Archives for August 2010

Take a walk past City Hall in Belfast any day of the week and there are clear signs that cultural tourism here is thriving. The numbers of tour promoters, in brightly coloured jackets and caps, waving fliers to get visitors on buses seem to multiply by the day. They're even beginning to outnumber the Goths and EMOs who perch on the benches outside City Hall.

I fell in behind a tour party recently just to eavesdrop on what the tour guide was saying. She was pointing to her right, to the Northern Bank building. As I got closer I heard her tell the party that this was where the infamous bank heist had happened! The cameras were clicking as I walked on by.

It got me thinking about what cultural tourism is and how it is still an evolving thing. Tonight I am talking to artist Lesley Cherry who, tomorrow morning will see the unveiling of a new artwork as part of the Lower Shankill Community Association's Re-imaging Communities Programme. It's called "Nothing About Us Without Us Is For Us".

A small slender girl came into studio last night carrying ornate and colourful screen prints on leather. They almost dwarfed her but as she laid them out on the studio table it became clear that Shauna McGowan's first solo exhibition "Machi" is a labour of love.

Her grandfather's long battle with cancer proved the starting point. A memory of the two of them watching "Jason and the Argonauts" together when she was a child triggered the idea for this exhibition. "Machi" is Greek for strength. She says her grandfather's battle with the illness was courageous, and reminded her of Jason's many brave battles. Mythology and family history collide.

"Machi" opens next Thursday at the Ards Arts Centre in Newtownards and runs for the month of September.

ILEX has just announced their first ever Cultural Broker. He is Caoimhin Corrigan. Currently the Arts Officer in Leitrim County Council, he's also Director/Curator of The Dock. 

Offaly born, he starts in the biggest arts job in Derry on the 6th of September. He says he's looking forward to it, especially with the UK City of Culture 2013 imminent. He has started house hunting, although the two houses he liked the look of had SOLD signs on them when he was in the city last week. 

Seems everyone's wanting to move to the City of Culture then!

Derry based contemporary visual artists Pascale Steven and Conor McFeely have been working on a joint project "Pause/Timeslip". It was commissioned by the Void Gallery, recently included in the Guardian's best small galleries in the British Isles.

The husband and wife team worked from home, they told me earlier, so they could collaborate and look after their children.

They have created two light based works which are going to be projected onto a section of the Walls in Guildhall Square. 

"Pause" by Pascale is text based (that's part of it below)

 while Conor's piece "Timeslip" (that's a projection of it below) is a 10 minute video of a sleeping child.

"A giant sleeping child" he said. It's his first public art work and says he's found the experience strange, seeing his work outside of the four walls of the art gallery, with no "sheet of theory".

The official launch is tonight but they did do a dry run last night. It seems their nearly four hundred year "canvas" looked great.

If you're in the city over the next few days head down to Guildhall Square anytime between 9pm and 12am.

Got my preview copy of Seamus Heaney's new poetry collection "Human Chain". Louisa, my producer, handed it to me this morning and, I'm not ashamed to admit this, I shouted for joy. Not good in an open plan office and probably not good for colleagues who might not share my devotion to the Nobel Laureate. Louisa then burst my bubble of joy by telling me her mum isn't that impressed by his poems.

And, yes, I do understand that some people can and do think what is all the hype about a new poetry collection?

But I've been waiting for this copy of over a year now. Hints of his new poems have teased me over the past 12 months, in interviews and magazines. He read two to me in a memorable moment in Bellaghy last year when the statue to him was unveiled.

Now I've only flicked through it, to get a sense of it, stealing time between scripting tonight's "Arts Extra" and going out and buying the dinner!

So no academic overview or thesis here. It's just great to have new work from him, epecially when the subject matter of several of the poems deal with his stroke in Donegal. It could have had a much darker outcome. So that's why I let out a shout of joy earlier holding my copy of "Human Chain" at last.

Just in from filming trailer for the new arts television programme Ralph McLean and I are hosting this October during this year's Belfast festival At Queens.

We had a great morning in the Grand Opera House in Belfast filming with the BBC Trails team, Paul Reid and Pamela Andrews and cameraman Bill Brown and soundman Peter Moore.

You can see I'm getting my makeup touched up by the makeup artist Anita Brolly. She was telling me she's just back from Shepperton Studios in London doing makeup on the new Martin Scorsese film "Hugo Cabret". Sir Ben Kingsley and Jude Law are starring in it. She hasn't met them yet. Apparently they're in Paris at the moment filming scenes so she'll see them next week.

But she has met "Marty" as she calls Martin Scorsese (!!). He's filming it in 3D too, but forget that, Ralph was just impressed by this close encounter with Scorsese. I was just thrilled to be getting my make up done for me instead of using the driver's sun visor in my car (while parked I hasten to add!!)!

Still wearing it now. So I should make sure the webcam is on for tonight's Arts Extra!

Terry Pratchett was doing a series of back to back interviews today, to promote the dvd release of "Going Postal", the tv adaptation of the book starring David Suchet.

These interview slots are always timed to the last second. So I turned up early to our studio in Belfast to hear the previous interview from a London studio in full flow. It's strange to hear another presenter talking to the guest you're about to interview. You begin to doubt the worth of your questions. And then they were laughing, cracking jokes and after the goodbye I heard Terry say "nice man" about the interviewer!

No pressure!

He managed a sip of his glass of water before the engineer patched him through to me.

Hello Sir Terry, I said. Not the start I expected. He was very nice but he doesn't like the "Sir" moniker, especially as it's used incorrectly. Yikes, we haven't even started the interview proper. The clock is ticking on the time slot and I am now in an Eat, Shoots and Leaves moment. The worst offenders he says are hotels. When he goes into his hotel room the tv screen is on with a welcome and enjoy your stay but bizarrely it reads "Welcome Mr Sir Terry Pratchett." 

 I was so enjoying our chat that I didn't notice the clock. The engineer cut in after 10 minutes and said we were running over and I had to wind up pretty fast. So I don't know if I made as big an impression as the previous interview. He made a big impression on me.

"Nice man" 

Mike Scott came into studio today, to talk about An Appointment with Mr Yeats. That's his show with the Waterboys performing twenty of Yeats' poems, all put to song by Scott.

Now based in Ireland the Waterboys front man is pretty passionate about Yeats. So much so that even he said he should get out more. Sitting at his piano with his Complete Yeats finding the poems that sing off the page to him. It's kind of the true artist's pose.

The thing is he wears his passion lightly. And he is so genuine about his fascination with Yeats that it doesn't for a moment feel contrived.

It's how popstars should be. Forget throwing tvs out the window. Arise and go now and get your collected edition of Yeats and lose yourself in The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

The Waterboys perform An Appointment with Mr Yeats in the Grand Opera House in Belfast on the 9th and 10th November. 

And check out what Mike thought of his day in Belfast today on his Twitter feed .

When I picked up Dublin writer Emma Donoghue's Man Booker longlisted novel a few weeks ago, I put it down after a few pages. I had picked up the clues dropped casually, naively, by the book's narrator. He has, after all, just turned 5 the morning we meet him. His name is Jack and he lives in "Room" with "Ma". What got to me was when he says her teeth are all black. He doesn't want to have teeth like her and so he counts his own teeth obsessively.

The rotten teeth triggered something in my memory, Elizabeth Fritzl, whose father Josef imprisoned her, was said to have had black teeth when she was found. She also had a five year old son Felix who emerged into the world, "Outside" as Jack calls it. So "Room" clicked. Room was in fact a prison, a woman kidnapped, "Old Nick" who would visit her most nights the abductor, Jack the product of it.

 I put the book down. I was in Donegal on my holidays. I could hear normal life around me, my two girls downstairs, fighting over which Peppa Pig dvd to put on, I wanted to think about whether to cook dinner or get a takeaway, whether it would stop raining and I could get the two down to the beach for air. I didn't want "Room" in my head. I went downstairs.

Back home after the break away I went back to it again. Then something happened. I fell in love, miraculously seduced. In the midst of a horror my mind was struggling to make sense of, here was a chatty, free spirited, inquisitive 5 year old. Jack told me about his day, his favourite toys, why he loved to watch Dora the Explorer and why there was no one else in the world like "Ma". And through him we glimpse Ma, and what is happening to her.

And then there was no one in the world like Jack. I was hooked. So when we're brought back to reality with the "beep beep" of the steel door of their prison signalling Old Nick was there my stomach lurched and I willed Ma to get Jack into the wardrobe as fast as possible. "Wardrobe" is his hiding place, so he can't see what is happening.

But he could hear though.

And then comes the escape. One reviewer said she punched the air. It is a marvellous moment.

Listen to tonight's interview here with Emma Donoghue on Arts Extra.

"Room" is published by Picador 

Me and Oscar the Grouch and Carroll Spinney, the voice of, and man behind, not only Oscar but Big Bird of Sesame Street fame. The two were in Belfast to meet the residents of "Sesame Tree". That's Northern Ireland's own version of Sesame Street.

I've never seen so many people craning their necks through the glass to get a peek at anyone I've ever interviewed before. Outside the studio there was a sense of mass hysteria mixed with nostalgia that was pretty infectious.

Carroll/Oscar took it all in their stride. One woman was openly weeping. Another invited him to her wedding! And told Oscar that she was going to name her first child Oscar.

And there was a queue to get pictures taken, autographs and hugs, mainly for Oscar.

Listen to the interview tonight on Arts Extra at 6.30pm to hear me flummoxed by maintaining eye contact wtih a puppet. It's the original Talk to the Hand moment.

Oscar the Grouch is in the building, with his "friend" Carroll Spinney. They're waiting for me in studio 8c. I am inordinately excited. Forget Seamus Heaney or any of the big names in the world of arts and culture who I have met and interviewed!

Oscar the Grouch is a living legend! He is my childhood.

Ok am away to meet him now. Best not to keep him waiting. Seeing as he is famous for his "grouchy" temperament.

More to come after we meet!

It's not often I find myself wishing myself older but that's what happened today when I met the Crescent Elderflowers Dance Company, a lively, lovely bunch of older women based in the Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast. I wanted to be one of them. But to be an Elderflower you have to be aged over 60. The youngest is 62, the oldest 80.

Renee, 71, tells me she has two artificial knees but that hasn't put her off embracing her "inner dancer" as she calls it, although yesterday's knee bending warm up was a bit much. She told their 27 year choreographer Eileen McClory to go easier on them!

Moya, one of the youngest, in her early sixties, said they've been discovering bits of themselves they haven't used in a while.

They've got a show coming up this Friday. "Here Comes the Sun" has been devised by the women themselves, who have lived, worked and raised families in Belfast for the past 40 years.

They appear as mothers, wives, British army, paramilitaries and children playing with toy guns.

They talk about how, when their teenage children went out at night, during the height of the Troubles, they didn't rest until everyone was back under the roof of the house again - worried that they would get caught up in trouble or end up being arrested.

Set against the drama outside their front door, life ticked on and, in one section, they try to remember who among them was the first to own a washing machine. 

There's so much laughter and energy I'm reminded of that film "Cocoon", when the older people get a new lease of life from the rocks the aliens have left in the swimming pool next door to their retirement home. Except this time, there are no extra terrestrials but a lot of endorphins released by exercise and movement.

And as well as a health kick, local older age groups like the Elderflowers could be in line for a financial kick too. A new fund has just been announced by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, which is giving £700,000 in an Arts and Older People programme.

 The Crescent Elderflowers perform "Here Comes the Sun" in St Mary's University College as part of Feile an Phobail on Friday 6th August at 3pm.