FROM World Fringe Day to Angela’s Ashes premier, to Future Islands at Dolan’s, this summer is rocking Limerick. Let us begin the Beguine.
Old Crescent RFC has seeded another annual festival with Vlad and Anton in the Rosbrien Marquee for Limerick Summer Music, to which Emma Langford’s set was catnip.
New company Tiger’s Eye gave us a kicking Wilde with ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ promenaded on Georgian grounds. Alliance Francaise Limerick had to turn latecomers from Belltable with Tres Court International Film Festival busting sales and seats.
A theatre premier ‘PUNT’ emerged from the Honest Arts stable and is touring international festivals. Belltable:Connect’s development programme has groomed an overseas festival winner already with Ann Blake’s ‘The Morning After the Life Before’.
Limerick Writers’ Centre never lets up with its varied creative output and Ormston House is a fecund hub and host to multi media events.
Visual arts is having no less a vital time. From the ether, Jack B Yeats and Paul Henry lure busloads to Hunt Museum with ‘Contrasting Visions’. Limerick City Gallery of Art in Pery Square is scoped out with three parallel shows, Chris Doris and ‘The Space Between’; Isabella Walsh asks ‘Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm’ and from Ronnie Hughes, ‘Strange Attractors’.
Storytellers Narrative 4 worked with Corbally artist Maurice Quillinan to lead an urban garden community mural.
Then Askeaton filled out with its Contemporary Arts festival and street installations created over weeks for and in the village. It was here that Carl Doran of Contact Studios launched another book littered and lettered with cats.
Read all about LGBT Pride on After Dark this week for another walk on the wild side; Pig’n’Porter was the contrast festival sharing world tag ruby honours in Rosbrien. Very soon Mungret will platform its own festival with stellar Nathan Carter as poster boy.
Limerick Printmakers opened an exhibition commissioned by Doras Luimní on Monday July 17 at 7pm in CB1 Gallery, fronting O’Connell Street. It’s supported by the Chilean Embassy – also laying on music for the launch.
This ‘War-Torn Children’ show focuses on how children, their families and communities are affected by war. The aim of the show is to raise awareness of the human impact of war and injustice, and to promote a culture of hospitality and welcome for refugees seeking sanctuary from war and persecution.
‘War-Torn Children’ will be accompanied by a series of lunchtime workshops and other events at the CB1 gallery.
And clock this for another and linked headline from Limerick Printmakers: ‘I am an asylum seeker but that is not my identity, it’s my experience’.
This statement informs art work by Vincent Pikamu and Leslie and is ongoing at Belltable, 69 O’Connell Street into Saturday 22. As part of Printmakers Centenary Commemoration programme, five studio members each worked with a group or organisation within local areas to help them express their feelings on living here, in a visual way.
Then stroll through Bedford Row of a Sunday to find 18 artists displaying works for sale. Such ArtLimerick is brave and brightening in our dodgy climes. Peruse their work after brunch by the rivers, from 12noon to 4pm until the final Sunday, August 6.
Signing off, I defy anyone to reason that Foynes Air Show this Saturday, flying boats and jets in breathtaking unison, is not choreography for the fearless. Have your gaze and soul lifted skyward. We’re in the gutter often enough; Wilde knew something of the world.
Feature image: 7″ ‘Feathers & Hallways’ by Future Islands
