Analysis: An oral history of the festival sees artists discussing events which have since become favourites among audiences who saw them live
Since 1978, the Galway International Arts Festival has evolved, grown and showcased a fusion of local and international artists. The nature of such live festivals, and their audiences, means that a wide range of events across theatre, music, comedy, and visual arts take place within a packed schedule each summer.
Artists, acts, and audiences return to Galway over the years and decades to be part of a shared experience that such a festival offers. As the festival looks towards its 50th anniversary in coming years, it is also timely to explore how a festival and the culture of festival-going is remembered and documented today.
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From RTÉ Archives, Eileen Magnier reports on the 1998 Galway Arts Festival
Programming reflects shifting tastes of audiences, emerging and established acts and new international influences as well as the infrastructure and landscape of a city and region such as Galway. Think of venues that pop-up and are repurposed to allow audiences to experience the festival in sites they otherwise would not be able to: the Festival Big top, the former An Post sorting centre, a disued 19th century distillery and even a university sports complex. The city and its spaces respond and become part of the festival experience.
The travelling theatre company, Footsbarn, left their Cornwall base in the UK in 1981 to travel Europe performing their 'theatre in a tent' show. In 1984, the troupe performed a version of Shakespeare's King Lear in Galway, highlighting the growing early international acts coming to the festival. Local groups, including Druid Theatre and Macnas, also performed in many of the early festivals through the 1980s and 1990s.
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From RTÉ Archives, Padraig Ó Catháin reports for RTÉ News on Footsbarn's production of King Lear at the Galway Arts Festival in 1984
The music programme saw numerous highlights in those early years. Sinéad O'Connor played a surprise gig as part of a set by The Stunning at the now demolished Warwick Hotel in Salthill during the 1991 festival. Local press reviews of the gig from the GIAF archive recall "Sheer magic. Two hundred of us cramped into the tiny front room to see The Stunning play with a few guests. For fifteen glorious minutes at the end of a powerful set we were captivated by Sinéad’s vocal tones."
The Festival Big Top would follow by the early 1990s and remains the main venue for the biggest of music acts programmed annually. The Big Top at Fisheries Field has housed some of the most memorable GIAF music acts, from De Dannan, De La Soul, Chic and Nile Rodgers and Brian Wilson to the recent run of sold-out gigs by local festival favourites, The Saw Doctors. International theatre groups who have come to the festival include Chicago’s Steppenwolf and Illinois’ Northlight Theatre Company, along with Cornwall’s Kneehigh Theatre.
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From RTÉ Archives, Charlie Bird reports for RTÉ News on President Mary Robinson officially opening the 16th Galway Arts Festival in July 1993
The GIAF archive collects and preserves the history of the festival and its artists since those founding years, creating a cultural memory of how and what has made the festival an annual event. A new oral history archive project is recording interviews with local and visiting participating GIAF artists each July and are hosted online by the University of Galway Library Digital Repository.
To date, conversations have been recorded with Enda Walsh, David Mach, Patricia Piccinini, Jennifer Cunningham, Karen Cox, Mark O'Rowe, Diana Copperwhite, Lucy Caldwell and others to form a living archive of the festival and its artists. This has allowed a new record of GIAF to be captured directly from the artists. Recent GIAF events are discussed during the oral history conversations that have since become festival favourites among audiences who saw them live.
Misterman
The fabled Corcadorca production of Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs in 1996 saw Eileen Walsh and Cillian Murphy become part of Irish cultural lore. The play came to Galway as part of the 1997 festival, continuing its celebrated run. Murphy and Walsh combined again for the new production of Misterman during the 2011 festival. In his oral history, Walsh recounts how he originally had played the sole character of Thomas, before Murphy took up the role in a truly mesmerising and unforgettable performance where every inch of the Black Box Theatre space was used.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Arena, a review of David Mach's piece The Oligarch's Nightmare which was exhibited at the 2023 GIAF
David Mach
Turner-prize nominated Scottish visual artist David Mach has been a frequent visitor to the GIAF Gallery over the last decade. His artworks have broken new ground, literally. In his exhibition Rock 'n' Roll, the concrete floor of the festival gallery was smashed and dug open as a boat was landed on the wreckage. In 2023 The Oligarch's Nightmare, a car was upended with plumes of blackened flames emitting from the engine. During the recording of Mach’s oral history, he carefully crafted some of his collage pop-art style artworks as he spoke, a quiet moment against the backdrop of his impactful installations.
The Rooms series
Enda Walsh’s series of theatrical installations in collaboration with GIAF artistic director Paul Fahy began with Room 303 in 2014, voiced by Niall Buggy. The works each feature a room from a typical Irish house meticulously recreated in which a small number of audience members enter and listen to a voice-over of a character associated with the space, voiced by a leading actor.
The idea is simple but captivating. Walsh discussed how he developed the series with Fahy and how the Rooms series "brought me back to when I was a kid and started getting interested in literature and character and all of that type of thing… I thought what a beautiful idea, and then we did it".
From Galway International Arts Festival, Enda Walsh discusses the Rooms series with GIAF artistic director Paul Fahy
Patricia Piccinini
The Australian artist has been a return visitor to Galway with her instantly recognisable artworks of curious creatures and animal-human hybrids. In 2015, Skywhale was a gigantic inflatable that hovered silently over the city throughout the festival, keeping a friendly eye over proceedings below. Piccinini discussed how the "Skywhale is a chimaera... and how evolution is a very inspiring process for me and plays an important role in every sculpture that I make, and indeed these sculptures ask if these changed imagined creatures could be part of evolution."
Jennifer Cunningham
Galway artist Jennifer Cunningham discussed her exhibition, After the Future, which featured mixed-media work depicting a post-industrial urban landscape in various states of decay and eerily absent of social connection between people. The works featured abandoned fairgrounds, overgrown glass houses, untended car parks and ghostly figures. "When you place a figure in a piece", Cunningham says, "you then place ourselves in the piece as well." She designed later GIAF festival posters with the theme of journeying, entitled The Wayfarer and We are all navigating.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
