In Belfast, Gemma Mae Halligan is practising to be a horse. Specifically, she is to be one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Beautiful Bones, at this weekend’s Spraoi festival. “Maybe it’s apt,” she says, laughing. “I come from a family with great horsey history, including, way back, Grand National winners from Waterford.”
Halligan runs Amadan Ensemble with her husband, Jude Quinn. “We specialise in physical theatre,” she says. “Clown and buffoon. Jude is a mime as well as a clown.”
In preparation for Spraoi, which takes over Waterford’s streets this weekend, Halligan has also been rehearsing in Glasgow, with Alan Richardson’s Surge, who are creating the show. “I have been doing intensive rehearsals with the other horses. We pull four trombonists around on these crazy contraptions. Minus the trombonists, it’s all in a normal day’s work.
“I have a very fabulous costume that in no way resembles a horse,” she says. “We have been told not to do any horsey movements – though I’m finding it hard not to want to break into a trot. If someone in the crowd waved a carrot I might be delighted, but I may then have to make them regret it. Such is the nature of the Apocalypse.”
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In Waterford, Shauna Farrell is getting ready to participate in the festival’s finale, on Sunday. “I’m pretty sure the first Spraoi parade I was in was when I was 13, so that would be 26 years ago,” she says, laughing. An actor and a drama facilitator, Farrell credits Spraoi, and Waterford Youth Arts, with influencing her career choice. “I ended up falling in love with the magic,” she says.
She describes the logistical triumph of getting more than 200 people costumed and rehearsed. “Clare Horgan does the costumes – she’s a genius. We break it down: there will be nine or 10 distinct sections, all telling part of the story.” Some include dance troupes, or acrobatics; some are performance-based, with dialogue and audience interaction. “We moved here when I was 10, from Dublin,” she says. “That was the first year Spraoi happened, and I remember thinking, wow, this place is amazing.”
It’s a sentiment that Mike Leahy, the festival’s artistic director, picks up on as key to the atmosphere the organisers aim to create. As Spraoi prepares to celebrate its 30th birthday this bank holiday weekend, Leahy casts his mind back to 1993, recalling a city beset by strikes and with a periodic name for trouble. Now, he says, “the whole town, its vibe, its reputation, it has come up in bounds and possibilities. From the early days of the Red Kettle Theatre to the Garter Lane Arts Centre, Waterford Walls to Spraoi itself, the arts have played an integral part.”
This year’s Spraoi is perhaps the ultimate in fully accessible arts: you don’t have to go into a venue; you don’t have to buy a ticket. As Leahy says, it’s “three days of entertainment without a wristband in sight”.
Street arts have a fascinating history. Performances in public places, paid for by soliciting money from the ad-hoc audience, are recorded across cultures, dating back thousands of years. In ancient Rome, street performances would take place at crossroads, which were natural meeting points. (In a nice piece of trivia, the word “trivia” comes from the Latin for an intersection of three roads – where snippets of news would be posted for passersby to read.)
Street arts have been evolving in Ireland since the community-arts movement began to grow in the 1960s and 1970s. What defines them is that they take place away from formal venues – “on a street, a car park, a forest, a mountaintop, the side of a building, a brownfield site, a warehouse, a car showroom”, says Lucy Medlycott of the Irish Street Arts, Circus and Spectacle Network. They have “been on a journey” and are “becoming more cool, more recognised and more professional”.
Leahy recalls the early days in Ireland, when the Galway-based spectacle-theatre company Macnas emerged, having been inspired by the Spanish collective Els Comediants on their visit to the city in 1985. “We brought them back in the 1990s,” he says of the Barcelona company. But, he admits, “we also did bad shows, shows with naive content, maybe badly made shows – but no one had seen anything like it, so there was nothing to quantify it against.” He is proud to be able to say that “the audience has come along with us”.
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Medlycott is similarly proud of street arts’ accessibility – but she adds that she and her colleagues encounter certain frustrations when it comes to arguing for proper institutional support. She describes how, during Covid, people talked about bringing the arts outdoors as if it were a new thing, adding: “The Arts Council’s new three-year plan” – the latest iteration of its Making Great Art Work strategy, launched in July – “everything they aspire to do, it’s what our art forms do already, and always have.”
Despite this, she says, street arts and spectacle get just 2.5 per cent of the overall funding pot, even as her organisation has grown from just 10 members in 2012 to more than 200 in 2022.
Such talent should be nurtured and supported rather than left to the vagaries of crowds and the weather, Medlycott believes. “Street arts have many, many different tendrils, different versions,” she says, citing both the larger organisations – such as Macnas, the Fidget Feet aerial-dance company and Spraoi itself – and the smaller groups and individual performers that her organisation works with, helping them find ways to access State support, so they can create new work and not keep having to repeat past performances simply to keep the show, literally, on the road.
Medlycott’s own route into street arts was via sculpture, when her tutor at Limerick School of Art & Design, the late Martin Folan, asked his students to question why their work should be in a gallery. “Why can’t we take it to the street?” he asked. “He was really interested in social change,” she says. “And I was very interested in art that didn’t stay in a gallery and cater to the people who see art all the time.” One thing led to another and, inspired by Folan, the group made work for the 1992 St Patrick’s Day parade.
“We had a warehouse down in the docks. We called it the Dream Factory. We got cars from the scrapyard and we built sculptures. And they had to be big, because you can’t do a little, tiny, nice pretty thing going down the street for tens of thousands of people.” Soon, she says, she was asking herself why you would struggle to sell tickets for an indoor show when there was a potential audience of thousands out on the streets, ready to watch your street art. “That’s where people are – and they are not your average audience. You have multi-generations, multi-languages, multi-economics, multi-everything.”
New companies and performers are emerging all the time, including Twisted Lane, Síolta Circus and Maleta, aka Alex Allison – who, as Medlycott says, tours all over Europe and is “now one of Ireland’s most world-renowned street artists, but he’s not known here. Isn’t that funny?”
“The arts talk a lot about accessibility, about how to get people involved,” Leahy says. “But it isn’t difficult. We have generations involved. We have about 500 people volunteering, and an age range in the parade from 10 to 90. People here think it’s the norm,” he says, and pauses. “It should be.”
Spraoi runs around Waterford city from Friday August 4th until Sunday August 6th; the Irish Street Arts, Circus and Spectacle Network is hosting a series of events during the festival, at Garter Lane, that aim to support artists, with invited international programmers present; you can find out more and register at isacs.ie
Five alive at Spraoi 2023
Beautiful Bones Created by Scotland’s Surge, this street spectacle and “musical pandemonium” turns the dour rituals of death on their head to create a colourful, sensual celebration of life. It’s like a mash-up of Mardi Gras and Day of the Dead, with music and sound design by award-winning composer Stephen Deazley.
Area 051 The annual Spraoi parade, which begins on Sunday at 9.30pm, has hundreds of costumed performers and bespoke floats, full of light, sound, music and special effects, weaving through the city’s medieval streets at night. This year’s Area 051 extraterrestrial theme concludes with fireworks launched from the river Suir.
Farmyard Circus Warm and cheery, family-friendly and farm life-inspired, this circus spectacle includes group acrobatics, juggling, theatre and live music. Expect an amazing display of group acrobatics and juggling using hay bales, wheelbarrows, a tractor tyre and even an old scarecrow.
Follow Me The Belgian parkour company Be Flat take you on a spectacular city centre tour as they tumble, climb and somersault their way across the urban architecture in a playful collective journey through public space.
Mirage A “360-degree dance performance” by Compagnie Dyptik. Fences and barbed wire, rusty metal sheets on roofs, hanging flags, solid footsteps striking the ground with elegance, chins up and colourful clothes carefully put together: this is the image of the Palestinian Balata camp, in the West Bank, which has inspired the show.
