the end of their performance Hanggai left firm friends of every member of the enthusiastic audience. In a packed venue, people stood, sat on the floor and eventually stood up and danced, drawn in and embraced by the sheer spirit of the music. You felt the rush of hooves of their horses and the sheer vastness of their home country in every note. These are a proud people and they expressed this pride in a sincere performance that brought us all in to their world.
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Review: Kevin Barry, Belinda McKeon and Paul Murray
This reading of new works in the Parade Tower was about new Irish writers. And at that, ‘hot’ new Irish writers if you’re into such branding. But by any definition of hot, Kevin Barry, Belinda McKeon and Paul Murray certainly are.
As Cormac Kinsella noted in his introduction, they were indeed ‘all young and all at the beginning of their careers’. It was certainly an inspired choice to programme these writers together because it certainly encouraged a big crowd, all eager to see members of the future literary establishment of Ireland.
Kevin Barry was up first, voicing his delight at being put in a castle. He read from his novel City Of Bohane (that’s pronounced ‘han’ not ‘hane’ he noted). Perhaps taking a leaf from Patrick McCabe’s book, Barry voiced and adopted the movements of his cast of rural oddballs from the fictional town of Bohane, coiling himself around the podium as if it were another character he was interacting with.
Belinda McKeon was next and while certainly not as animated as Kevin Barry, she gave a dryly humorous reading of her debut novel Solace. The book has been generating a lot of hype recently and its easy to see why. Her use of language is fantastic and the interplay between her characters really sparked during her reading. From the perspective of someone who hasn’t read the book, it definitely piqued my interest in grabbing a copy. McKeon read two different extracts from the novel, the last of which focused on the horrors of child birth.
This segued nicely into Paul Murray’s intro when he mentioned that he was going to have a child in 3 weeks time and humourously thanked Belinda for her reading. Skippy Dies has been one of the most talked about Irish novels of recent memory and it’s fair to say that hearing Murray read it was the biggest draw of this event. It’s a fantastic book and it’s one of the best Irish reads I’ve had in a long time. Murray read about Skippy’s attempts to get a date and also the confrontation between him and Karl, the school bully. It was hugely funny, well delivered by its author and created a fantastic sense of the rapport between the boys of Seabrook College. Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway) his reading went down a bomb.
A short question and answers session followed with the most interesting question revolving around the degree to which the authors act out their characters when they’re writing. Barry admitted entirely acting out all of them. McKeon said she can see them but refrains from acting them out and Paul Murray gave my favourite quote of the night: ‘If you’re not hearing the voices, you’re not getting the characters.’ They also touched on how well the cultural references in their books seem to travel abroad and how they’ve interpreted Ireland in their own books. It was a nice round up to a great event.
I left as most of the audience were making a beeline for the stack of books on sale at the back. Mission accomplished.
John
Review: The Big Deal
After the success of last years performance of Victor and Gord in Cleeres, it was great to see Una McKevitt back in Kilkenny to present her new show The Big Deal in The Barn.
It’s getting closer to the point where ‘Una McKevitt’ may well be considered a brand of theatre as opposed to just being one of Ireland’s most promising theatre makers. She’s spearheaded a form of documentary theatre like the aforementioned Victor and Gord and the acclaimed 565+ that presents real people and real stories with all the trappings of theatre.
The Big Deal is another slice of real life that’s just as happy, sad and original as her other work. It tells the story of Cathy and Deborah. Both of whom were previously men suffering from gender identity disorder. In this case, the identities of the real Cathy and Deborah are protected and the roles are played by actors with the stories coming straight from the personal diaries and first person accounts of the subjects. They talk of their hopes, their dreams, their backgrounds, their families and in lots of detail, their transformations. The procedures of gender reassignment surgery are graphically described. So much so that I spent the entire 60 minutes with my legs locked into crossed mode. Gentlemen, be warned.
The most poignant moments for me were when both women address their relationships with their children and their former partners. It’s very emotional stuff and really makes you question notions of gender in parenting and what it is that makes a parent. Speaking of those trappings of theatre, there’s a minimal but effective set and splashes of pop music interludes. Speaking of which, (apart from impeccable taste) I really love how McKevitt makes these musical pieces feel spontaneous and refreshingly underrehearsed as if they’ve just happened out of nowhere.
The Big Deal is a unique and challenging piece of theatre. It’s also an opportunity to see one of Ireland’s best and most progressive theatre makers present her newest work. If you’ve never seen a play in The Barn (and they don’t come all that often) it will also give you a chance to see a play in one of Kilkenny’s best unsung theatre venues.
While I’m here, I’d just like to take the opportunity to coin the phrase ‘McKevittesque’. I’m confident it will get a lot of good use in the next few years.
John Morton
Listen Back: Myles Dungan in Kilkenny
The RTE Radio One Today show arrived in Kilkenny this morning to broadcast live from Set Theatre and celebrate all parts of the Kilkenny Arts Festival.
The show featured Colm Tobin, Fintan O'Toole, Paul Muldoon, Hanggai and a debate on natural resouces.
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Visual Arts and Crafts Crawl: Part 2
Here’s the second part of our walk through of the Visual Arts and Craft strands at this years festival, encompassing the rest of the city and a little detour to Callan.
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Review: Christophe Rousset
Continuing the Baroque aesthetic of this year’s Classical programme, renowned French harpsichordist Christophe Rousset performed to a full house in St. John’s Priory at Sunday lunch time.
For those that don’t know, Rousset teaches Harpsichord at the Accademia Chigiana in Sienna and has recorded the works of Bach, Rameau and Francois Couperin amongst others.
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Visual Arts and Crafts Crawl: Part 1
You’d need a good days weather to take a jaunt around town and take in all the delights of the visual arts strand and craft strand of this years Kilkenny Arts Festival. In fact, considering how full to the brim both strands are you’d probably need more than a day.
But the gorgeous sunny weather of Tuesday afternoon dictated that this was the day to take advantage of and undertake that jaunt around town.
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Preview: Wednesday, August 10
Here's your morning guide to the wonderful and varied events taking place in Kilkenny today.
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