Record breaking year for city’s premiere arts event
There will be no rest for the wicked-ly good organising team behind the Galway International Arts Festival.
On the back of a record-breaking year for the city’s premiere arts event, key staffers are planning to decamp to Edinburgh to check out work that may appear in next year’s festival.
Artistic director Paul Fahy is also closely involved in touring the hit shows of the festival - Ballyturk moves to Dublin on August 8 before travelling to Cork and London. Last year’s production of Riverrun premieres in Edinburgh before moving to New York.
“It’s very busy. We don’t get a few weeks off as people may think. We have the big mop up from today and then we start the touring for the home-grown productions. It’s great, brilliant to be in a position to bring these to a bigger stage.”
While no figures have yet been collated for the fortnight’s extravaganza, Paul is in no doubt it is the biggest box office smash yet during his tenure at the helm.
“It will be another couple of weeks before we get figures balanced but without question it was our best year. Pretty much everything sold out, there were those red dots all over the place on the board in the box office.”
As for the most memorable shows, Paul singles out Ballyturk as the runaway hit of the fortnight.
“I knew the Redball would be a grower and it would take time for Galway to get it but it really captured the hearts of the people. Pictures of it on the Salthill Prom and on the canal really made Galway look stunningly beautiful. It really captured the imagination.”
He labelled the Janet Cardiff sound installation at the Aula Maxima, called The Forty Part Motet, as “one of the most beautiful things we’ve ever done.”
Room 203 by writer Enda Walsh in the Absolut Festival Gallery managed to really astonish, he recalled.
“This was a gem of a surprise, you have this box in the middle of a large white space and you walk into the 1970s seaside hotel room where you hear the heart-wrenching story voiced by Niall Buggy. It was really special.”
Other big talking points were the Big Top gigs, in particular The National which blew audience members away, he says.
The French production Dragonus and the Slovenian street show The Invasion (both free shows) proved a real crowd pleaser.
As for next year, it’s certainly not too early to say, laughs Paul.
“The rebranding and repositioning of the festival really worked for us. We had a lot of festival directors from international festivals here - from Edinburgh, New York, London, Australia, New Zealand.
“That’s going to really open up possibilities for our own productions and in terms of material,” he explained.
The festival from now on will be on the hunt for new exciting productions to lure west.
“We never repeat ourselves in terms of the programme. You never look at the Box office and say that would go down again. You’re constantly coming up with new ideas.”