We’ve had quite the few days at the Kilkenny Arts Festival. Now, in it’s 39th year, it’s Kilkenny’s biggest festival and offers a massive range of arts for 10 days every August. It’s also the time of a year where a massive buzz rises up in the city and everybody goes crazy for 10 days. It’s pretty magical.
For the past few years, some of our lot have been working on the social media side of the festival (Ken McGuire, John Morton, Ross Costigan) and running around filming events, shooting photos, writing previews, tweeting, facebooking, blogging, archiving, the whole shebang. And this year is no different with a whole lot of running around being done over the first weekend of the festival.
Of course, we always have a sneaky grá for the theatre side of things and this year is no different. We were incredibly lucky to see The Globe Theatre’s debut Irish performance on Friday night in the Castle Yard as they performed As You Like It in the evening sun to a capacity audience. It was an amazing piece of theatre and it was an honour to be there for such an historical moment for theatre in Kilkenny. We also got to catch the chat on directing Shakespeare between the director of As You Like It James Dacre and Fiach Mac Conghail of the Abbey Theatre which proved to be very insightful. The cast of As You Like It were also great fun as they talked to a packed house in the Parade Tower yesterday evening, touching on their backgrounds, process and life on the road.
One of the major highlights of the weekend for us was the beautiful, poignant Swimming With My Mother by Coiscéim in The Watergate Theatre. A gorgeous piece of dance, performance and documentary performed by David Bolger and his mother Madge, we loved it. It was one of the best performances we’ve ever seen at the festival and the amount of buzz about it in the Twittersphere and beyond has ensured that it’s already one of the big hits of this years festival.
Of course, there’s 7 more days to go and a whole lot more to look forward to! If you want to follow any of our team as they dive into the sights and sounds of the festival over the next few days, you’ll find them on Twitter at the following handles: Ken McGuire (@kenmcguire), John Morton (@mohnjorton), Ross Costigan (@rosscostigan).
For more on the festival, check out KilkennyArts.ie
Photos by Ross Costigan. There are no zombies in these photos.
