Discord over opera policy and Cork arts

ARTSCAPE: THE CURTAILED season that Opera Ireland opens tonight will bring to an end an annus horribilisfor opera in Ireland, writes Michael Dervan. The contraction of operatic output in Ireland has been extreme. Opera Ireland's winter season will feature just one full production, of Verdi's Macbeth, plus two concert performances of Wagner's Rheingold.

Cork’s Opera 2005 is out of action (or at least in hibernation), having failed to secure any Arts Council funding this year. The Anna Livia International Opera Festival did not survive the passing of its founder, Bernadette Greevy. The regular supply of touring opera productions from Eastern Europe that used to flow through Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Limerick, courtesy of the British promoter Ellen Kent, is no more. Kent shut down her touring operations earlier this year and is now concentrating on large-scale arena productions.

The Wexford Festival curtailed its run from 18 days to 12, and dropped the series of ShortWorks productions which had been part of the programme in one form or another for over 25 years. Vivian Coates, whose company, Lyric Opera Productions runs its performances at the National Concert Hall, has reason to be grateful for his independence of Arts Council support.

The council’s decision to cease funding its existing opera clients in favour of a single new company from 2011 is an extraordinary threat to the future of opera in Ireland. The transitional costs of what’s being called the Shannon Plan (named after Arts Council opera specialist Randall Shannon, who drew it up) have been estimated at up to €3 million.

This would involve the clearing of substantial deficits at Opera Ireland and the Wexford Festival, as well as the wind-up costs of those two companies and those of Opera Theatre Co.

Yet in response to questions I put to the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism, months after the council had made its decision, I was told, “The Arts Council has not requested exceptional funding from the Minister for opera. The allocation of its funding among the various art forms is solely a matter for the Council from within its own overall budget.” I was also told, specifically in relation to funding transition costs, that, “This would not be a decision for the Minister. The Arts Council would have to fund any such decision from within its own budgets.”

The Minister has declared his preferences on the matter: the preservation of the Wexford Festival as we know it, and the creation of a national opera company based in Dublin, rather than one based in Wexford as the Arts Council is rather preposterously imagining. The council’s proposal has all the imagination of centralising the state’s cancer services in Monaghan, simply because the town had a suitable building. The council has already postponed making opera funding decisions for 2010. The Minister has declared his position but not made any move to implement it. The next move, by the Minister or the Council, will be highly revealing.

And the otherhot "restructuring" topic is sure to raise some debate next week, when Imma hosts a public forum on the proposed amalgamation of the National Gallery, Crawford and Imma. The suggestion has generated much heat but this is the first public debate and Imma organised the day-long event in response to queries from visitors, artists, collectors and other stakeholders. It involves speakers with an informed opinion, including international directors involved in setting up or working within an amalgamated structure; cultural policy commentators; artists and an economist: Sune Nordgren (National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo); Michael Houlihan (director general National Museum Wales); artists Hughie O'Donoghue and Jaki Irvine; Noel Kelly (director Visual Artists Ireland), and gallery/studio directors Jerome Ó Drisceoil and Jacinta Lynch.

Visual arts academics, Mike Fitzpatrick and Brian Fay, cultural policy analyst Pat Cooke and economist Jim Power will also speak, as will Imma chairperson, Eoin McGonigal and director Enrique Juncosa. The Minister was invited to speak but was unavailable and, as far as Imma is aware, no representative of the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism or the Arts Council is attending.

Juncosa says the contributions will help in “mapping out the way ahead, whatever direction that may take”. Free, but booking essential, www.imma.ie by November 16th.

Severe cut in opera offering

Michael Keegan-Dolan and his Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre have once again set the performing arts world buzzing, writes Karen Fricker in London. Keegan-Dolan's radical revision of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which had its world premiere at the English National Opera last weekend, transforms a company of 18 bearded male dancers in flat caps and barn jackets first into a pack of hounds and then into a frock-wearing ensemble led by the brilliant Daphne Strothmann (who played the title role in Keegan-Dolan's career-making Giselle).

In his five-star review, the Financial Times'Clement Crisp praised Keegan-Dolan's Rite as one of the very few, alongside those of choreographers Kenneth MacMillan, Pina Bausch, and Leonide Massine, to "realise Stravinsky's vision of pagan ritual" – towering praise indeed.

The London Times'Debra Crane also gave five stars, proclaiming it a "savage and inspired rewrite", while the Guardian'sJudith Mackrell welcomed its "electrifying physicality". The Telegraph'sRupert Christansen offered a lone voice of dissent, wondering, in a one-star review, "what Father Ted would have made of" a production that was "simply drivel".

At the premiere, presented in a double bill with a startling new staging by Daniel Kramer of Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle, was attended by Arts Council chairwoman Pat Moylan, Galway Arts Festival director Paul Fahy and playwright Enda Walsh.

Culture Ireland contributed €100,000 towards creating the piece and is supporting the travel of international promoters to see it; Culture Ireland’s chief executive Eugene Downes says the positive response in London bodes well for the production’s future prospects.

Norwegian saxophonistTrygve Seim and his 10-piece orchestra kick off the fifth Galway Jazz Festival on Thursday; the festival includes performances by Rebecca Martin/Larry Grenadier; Métier; Francesco Turrisi Trio; Buckley, Stowell, Feely; Polar Bear; Julia Hülsmann Trio; and Matthew Berrill's Galway Allstars.

International museumtheft is a hot topic, and the subject will surely come up in the Irish Museum Association's annual James White lecture called Collections Present and Absent at the new Acropolis Museum, by Prof Dimitrios Pandermalis of the museum in Athens. It takes place on Wednesday, November 18th at 6.30pm at the National Museum, Kildare Street, Dublin. Free but booking essential (01-4120939 office@irishmuseums.org)

The winterof discontent sees a march this afternoon in Cork city as part of the National Campaign for the Arts. Cork artists (www.corkarts.org) are proud of their contribution to the city's designation as a top 10 world city, and the local economy. The march is to highlight what's at stake for the arts in the Budget and to ask people to sign an online petition – the national campaign aims to gather 10,000 signatures by November 27th (petitiononline.com/ncfa/petition.html).