One of the first festivals this year to welcome members of the public "in person", albeit on a limited scale, gets under way today in Carlow.
'Woman in the Machine' is one of the main themes of the Carlow Arts Festival, featuring as it does dozens of art installations and projects by women artists and performers, as well as a film of the same name, throughout its 10-day programme.
Last year's festival was one of many victims of the pandemic-related restrictions and this time around the organisers spent much time preparing for a socially-distanced version, settling on the former Braun factory, and its 30 acres of space, on the edge of the town as a venue.
The film 'Woman in the Machine', is the work of Emma Lucy O'Brien the CEO of Visual Arts in Carlow as well as Jo Mangan, artistic director of Carlow Arts Festival.
"Together Carlow Arts Festival and Visual have gone into this incredible industrial site, Braun, and we have created this project Woman in the Machine, which is mostly female artists, and considers women and technology, Emma Lucy O'Brien said.
She described it as "an enormous production," with over 70 artists involved. "We're running a full gamut with this one, just bringing as much as we can into this extraordinary space.
"It's going to be the highlight of the festival programme but also Visual Carlow's summer programme so you have two big cultural institutions from Carlow coming together to create this."
Jo Mangan said running the festival is a relief in itself and the culmination of much work in recent months: "It's brilliant that we're back making work happen for audiences.
"It's limited audiences, because we're still operating under really significant Covid restraints, so we're talking 15 people at a time, bringing people onsite to the various events that we're running, over a longer period of time.
"So what it means is that rather than putting on a show for an hour and having 5,000 people turning up, we're in a position where we're putting on a show across 10 hours and having 15 people show up at a time.
"We're right back at the beginning of the whole festival season again. We're part of the light at the end of the tunnel, we're looking towards the future, I'm excited for colleagues who are running festivals later in the summer who are really going to be able to build on all of the successes that we will have had in this period where we will have had people onsite."
The festival is receiving funding for its 'Woman in the Machine' project from the Arts Council through its Brightening Air season, which is supporting several festivals around the country during this month, in a variety of venues.
Performances in Carlow, as well as 'Woman in the Machine', will include circus, dance, art installations, roller-skating, and even gardening.
Zoom is "playing no part" in this year's festival, according to Jo Mangan. "Even where we're talking about work that isn't live, we're talking about work that's in a virtual reality format so 360-immersive work where you can physically go to the festival campus in an avatar and experience a digital version of it, and it's live and you'll be able to interact with other humans.
"But people certainly in Carlow and in the environs around it, and thankfully now people can travel inter-county, are really excited to get back outside, to get meeting friends and family, and to have those extraordinary cultural experiences that we've all missed over the last year and more."
