Best Production: The Rehearsal: Playing the Dane , Pan Pan Theatre’s deconstruction of Hamlet, directed by Gavin Quinn
Best Actor: Marty Rea as the procrastinating prince in Second Age Theatre’s Hamlet , directed by Alan Stanford
Best Actress: Olwen Fouere as the woman in her translation of Laurent Gaudé’s Sodome, My Love , directed by Lynne Parker.
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The Dublin Culture Trail, a new interactive website and iPhone app, has now become available, the Irish Times reports . The program allows visitors to Dublin city to virtually tour historic building, galleries and museums and view video footage, interviews and photographs related to the venues.
Some of the venues included are the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Trinity College Dublin, Project arts centre and the James Joyce centre.
The Times quotes Senator David Norris, speaking at the launch, saying: “The trail is fantastic because it combines creativity, imagination and new technology which together brings collections alive to everyone.”
The project is an initiative of the Temple Bar Cultural Trust.
A painting of John F. Kennedy Jr. by Cork-born artist Patrick Hennessy has risen in value to almost $100,000, after it was bought for $600 at an auction in 2003, the Irish Times reports. It’s for sale at a gallery in New Orleans.
The image depicts the U.S. president boarding air force one at Shannon in 1963. That would be the last time he would set foot in Ireland. He was assassinated later that year.
Time reporter Michael Parsons writes: “In 2003, the painting appeared at a small rural auction in the United States and was spotted by a collector in Dublin who bought it for $600. He brought it back to Ireland and, a year later, consigned it to auction at Whyte’s in Molesworth Street who estimated its value at €8,000-€10,000.”
The painting is believed to have been returned to the U.S. by a London dealer, who purchased the painting for $20,000 in 2004.
Irish Artists including Stephen Rea, Robert Ballagh, Felim Egan, Guggi and Pat Harris have put their support behind a campaign to send an Irish aid ship to Gaza as part of an international flotilla in late May.
The mission will take place exactly one year after the tragically failed “Freedom Flotilla” mission last year in which aid workers clashed with Israeli blockade enforcement officers.
A fundraiser entitled “Irish Art For Gaza” took place in Dublin, yesterday.
Guggi told Irish Independent reporters: “My heart is with the children of Gaza who are suffering at this time. I want to take part purely for humanitarian reasons. This is not about making a political statement of any kind.”
The building that has housed the Irish Cultural Centre in London since 1995 will be sold off at the hands of a Tory-controlled council. Hammersmith and Fulham Council has recently embarked on a massive cost-saving initiative to combat debt that is costing them almost £400,000 per month in interest, Mark Hennessy of the Irish Times reports.
The council may allow an interim, however, in which the centre could raise sufficient funds to purchase the building, which is valued at around £2 million.
The centre received a £175,000 government subsidy until 2007, when conservatives took control of the council.
The Irish Times quotes cultural chairman Jim O’Hara’s impassioned appeal to the council to act respectfully, saying: “If you are determined to go ahead and sell the centre at least give us an extension to the lease, so that we may have the time to raise the funds. If you do that, we both win. The council gets the funds that it says that it needs, we raise the funds, buy the building and continue the educational, welfare and welfare activities that we are involved in. I am appealing to you in this to be reasonable, to be fair and, above all, to use an old-fashioned word, to be honourable.”
Dublin’s Peacock Theatre will now have wheelchair access, Peter Crawley, of Irish Theatre Magazine, reports.
Forty-five years after its opening, the theatre has finally undergone an 80.000 euro refurbishment, including the installation of an elevator at street level. The building now meets Dublin City Council regulations.
“It’s more than forty years coming, frankly,” Abbey Director Fiach Mac Conghail, told Irish Theatre Magazine . The development corrects a situation he considered “a great source of moral embarrassment”.
Last year, Mac Conghail picketed his own theatre in promotion of disability rights.
Fiach Mac Conghail, director of Dublin’s Abbey theatre, is on a mission to find financial support for his theatre abroad, Boston.com reports.
Faced with serious budget shortfall, he has teamed up with ArtsEmerson to Bring Mark O’Rowe’s “Terminus” to Boston, in an effort to generate interest in Irish cultural exchange, and perhaps a few donations. The production is part of “Imagine Ireland”, an Irish government initiative that will see over 40 arts events produced in the United States in 2011.
The Abbey relies heavily on government subsidy, receiving half of its required 14 million Euro operation costs from state sources. The rest of the budget is made up of ticket sales and fundraising.
“The Abbey wouldn’t have survived its first 25 years without’’ the United States, Mac Conghail told boston.com reporters. “The diaspora funded the Abbey at the start, before there was a functioning government that could step in.”
www.imagineireland.ie
Two international curators have been chosen to work on the Dublin Contemporary arts festival, the Irish Times reports.
They are Chilean art critic Christian Viveros-Fauné and Brussels-based artist Jota Castro. The previous curator, Rachel Thomas, left her tenured position last month. “The pair were headhunted by the board of Dublin Contemporary and both are familiar with the Irish art scene,” writes Times reporter Ronan O’Greevy.
The festival had been running behind schedule, and organizers worried about its future viability. “We are less worried now,” project director Lesley Tully told the paper.
The festival is the biggest of its kind to ever take place in Ireland and will run from September 6th to October 31st. Program details will be released next month.
The Irish Independent Newspaper has exposed millions in wasted arts spending. They report today that the Irish state spent almost 2.5 million euro planning a revamp of the National Concert Hall that won’t go ahead, and another 400,000 on consultations on whether the Abbey Theatre should move to a new site in Dublin city.
The department of tourism, culture and sport had originally planned to spend up to 350 million euro on redevelopments for both institutions, but a spokesperson confirmed that the projects had been shelved indefinitely as a result of the financial crisis. The money, however, would not be wasted, the spokesperson told the independent, saying: “Since 2007 some €2.4m has been spent by the National Development Finance Agency, the Office of Public Works and the NCH on technical, legal and financial advice for the project. A significant amount of that advice was site specific and remains relevant to the concert hall and any future development at the site.”
BEST ACTOR
Louis Lovett – as B and Brian in B for Baby- the Abbey Theatre, written by Carmel Winters and directed by Mikel Murfi
Malcolm Adams – Tim Hartigan in Slattery’s Sago Saga, written by Arthur Riordan, directed by Jo Mangan for Performance Corporation
Marty Rea – Hamlet in Hamlet, written by William Shakespeare and directed by Alan Stanford for Second Age Theatre Company
Karl Shiels – as Quinn in Penelope, written by Enda Walsh and directed by Mikel Murfi for Druid Theatre Company
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