Arts Show asks . . . Festival Fever or Fatigue? The Arts Show

We're back in a brand-new cultural destination.

Not in Belfast, London or Dublin, but Bellaghy in County Derry.

It may not trip off the tongue as easily as a Heaney poem,

but the brand-new arts centre, the Seamus Heaney HomePlace,

has now opened rural mid-Ulster to the world.

On the site of a former RUC barracks,

it cost £4.25 million to build,

with the Heaney family at the heart and soul of it.

The centre covers two floors with the theatre and a permanent display

of previously unseen family archive,

and a recreation of Heaney's study,

in which he wrote so much of his Nobel Prize-winning poetry.

But it is more than a museum to the man.

There is an emotional pull that Seamus would have delighted in.

Coming up, festival fever or fatigue?

With the big daddy of festivals

on right now, is there just too many?

Singer-songwriter, and now add extreme weather performer,

Lisa Hannigan.

Put the bins out, the Pope of trash

John Waters is en route.

And Stephen Connolly waxes poetic

about his hero Seamus Heaney.

But first, ahead of his flying visit in December,

the wizard of the waltz, Andre Rieu,

on the art that first blew his mind.

# The hills are alive with the sound of music... #

The Sound Of Music, the number one movie, film, in the world.

I was so in love with Julie Andrews. I'll never forget it.

I couldn't sleep the whole night.

And still I look at it very, very often.

Oh, let's see if I can make it easier.

My mother tells me I must have been three years old.

I was sitting in a concert with my father

and I saw all these bows of the strings go up and down.

And that was...

That made such an impression on me and there was a violinist,

a girl, playing and I was sure I wanted to do that too.

It's not one book, it's a whole series of books. It's Tintin.

You know, and the captain and the little dog?

I was fond of it and I still read that.

And, in fact, in one of the books the Captain bought a castle

and when I saw that picture of the captain and Tintin

walking through the castle, I thought I want to have a castle too.

I don't know, I never go to the theatre but...

..I love, for example, Romeo And Juliet from Shakespeare.

And I saw the movie by Zeffirelli.

You know, always when I go to the theatre, I want it bigger,

I want the whole thing.

And in the theatre, you know, it's only onstage, so that's...

why I never go to the theatre. I want...

CRESCENDO

The Pieta by Michelangelo.

When you really stand in front of that masterpiece

and you know that he made that when he was 23 years old,

I mean, that's...

that's divine, incredible, that a man can make that.

So, for me, that's art.

With so many festivals scattered across the calendar year,

are we now at saturation point?

Ruth McCarthy is Artistic Director of the Outburst Festival...

Shona McCarthy is Chief Executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe...

and Mark Phelan is Head Of Drama at Queens University.

The big festival that's happening at the moment

is the Ulster Bank Belfast International Arts Festival.

Are the days of that kind of festival gone, Mark?

I don't think so.

I mean, one of the most encouraging things in the arts scene

in the last two decades, I suppose,

since this putatively post-conflict kind of period

has been an explosion of arts festivals.

That's true right throughout the UK.

And throughout Western Europe you see this as a phenomenon everywhere.

But has the International Festival suffered

because of the likes of Outburst or the Cathedral Quarter?

No, I don't see any competition between arts festivals.

I see a very complicated and a very diverse

and a dynamic ecology of festivals.

And I think there will always be, within, as I say,

the very varied ecology of festivals in this city,

there's always going to be a role

for a major international arts festival,

and that is the Belfast Festival.

So, I think it's tremendously important,

both in terms of importing international work,

but also providing a platform and a birth for local theatre companies

and arts organisations and artists to stage their work

in the context of a larger international festival.

But surely that was what the Belfast Festival was doing.

It was bringing in international art,

it was bringing in local people.

I kind of feel that it now has had to cede, in some way,

to the other festivals coming in.

There are audiences who will naturally go to something

like the Belfast International Festival and there are audiences

who come to Outburst,

who come to Outburst because they might be LGBT

or they might want to see something a bit different,

and those people... We're growing audiences.

The smaller festivals actually expand what bigger festivals can do.

-So you're not rivals then? You wouldn't see...?

-I don't...

I don't think so at all.

Practically every festival that happened in Belfast

has a very different remit and can have very different audiences.

Edinburgh did this massive piece of work across all of the festivals

to look at the economic impact,

because that's what the Government wanted to know.

So there's at least 280 million back into the economy of the city

-just from the 12 festivals, just from those 12 festivals.

-Right.

Now it's all, "Well, what about the social impact, guys?"

You know, "How are you impacting on poverty?"

You play so hard to gather one piece of evidence,

and just at the minute you provide all that,

it's, "Well, what's your economic impact, Ruth?"

I mean, and they keep changing the goalposts that way.

I think it is a mistake to simply look at the arts

in relation to how much economic

return they can generate because, you know,

you think of the role theatre played in apartheid South Africa,

in the liberation struggle there.

Czechoslovakia, where you have a playwright

that becomes president of a new democratic society.

So, the arts matter in ways that aren't simply materialistic

but in terms of a healthy, civic, democratic culture.

Well, as we've been hearing, there's a lot of events happening now,

not least the daddy of them all,

the Ulster Bank Belfast International Arts Festival.

Do check out the darling of the New York arts scene, Taylor Mac,

and check out our series of short films about the fest online.

The Scissor Sisters' Ana Matronic rocked it two years ago

and now voice of an angel Charlotte Church gives it some Welsh welly

as she hosts the largest art prize in Ireland,

the MAC International Ulster Bank Prize.

Northern Irish artist Mairead McClean won the biennial prize

in 2014 with her show, No More.

And the ever-popular RUA exhibition at the Ulster Museum

proves that you can still be well hung at 135.

The great playwright Brian Friel did it

and now Belfast writer Lucy Caldwell steps up to the plate

to rework Chekhov's masterpiece Three Sisters.

1900s Russia does the time warp to 1990s Belfast,

rocking the Lyric main stage till November.

There's a new literature festival in town...well, city - Armagh city.

The first-ever John O'Connor writing school being championed

by the boy from the Moy, Paul Muldoon.

And, with six decades under his rhinestone-studded belt,

Kenny Rogers claims this is his last tour,

but we may just call that gambler's bluff.

Finally, Lisa Hannigan has a new album out

and plays Londonderry and Belfast early December,

which is as good an excuse as any

for us to catch up with her in Dublin.

This song is called Snow.

# Heading from city to sea

# Just you and me

# Our boots creaking quietly

# We would never be here again

# Watching the snow falling down

# Watching the city lose colour and sound

# And we were looking

# To find in the feather sky

# The contour line from summer

# To Christmas time

# For the what

# For the when

# When you were the snow falling down

# And I was the city losing colour and sound

# And we were

# Sunk like treasure

# Sunk like treasure

# Sunk like treasure

# Sunk like treasure

# Heading from city to sea

# One facing east

# One looking westerly

# We would never be here again

# Watching the snow falling down

# Watching the city lose colour and sound

# And we were

# Sunk like treasure

# Sunk like treasure

# Sunk like treasure

# Sunk like treasure. #

We've got the Ulster Bank Belfast International Arts Festival

happening in October, then you've got Outburst in November.

Nothing, maybe, in December, then you've got Out To Lunch,

the boutique festival from the Cathedral Quarter happening.

So, is there a way of marrying those all together?

Is that something that could happen?

There are a dozen festivals in Edinburgh in a year,

one for every month - that's not a bad metric.

I think we should aim for something like that.

Again, I don't know what a city looks like

that has too many festivals.

But I do know what a city looks like that has too little.

-Because that's what this place was like 20 years ago.

-Yes.

But how many different audiences do we need? Belfast isn't that big.

Well, can you have too much culture?

I don't actually understand the question.

What is the society that has too many arts events,

too many cultural activities?

I think the hallmark of a healthy society

is a diverse and dynamic arts scene.

And I think one of the most encouraging things

with life in the city, and I speak as a generation,

a large number of us, my generation, who grew up hating the city,

and wanted to escape from it,

one of the things that has helped me learn to love this place

has been the work of Outburst and the International Festival

and the Cathedral Quarter Festival and the East Belfast Festival...

But are there too many, Shona?

Well, if you look at Edinburgh,

people have been asking this question for 70 years!

I know, but they...

The Edinburgh Fringe and the International Festival,

the Film Festival, the Book Festival,

they celebrate their 70th anniversary next year.

But while you are there, I really want to get your experience.

It all happens in one month.

Is there something about it being concentrated into one month

as opposed to what I feel sometimes are little empires of festivals

happening right throughout the 12 months?

You see, that isn't strictly true. That is just perception.

There are actually 12 major festivals in Edinburgh

that happen right across the year.

There are only four of them that will all happen at the one time.

But the perception is that they all happen at the one time

because it happens to be two of the biggest happen right in August.

Is that not a more successful strategy to have?

Even in Edinburgh, the question is asked all the time, too.

Should we be more supportive of the wider cultural sector all year round

and not put the emphasis on funding into these festivals?

And for me, it's kind of back to your point, Mark.

It should be both and both.

It shouldn't be either/or.

And if the festivals can provide an incredible platform,

that place where people just see something that inspires them,

that wows them,

and it provides a platform for local people to be able to showcase

their work to external audiences as well as internal,

then, to me, you kind of can't have too many.

Outburst Festival, ten years old this year.

What is the DNA of the festival? What is it?

Outburst started very much as a community festival,

as a space where people could share stories.

We use the word "queer" deliberately

because queer is very much on the outskirts,

it is the scout for the future, it is the fringes of things.

So while the work is LGBT work or LGBT themed work for the most part,

it is also about not doing the obvious.

I think that's why we love the word queer.

It is about developing local work

but also developing work with people from other parts of the world.

But provoking, as well.

-Absolutely.

-You must have known what you were doing,

starting up a festival like yours in Northern Ireland?

Absolutely, and I think that's why it's vital here.

Socially, things aren't probably the way they are in

a lot of bigger cosmopolitan cities.

You've got kind of raw material to play with,

something that is not set in stone.

And to me, that's what queer is, queer is always about the fringes.

So, the likes of John Waters coming over,

his only European appearance this year will be here in Belfast.

Yes, at the Outburst Festival.

I mean, if you are looking at somebody to embody

what queer culture is about, look no further than John Waters.

We sent one of his biggest fans to Baltimore to meet him.

Joe Lindsay.

Nowadays, Baltimore may be most famous as the backdrop

for the iconic series The Wire,

but before then, in more shocking and stranger ways,

it was the setting for the films

of the Pope of Trash himself, John Waters.

He filmed in his local community with local actors,

and he is coming to the Outburst Festival to tell us all about it.

Yes, folks, this isn't any cheap,

X-rated movie or any fifth-rate porno play.

This is the show you want.

Lady Divine's Cavalcade Of Perversion.

The sleaziest show on earth.

Not actors, not paid impostors, but real, actual filth.

John, we meet you

as you are about to come to the Outburst Festival in Belfast.

-Have you been to Belfast before?

-I've never been to Belfast.

So I'd love to go to a city I've never been to.

I've been to Ireland, but I've never been to Belfast.

So I'm looking forward to it.

You're very aware of the Outburst Festival?

I know about it, I've read about it.

-The ten year anniversary, which is good.

-That's right.

And I think it sounds perfect.

You made some of the most significant films

of the '60s, '70s and '80s.

I want to ask you about Hairspray.

-Yes?

-It seemed to have just changed everything.

I mean, all of a sudden, Hairspray was a Broadway musical,

and a global stage musical.

Then it was remade.

# Come on, baby! #

Yes, it is the gift that keeps on giving,

and I've seen it, now, in politically correct versions,

where a skinny black girl plays Tracy

and it makes no sense, but I kind of like that, too.

I think it's a Trojan horse that sneaks in.

Anyone that would dislike me, my values, but they don't notice.

Oh, my God! There are coloured people in my house!

I'm going to make a citizen's arrest!

The same values as all my other movies.

But it sneaks in and they don't notice.

So it's the only subversive film I ever made.

People say, when did you come out? That seems so square.

I'd never have a...

That's like a Bar Mitzvah or something! To me, I just figured,

well, every has to have figured that out. You know?

And I was the on the cover of Gay Times in like, 1972,

not because I was so brave,

it was the only people that asked me to be on the cover!

# The girl can't help it, she was born to please

# She can't help it the girl can't help it... #

There is a great sequence, I think, that sums up your film career

with Divine going down the street in the cha-cha heels.

-And you're obviously filming from a moving car.

-Correct.

And literally, everybody's head turns.

Everyone.

No-one just ignores, because he's dancing down the street.

It's just absolutely incredible.

Well, I can look at them, they don't see me, either.

They just see Divine.

And in Female Trouble, they do it, too.

But he has scars on his face, so they look away,

but then they don't want to be rude because he's handicapped.

Divine was not transgender.

Divine did not want to be a woman, ever.

He wanted to be a monster.

His drag persona of Divine, which obviously you helped create,

and you helped cultivate, was that very much emancipating for him?

Certainly it was, because he always said he wanted to be

a movie star, he wanted be Elizabeth Taylor.

But that was not going to happen in Lutherville, Maryland,

where we grew up.

But it did happen, and, in the end, I met Elizabeth Taylor,

she looked like Divine!

A little.

I don't mean that negatively.

Like Divine looking good.

You know. Not like Edna in Hairspray.

Didn't look like an old housewife.

But that's amazing, because Divine established this character

that basically frightened people,

but then when he did the exact opposite

and played a frumpy mother in Hairspray,

is when he got great reviews.

Wilbur, it's the times.

They are a-changing.

Somethin's blowin' in the wind.

He must have loved pushing that button, as well?

He did. He was scared, he said, "Can I get away with doing this?"

When I said, "Jump out of a car," and he was downtown

having to walk down the street in drag, he was scared.

It was like, we didn't have protection.

There were no film office, we didn't have permits.

We had been arrested for making a movie.

It was like committing a crime.

It wasn't like an action, a political action,

it was like terrorism against good taste.

And we would jump out and do it and then jump out and run.

We didn't set off a bomb, but it was...

it was in the spirit of that without hurting anybody.

HE LAUGHS

Obviously you assembled the Dreamlanders around you.

They were the people that were in my early films since Multiple Maniacs,

which I think is showing at this festival.

It's a movie that I made 47 years ago that just came out again

in America, restored and revived and repulsive!

They were my friends.

It's who I took LSD with

and who we hung around with and we did have

a definite group of people that was very mixed.

It was suburban bad kids, that went downtown to be beatniks

and black people and gay people

but none of the three of those groups

never hung around together, but we did.

And the cops, black cops, white cops, everybody hated us.

We were outcasts of any neighbourhood.

We were all looking for bohemia,

and that was I was looking for and I didn't know anything about it

until I read about Tennessee Williams in Life magazine.

So the most popular magazine in America corrupted me every week.

They told me about beatniks, about junkies, drugs, pot, hippies,

everything that they covered, I was eagerly reading about.

-This was your handbook for life?

-Yes.

Dreamland Studios was a joke,

because it was a bedroom at my parents' house

when I first started making eight millimetre movies.

This isn't one of those sick shows, is it?

You will see, sir, you will see.

THEY GRUNT

My parents were horrified by the movies - but, on Multiple Maniacs,

that's the front lawn the Cavalcade of Perversion is being shot on,

on their front lawn!

So they were supportive enough.

They didn't like what I was doing but they respected my business sense

that I could get a film made,

that I could get it shown, I could get it advertised,

but, "Can't you make a different kind of movie?"

That was the problem.

But I figured they just thought, well, what else could I have done?

Was there ever a point you thought, "Oh, I've gone too far?"

Well, what would have been going too far to me, I wouldn't have done.

I make movies about the grey area,

about how you far you can go and still be funny.

But if it wasn't funny, I wouldn't...

I mean, I'm not a child molester, I don't do a lot of Holocaust jokes.

Especially not being Jewish.

I think, if you're Jewish, you can...

I think it all depends on where you're coming from

to make the jokes,

for what you can get away with.

In this era in America of the Kardashians,

what is bad taste any more?

We seem to have gone right past it.

Well, to me, I don't like reality TV

because I think it makes the audience feel

that they should condescend to the people in it.

I think you're supposed to feel superior to the people in it.

I like to watch things, even if they're very strange, about things

I don't understand but I'm amazed at the people that are in it.

Even if they're hideous, even if they're evil, even if they're crazy.

Was there ever a point in your life that you thought,

"You know what, maybe I should stop and go into something else"?

Oh, I already have done that!

You know, I probably will never make another movie again,

-and I'm fine about it.

-Really?

My last two books were bestsellers,

my last movie was a financial flop, so...

I was going to ask, I mean, you've now got this other career

as a writer, and your books are brilliant.

Both the books did great.

So, I always knew a long time ago that you never depend on one career.

And I just like to tell stories.

So I have a spoken word show, I have art shows, I have movies -

I get deals still to write them.

I write the books. Doesn't matter to me.

I like them all equally.

They're equally as important to me.

-Officer!

-Yes, ma'am, can I help you?

Oh! Aaargh! Aargh!

That was Joe in Baltimore, meeting the legend that is John Waters -

or John Waters meeting the legend that is Joe Lindsay!

Quality, costs - so, how do you match that?

It's not always about financial return

in terms of numbers of hotel rooms for the night, or whatever.

There really doesn't seem to be an understanding in government,

a lot of it is short-term thinking

in terms of return for what they are putting in.

The social impact of the arts is huge.

We think of the arts as a business like any other - and it's not.

It has that element and that's important and tourism is great -

I love the idea that people want to come from somewhere else

to see something at Outburst.

Have funders said to you, "Great, John Waters, great,

"I Heart Alice, whatever you programmed -

"how many people came to see your play?"

-Do you have to go through those kinds of nuts and bolts?

-Absolutely.

One of the things that takes up a lot of our time in festivals

is funding reporting and saying how many bums on seats.

And that's important for us to know.

It's important to know for audience development,

who is coming to our shows and who we are missing a trick with.

And that's important for you, as well,

when you're programming the festival?

I mean, have you learned, in the last ten years,

what has worked and what hasn't worked, even within your own niche?

Absolutely.

I mean, for every John Waters event with hundreds of people,

there will be an event where maybe it is a very intimate event

with 50 people -

but those 50 people could be impacted hugely

because of a very intimate experience that they have.

I think that's a crucial point, that the arts don't exist

hermetically sealed off from the rest of society.

It plays a crucial role in the health and education of society.

But we hear that all the time, and people will say,

well, we still need hospital beds and we still need...

I know, but nobody is actually saying some child with meningitis

cannot get their medication

because Sinead Morrissey needs to write a poem.

That kind of logic is a little bit ridiculous

when you look at the arts budget.

Within the context of things, it's minuscule,

but it makes such a huge return to society.

It wouldn't even run the health service for a single day.

And yet some of those cuts, proportionately-speaking,

in relation to the art scene, is affected quite direly.

And the money that's already spent in the arts scene here,

it's the smallest dividend of all.

We're sitting here, talking about festivals.

Why not scrap festivals completely and fund the artists?

That's another one of those arguments.

It's not an either/or

instead of both and both.

As much as the artists are at the core of everything,

the vast majority of artists that I've have worked with in the past

are not skilled businesspeople.

They have no idea how to market their work,

so really good producers, really good programmers,

really good curators are as important, actually,

in order to create the right platform, draw audiences,

do all the research,

do the report-backs for the funding, all of the rest.

These two things are interdependent and it's not a kind of either/or.

And Then The Sun.

And then the sun came slicing sideways

Clearwater reflecting it, giving it slant

A gloss of rain, so quick and light that day, hardly made a sound

The thought of sheets hung out and drying on the line,

of seeds in soil and soil itself

The glutting ends of stems of leaves that will them to let fall

up and out and through the trees

The shape that shoots could take, of you and this moment as it happens

Our echoing hush as we try to hold the close music

of the blackbird in the bush.

And then the sun continued on,

Lough Neagh cooled under the firm keels of fishing boats

on the water's taut skin,

their painted hulls in pointed arcs an emblem of balance

so finely wrought that they could tell the weight of light or air

Each night, we walk along the shore, expecting still to find

your sturdy figure waist-deep in waders,

plumbing darkness, hauling it in,

but never again your grip on the reel

and never again the music of the blackbird nesting in your hand.

And that's it from The Arts Show.

You can keep up-to-date online and on radio.

Bye-bye.

And The Arts Show is on BBC Radio Ulster and BBC Radio Foyle

Tuesdays to Fridays at 6:30.

And find us online and on social media.