TUNE IN FOR A SLICE OF THE ACTION
Carlow Arts Festival goes online with bite-size pieces
FESTIVAL season should be well underway and like many others, the Carlow Arts Festival was due to be taking place this weekend.
Renowned for interesting acts and community engagement, the festival regularly attracts around 55,000 people to the town so Jo Mangan, festival director, admits she was at a loss initially when Covid-19 hit.
‘In a way it has happened so quickly for us — we had signed up all our acts and we were ready to launch when all this kicked in.’
The festival was cancelled and Jo admits that for a few weeks she could see no way out of the situation. But then, after seeing what others were doing, she decided to bring the innovative nature of the Carlow Arts Festival online in what she’s calling Slices.
‘I started to look at what other festivals were doing internationally and I saw other people had a full festival programme online,’ Jo explains.
‘You would end up with a screen full of acts that would normally be on over three or four days in a theatre or out in the open and then they had lots of talking heads and conversations. And to be honest I found it deathly dull.’
Like a lot of people, Jo found herself left cold by the constant staring at a screen as it was not how she wanted to feel at a festival, particularly when we are spending so much time on our computers working and on Zoom.
‘I think one of the reasons some material is not working is because it is not conceived for an online format,’ she says. ‘People are scrambling to get stuff up online as fast as possible, transferring what they would have done on stage to a small screen and the truth of the matter is not everything works. I don’t have the concentration for that — we are deluged with content at the moment. So I was thinking my attention span is three to four minutes and I could push it out to five and that is pretty much what we decided to do. So we are doing a one hour long broadcast on Saturday night, no act is longer than five minutes and we have everything from dance to a circus to Exotic v. Baskin: The Micro-Opera based on the Tiger King series.’
‘We are going to have fun with it and not take ourselves too seriously so it’s just an hour of craic on Saturday night, in the first of what we are calling Slices that will go one throughout the summer because we are not bound by time any more.
‘Later we are going to do virtual reality cinema where we will post headsets to people’s homes and they can look at that in their own homes. We have an exhibition that is physically going to open in July hopefully and we are doing some digital and online stuff throughout the rest of the year.’
Exotic v Baskin: The Micro-Opera is centred round a musical duel between zookeeper Joe Exotic and his arch-nemesis Carole Baskin. It is conceived and composed by acclaimed US composer Dana Kaufman, with a libretto by awardwinning playwright Tom Swift — the team that created the Reality TV inspired Opera Kardashian and is performed and directed by Lucia Lucas and Ariana Lucas.
In Grow Your Own Way, madcap Lords Of Strut performer Cian Kinsella will take you on a journey into farming and partial insanity during lockdown.
Choreogpraher Emma Martin will present Oh Sweet Future Dream’, a visual essay on the dance between reality and imagination using a mash up of original and found material. There will be dance live from Argentina in Precaridaza as well as more music and spoken word.
And Jo is certain that the likes of the Tiger King opera will go on from its premiere here.
‘The guys were working on the Kardashians’ opera which was supposed to be happening in LA this summer but when everything was cancelled, they decided to work on something new and that’s where the Tiger King came from and it is just spectacular. It is hard to believe those characters are real when you are watching it. . I am really excited about this as this piece is going to go on from here. I think it’s going to have big legs after this as it’s so good and so funny.’
The mix of live and pre-recorded content will be streamed as a live broadcast across Carlow Arts Festival youtube channel and facebook page this Saturday June 6 at 8pm — see youtube.com/c/ CarlowArtsFestival_Ireland and facebook.com/carlowartsfestival for streams and details.