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Looking back on 25 y e a r s o f t h e a r t s festival
AN EXHIBITION of posters, photographs, and other memorabilia from the past 25 years of the Galway Arts Festival will be opened tonight in the foyer of the J a m e s Hardiman Library, NUI, Galway. In their element: Twenty Five years ofm the Galway Arts Festival will be formally opened on Thursday July 18, by NU1G president Dr Iognaid 6 Muircheartaigh. This will be followed by an address by Kieran Corcoran, a Galway Arts Festival board member. This exhibition, conceived to mark the I festival's 25th anniversary will contain a selection of the material from the Galway Arts Festival Archive, which has been presented to the university and the library by the board of the festival. It will include many photographs, posters, and programmes illustrating its development from a small local arts festival, to Ireland's premier international arts event. It is fitting that NUIG should be home to this archive, given the connections between the university and the festival. The exhibition will be open to the public from Friday July 19, from Monday to Friday between 9am and 5pm, and will run to the end of August. Kernan Andrews
Standing at death's door
BY K I E R A N HAYES
A story for every festival poster
TED TURTON, one of the founding members of the Galway Arts Festival will give a talk this week on the history of the festival and its many weird and wonderful posters. Every Picture Tells A Story, is the tide of Turton's talk. It will be held in the foyer of the James Hardimann Library on Saturday July 20 at 4pm. Turton will talk about the posters, their history, the festival, and its success. There willbe plenty of stories about past festivals and be will also have some collectors item to give away. Along with Ollie Jennings, Mary Coughlan. Joe Boske. and others, Turton was involved in the first Galway Arts Festival in 1978. He's still on the board of the festival, but when he started, did he ever think it would grow into the international success story it is today? "No, we were only young." he says. "I was one of the oldest at 28 and we just had a ball, trying to think about what we were doing and send applications to the Arts Council. When we got the money we would say Oh, what will do with this now?' We never thought it would grow into what it has become." So, 25 years later, what is Turton's most favourite memory of the festival so far? ""I think seeing Footsbarn doing Hamlet" he says. "'Dial was a fabulous memory seeing them pull the whole thing onto the stage and running about into the audience. No one had ever seen anything like it before. Also meeting Gerry Harding, who had been in the X-Files. He did a show on Mark Twain. He's a six foot four Texan but a really sweet guy. Some of the things that went wrong have been hilarious. Showbiz is so strange. You spend a year planning the festival and it's over in 12 days and you say 'What happened there?' and then you start planning for the next one." Turton will have plenty stories like these on Saturday at 4pm. For a slice of alternative Galway history, it's a talk well worth going to hear.
WITHIN WEEKS of his mother's death Peter Stanford was getting phone calls from concerned friends, anxious that he was taking it all rather badly: invitations to dinner, the cinema, the phone number for a bereavement counsellor. "I didn't want to see a counsellor, I just needed time to grieve and reflect," says Stanford. We are afraid of death, and have effectively anaesthetised ourselves to it, he believes. Death is a kind of failure, any emotional or intellectual engagement with death unhealthy introspection. Sweep it into the hospices, the hospitals. Get on with life. "At some point we all die, we just put off thinking about it," he said. His mother and her generation had greater intimacy with death. The tradition of waking a body in the house made death's presence real, made it clear that "life leaves the body", whereas Stanford's first encounter with a dead body was at the age of 37. His mother's death was made more poignant by the birth of his daughter a few weeks later. The proximity of life and death
haunted him, as he imagined that some essence of his mother's life had found its way into his baby daughter. A Catholic education that had placed more emphasis on hell than heaven did not provide a context for his grief. Certainly, he found visions of what Mark Twain called a '10 cent heaven', a day-glo earth cleansed of sin and suffering, unsatisfactory. "In the spiritual supermarket we get consumser ideas of heaven. For us the idea of re incarnation might be comforting. The true understanding of the Buddhist view is that rebirth is undesirable. Heaven is never being born again." For Stanford, researching and writing Heaven: a Traveller's Guide was a comforting and cathartic experience. The book offers a history of humanity's attempts to define heaven, from images of St Peter at the pearly gates, to Hildegard de Bingen's vision of mystical union with God. We can draw sustenance and solace from the stories and myths humanity has drawn from death's deep well, says Stanford. We need to talk about the central
fact and central mystery of death. Looking it in the eye, we discover greater joy and vitality in living. A moment in the last days of his mother's life was a "glimpse of something more, of another dimension to life beyond what we see". She was in hospital following an operation when she started singing softly, gazing at the ceiling, her features tracing a faint smile. It sounded like Gregorian chant, though she had no knowledge of music and had not sung since she was a little girl. When the end came, it was "utterly peaceful, as if she were just popping out to somewhere familiar." Stanford finally resists the temptation to catagorise heaven, put a face on the unknown. The precincts of faith surpass what can be rationally proved or examined under a microscope. "1 think St Augustine was right for once in his life when he wrote that heaven is ineffable." Peter Stanford will give a talk in the Radisson SAS Hotel on Thursday 18 July at 4pm as part of the Galway Arts Festival. Price 5 .
Bookshop Expansion
W e have expanded our bookshop floor space by 700 sq ft Large new area devoted t o Art, Photography, History, Archaeology, Classical Studies and Philosophy. Thousands of new interesting titles just in. Publishers overstocks, bargain and secondhand books. Open this Sunday
Charlie Byrnes's Bookshop
The Cornstore, Middle St.Tel/Fax 561766