Yeats Festival, Sligo,

28th July –10th August 2007

This year’s Yeats Festival in association with the Yeats International Summer School, runs from July 28th July – August 10th 2007.

The festival line-up features a diverse programme of literature, music and drama, with a combination of lunchtime events (on weekdays at 1.10pm at the Yeats Memorial Building) and evening performances (at the Hawk’s Well Theatre and the Model and Niland Gallery at 8.30 pm). This year’s Festival comes guaranteed to please the most discerning!

 Monday 30th July 8.30 pm The Model Arts and Niland Gallery

€10 (€8 concessions YISS students free)

Richard Murphy

Richard Murphy was born at Milford House near the Mayo-Galway border in 1927. He spent five years of his early childhood in Ceylon . Educated at boarding schools in Ireland and England , he won a scholarship to Oxford at 17 and studied English under C.S. Lewis. From 1951 until 1980 he lived mostly in Claddaghduff, Connemara . He then moved to Dublin in 1980.

His poetry collections include The Archaeology of Love (Dolmen, 1955); Sailing to an Island (Faber, 1963); The Battle of Aughrim (Knopf, and Faber, 1968; LP recording 1969); High Island (Faber 1974); High Island: New and Selected Poems (Harper and Row, 1975); Selected Poems (Faber 1979); The Price of Stone (Faber 1985); The Price of Stone and Earlier Poems (Wake Forrest, 1985); New Selected Poems (Faber, 1989); The Mirror Wall (Dublin, Wolfhound Press, 1989); and In The Heart Of The Country: Collected Poems (Oldcastle, Co Meath, Gallery Press, 2000). His awards include the A.E Memorial Award (1951); first prize, Guinness Awards, Cheltenham (1962); British Arts Council Awards (1967 and 1976); Marten Toonder Award (1980); Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1969); American-Irish Foundation Award (1983). In 1993 a unique memoir of his life and times The Kick was published by Granta, constructed from astonishingly detailed diaries kept over the course of five decades. Now he divides his time between Dublin and the Western Cape, South Africa, where his daughter and her family reside.

Tuesday 31st July 1.10pm Yeats Memorial Building

€5(€3 concessions)

Poetry Reading with Tom Morgan and Damian Smyth

Tom Morgan was born in Belfast in   1943.

His collections are The Rat-Diviner (Dublin, Beaver Row Press, 1987); Nan of the Falls Rd Curfew (Beaver Row Press, 1990), which was nominated for the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Awards; In Queen Mary’s Gardens (Galway, Salmon Publishing,1991); and Ballintrillick in the Light of Ben Whiskin (Lagan Press, 2006). He has collaborated with artists Patric Coogan, Brendan Ellis and Catherine McWilliams in joint poetry-painting exhibitions in Sligo, Belfast , Galway, Dublin and New York , and has worked with composer Frank Lyons for the Visconic Arts Festival in Belfast .

His concern for Belfast and his love for Sligo is evident, particularly his interest in place names and local history. He is indebted to Francis Crean for his interest, knowledge and sense of humour. The poems testify to the hope that poets and artists have the edifying vision that contributes to society whether it is urban or rural.

He lives in Belfast and Ballintrillick, Co Sligo .

Damian Smyth was born in Downpatrick, Co Down, in 1962.

His collection are Downpatrick Races ( Belfast , Lagan Press, 2000); and The Down Recorder (Lagan Press, 2004). He has also written a stage play, Soldiers of the Queen , which was premiered in Downpatrick, 2002 and later staged at the Belfast Festival at Queen's, and on tour. It is published by Lagan Press, 2002. He is a former deputy and arts editor of Fortnight magazine and former editor of Causeway, the journal of cultural traditions. He is a former reviewer of theatre in Ireland for the London Independent and has written and reviewed extensively on theatre in Ireland as well as on literature, visual arts and cultural politics for a variety of publications and on television and radio. He has edited Joseph Tomelty: All Souls' Night and Other Plays (2002); John Hewitt: Two Plays (1999); and Martin Lynch: Five Plays (2002). He has been Public Affairs Officer with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland since 1995.

Tuesday 31st July 8.00pm Yeats Memorial Building

€5 (€3 concessions)

Claire Roche Harpist

Claire Roche is well-known for her enchanting harp music and song, She will perform the poetry of W.B.Yeats set to music and other compositions .

9.00pm Irish Dancing, Sancta Maria Hotel,

Strandhill €15

Wednesday 1st August 1.10 pm Yeats Memorial Building

€5 €3 concessions)

Carmel Gunning

Carmel Gunning was born in Geevagh Co. Sligo into a musical family.

She was taught her music by her late father Tommie Nangle.

She is an All Ireland Slow Airs Champion and All Ireland Scor Champion (Instruments).

She celebrates 30 years of teaching and some of her past pupils are top class in the world of traditional music today in traditional singing and tinwhistle and flute playing.

She is Director of Queen Maeve School of Music and Summer School and

she also tutors the MA and BA students in Limerick University. The Queen Maeve Summer School Festival is held in Sligo town every August. She gives monthly workshops in singing, tinwhistle and flute in Sligo town. She has written two books "The Mountain Top" and "The Maid of Gurteen". She travels to festivals at home and abroad and has appeared on television in Ireland, England and Australia.

 Wednesday 1st August 8.30 pm The Model Arts and Niland Gallery

€10 ( €8 concessions)

Poetry Reading and Music

with Richard Douglas Pennant, poet

Darragh Morgan, violinst and Abdullah Chhadeh, Syrian

Qanun

A truely unique evening of music and poetry with Welsh poet Richard Douglas Pennant, Darragh Morgan and Abdullah Chhadeh

Richard Douglas Pennant

Although Richard has written poetry since adolescence, a systematic and mature approach to his creative passion arrived only later in life. However, he has never ceased to be inspired by his native soil, its rugged landscape and particularly the tales and legends of the Celtic deities. More recently, Richard draws inspiration from the Hellenic world and the richness of the myths and civilization of ancient Greece . A keen traveler, Richard finds himself repeatedly drawn back to the Near East , whose ancient stone monuments are both beautiful and deeply moving, representing what he considers to be the universal aspirations and achievements of mankind. Human relationships, the power of love and friendship, and the beauty of the ordinary experiences of life, all play a part in his writing. Since publishing his first collection of poems, Old Stones New Tales in 2004, Richard has been exploring the relationship between his poetry and a variety of musical genres in live and recorded performances. At his debut performance at the Weaving Mill in Nicosia , Cyprus , Richard gave a reading accompanied by original music for clarinet quintet composed especially for the event by Roland Melia. He has since toured festivals, arts centres and music clubs in the UK, Cyprus, Holland, Greece and Ireland where he has shared the stage with the Allegri, Elias and Danel String Quartets, cellist Matthew Barley, pianist Tim Horton and violinist Darragh Morgan of the Smith Quartet as well as the celebrated middle eastern musicians Ross Daly and Kelly Thoma playing Cretan lyre, PereklisPapapetropoulos on Saz and Abdullah Chhadeh on qaanun.

Darragh Morgan

Born in Belfast in 1974 Darragh Morgan currently resides in South East London . Following two sellout performances at his Wien Modern debut in 1998 he quickly has established himself a soloist of new music, giving numerous recitals at Sonorities Festival, as well as in  Prague, Malta, Nicosia, Hong Kong, South Korea, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, USA and throughout the UK & Ireland.

He has performed with many of the world's leading contemporary music groups, including Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta , Musik Fabrik, Icebreaker , Birmingham Contemporary Music Group , Remix Ensemble, Jane's Minstrels and Topologies. He has recently joined The Smith Quartet . Darragh broadcasts regularly for BBC Radio 3, has been chosen as BBC Radio 4's Pick of the Week and also appeared on The South Bank Show, SABC, CYBC, RTHK, WDR and Lyric FM.

As a recording artist he has worked with The Spice Girls, The Corrs, Jamiroquai, Paul McCartney, The Divine Comedy, The Lemon Heads, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Travis, Incognito, Brian Kennedy and David Bowie. In the world of Irish Traditional Music Darragh has worked closely with Micheal O Suilleabhain, Noirin Ni Riain and the late Derek Bell of The Chieftains

Darragh has participated in masterclasses with Yehudi Menuhin, Pinchas Zukerman, Nigel Kennedy, Mauricio Fuks, Pierre Amoyal and Paul Zukofsky. He plays a fine violin by Peter Boardman after a Peter Guarnerius, Venice 1735 and a classical violin by Thomas Perry of Dublin 1765.'One soon got over the surreal experience of someone playing like Paganini, but wearing pants like Robbie Williams' Sunday Tribune, South Africa

Abdulleh Chhadeh

Abdulleh Chhadeh is the Arab world’s mostinnovative qanun player.

 He has re-designed this 10th century oriental instrument by the addition of an octave, enhancing its tonal range and enabling him to challenge the qanun's traditional repertoireHis work has included adaptations from the Syrian, Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Andalusian traditions as well as more surprising interpretations of well-known Western classical composers.

Born and educated in Damascus , Chhadeh studied both Classical Arabic and Western music at the Conservatoire of Damascus.

After a performance in London for the Syrian Embassy, he was offered a scholarship to study composition at the Guildhall School of Music, where he refined his prodigious skill as a composer and started to introduce the qanun's distinctive sound to new settings.

His composition for qanun and chamber orchestra had its world premiere performance in 2000 in Cyprus , while his recordings and collaborations have included both solo performances and featured soloist work with Sinead O' Connor, Jocelyn Pook, Natacha Atlas and David Arnold among others. In 2001 he formed Nara, an ensemble combining the qanun with a variety of traditional Mediterranean and Middle Eastern instruments; an ever-evolving musical project based entirely on Chhadeh's original compositions Nara continues to inspire audiences at every performance.

 Thursday 2nd August 1.10 p.m. Yeats Memorial Building€5 (€3 concessions)

  "The Cooing of Doves" by Sean O'Casey

 A rehearsed reading of the recently discovered 1 act play by Sean O'Casey directed by Anne Margaret Daniel  

Thursday 2nd August 8.30 p.m The Model Arts and Niland Gallery€10 (€8 concessions YISS students free)

Thomas Lynch Poetry Reading

Thomas Lynch is the author of three collections of poems, Skating with Heather Grace , Grimalkin , and Still Life in Milford . His first collection of essays, The Undertaking , won the American Book Award, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Bodies in Motion and at Rest won the Great Lakes Book Award. Booking Passage -- We Irish and Americans was published this past summer by W.W. Norton. He has written for the New York Times , The Times of London , The Irish Times and the L.A. Times , and his work has been broadcast on the BBC, NPR and RTE. He is a regular presenter to literary, professional and academic groups and is an adjunct professor with the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Michigan . He lives and works in Milford , Michigan where he is the funeral director, and in Co. Clare, Ireland where he keeps an ancestral cottage.

Friday 3rd August 2.00p.m St John's Cathedral

€5 (Concessions €3)

Bernard O'Donoghue Poetry Reading

Bernard O'Donoghue was born in Cullen, County Cork , in 1945, later moving to Manchester . He studied Medieval English at Oxford University, where he is a teacher and Fellow in English at Wadham College .

He is a poet and literary critic, and author of Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (1995). His poetry collections are Poaching Rights(1987); The Weakness (1991); Gunpowder (1995), winner of the 1995 Whitbread Poetry Award; Here Nor There(1999); and Outliving (2003).

His latest work is a verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2006)."I grew up in rural North Cork , in a place famous for traditional music and for poetry in Irish from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These things led to deep-rooted interests in linguistic things, and especially literature, both written and oral. I went to school in Manchester (my mother's place of origin) when I was 16, and my obsessions from then on were Latin, English literature and music (including classical music at the Halle ). I have lived in Oxford since 1965, and my main inspirations have been medieval literature: Chaucer and Dante and above all, the shorter poems in Old and Middle English. The Anglo-Saxon elegies are my model for the perfectly formedlyric poem".

Friday 3rd August 8.30 p.m The Model Arts and Niland Gallery€15 (€12 Concessions)

Mary McPartlan in Concert

Traditional concert with singer Mary McPartlan, featuring songs and music from the international award-winning CD, The Holland Handkerchief and her second CD which will be released in 2007.

Mary McPartlan is one of the most talented singers to come out of the Irish scene in recent years. Born in Drumkeeran, Co. Leitrim and now living in Galway, she started singing in the early 70s but it wasn’t until 2003 that she decided to make music her full time career.

Her singing career took off in January 2004 when she released the critically acclaimed album The Holland Handkerchief . The CD was voted #1 Folk album in MOJO Magazine’s 2004 poll, and was nominated in the 2005 Irish Meteor Awards in the Traditional Folk section. It continues to get airplay all around the UK and Ireland.

Mary has completed a very successful 22 date marathon tour of Ireland during November /December 2006 and January 2007. She also performed in all of Holland ’s major cities to sell out concerts and received an excellent response from the Dutch audiences. Mary was a guest performer with Mairtin O’Connor and Frankie Gavin on a special Geantrai Programme for TG4.She is currently working on projects which incorporate special guests from the literary world, story telling performers, and sean-nos singers and material for her upcoming CD.

“McPartlan’s voice is gloriously earthy, as she breaks in her material for all their life-giving powers .” Siobhán Long, The Irish Times.

Sunday 5th August

Dervish in Concert.

This Concert has been postponed until further notice

due to the success of the Sligo County GAA team,

Connacht Champions in this year's Senior Football

Championship.

Ticket refunds available from point of purchase

Monday 6th August 1.10 p.m Yeats Memorial Building €5 (€3 concessions)

Traditional Irish Music

Seamus Tansey

Seamus Tansey is one of Ireland's most respected flute player of all time.

Monday 6th August 8.30pm The Model Arts and NilandGallery

€15 (€12 concessions)

Travels With My Harp

An Evening with Mary O'Hara

Although Mary O’Hara has now retired from the concert platform for good she still continues to delight her audience with witty stories and reminiscences from her days of Travelling With Her Harp. In the presentation, Mary talks about her childhood in Sligo,her rise to fame, and the devastation caused by the death of her husband. She reflects on the trappings of show business and discusses the spiritual and commercial forces that shaped her music and her view of life. She illustrates all this with slides and video excerpts taken from her many television appearances.

Mary O'Hara
Mary O’Hara’s unique style of singing and harp-playing, the content of what she sang and her own striking personality came to public notice in Ireland and England in the mid 50’s. At the age of 20 she had made her mark at the Edinburgh International Festival, had her own prime-time Saturday night music programme on the newly founded BBC TV and had recorded two best-selling long-playing albums with Decca Records. She specialised in Traditional Irish and Scottish music, much of it in Gaelic, which is why many people in the music business were surprised at the popularity of her work. By a couple of years she pre-dated the so called ‘Folk Era’ that many now associate with The Clancy Brothers, Bob Dylan, et al. Liam Clancy in his 2002 autobiography ‘ Memoirs of an Irish Troubadour’ writes about how the singing of Mary O’Hara had inspired him andothers of the period.

Her first albums Songs of Erin , Love Songs of Ireland and Songs of Ireland became best sellers not only in Ireland and England but in the USA and in Australia and New Zealand, gaining something akin to a cult following. At the age of 21 Mary O’Hara married the young American poet Richard Selig and they went to live in New York . Sadly, Richard died of cancer within two years and, devastated, Mary decided to give up singing and join a religious community of nuns. While searching for the right community she still continued singing and it was during this time that she undertook a very successful concert tour of Australia and New Zealand and recorded several programmes for Radio and TV there. She then joined a community of Benedictine nuns at Stanbrook Abbey in England intending to be there for life.

 However in 1974, after 12½ years, ill health forced her to leave. Surprising everyone, including herself, she quickly regained lost ground and emerged from seclusion to take up her singing career where it left off, adding twelve more long playing albums (and CDs) to the seven she had recorded before embracing monastic silence. In due course she went on to wider success and acclaim, having her own TV series on the BBC and on ITV in the UK . She toured extensively, collecting plaudits wherever she went and giving concerts in places as diverse as the ancient Herod Atticus Theatre in Athens and the major concert halls of the English-speaking world – Carnegie Hall, London ’s Royal Albert Hall , The Sydney Opera House.

She also found time to write three best-selling books, one of them her autobiography, The Scent of the Roses , a best-seller in several countries. In 1996 Mary O’Hara, who had remarried in 1985, accompanied her husband to work in Africa . She stayed there six years. She is now back at her home in England and spends her time writing and giving talks. Recently a play about her life, Harp on the Willow, has been playing to sold-out houses in Sydney and Melbourne.

Tuesday 7th August 1.10 p.m Yeats Memorial Building

€5 ( €3 concessions)

Iggy McGovern Poetry Reading

IGGY McGOVERN was born in Coleraine and resides in Dublin where he is Associate Professor of Physics at Trinity College . His poetry has been widely published in anthologies and journals in Ireland and abroad, as well as in the popular ‘Poetry in Motion’ series on trains in the Dublin suburban rail system (DART). Well-known for his witty, playful, but emotionally engaged poems, McGovern is the recipient of the McCrae Literary Award and the Hennessy Literary Award for poetry. Originally published in November 2005 in a special pocket-sized edition, and already reprinted, some four months later, in a new standard format, The King of Suburbia is his firstcollection.

"So long as the poems are as snazzy, and sharply focused, and ingeniously rhymed as Iggy McGovern's one-pagers in The King of Suburbia, we can't complain. This first collection, from one whose reputation has preceded it, consists mainly of umpteen variations on the sonnet, one sestina at the end, and nonce-forms that read like resurrections of long-lost rhyme schemes. 'The Bony', for example, combines a spine of short-lined vertebraic stanzas cunningly connected by a spinal cord of rhyme. These assured formal techniques serve Prof McGovern's purpose very well, for he's a master of the ironic, the pun, the innuendo, and such feats of word-play as will keep a smile on any visage but that of the incorrigible cynic. We could do with a whole lot more of this kind of well-turned verse and sharply-observed ironies." —James J McAuley, The Irish Times

Tuesday 7th August 8.30 p.m The Model Arts and

Niland Gallery

€10 (€8 concessions YISS students free)

Kerry Hardie Poetry Reading

The winner of the 1996 National Poetry Award, Kerry Hardie has published three collections of poetry with the Gallery Press, A Furious Place (1996), Cry for the Hot Belly (2000) and The Sky Didn’t Fall (2003). Her first novel, Hannie Bennet's Winter Marriage appeared in 2000 while another, The Bird Woman, is forthcoming. She was born in 1951 and grew up in County Down . She now lives in County Kilkenny with her husband, the writer Seán Hardie.

"The essence of her marvellous poems lies in the way she sees through a material world that is rendered truthfully, plainly yet freshly" - George Szirtes, The Irish Times

Thursday 9th August 1.10p.m Yeats Memorial Building

€5 (€3 concession)

Doug Saum presents Yeats's Poems set to Music

Doug Saum will present his fifth concert for The Yeats International Summer School. Since 1996 Saum has been producing Yeats’s poetry to his original musical settings. To date Saum has produced five CD collections of this work. His latest offering, The Wild Swans @ Coole, will be available in Sligo for the first time this week.  In addition to Sligo, Doug Saum has presented his “Yeatsongs” in New York City, Chestertown NY (where John Butler Yeats is laid to rest), SanFrancisco, Reno, etc. 

“The vitality in Yeats’s poems seems to evoke melody in me. I’ve attempted to recreate these melodies and share them with the wind.” Doug Saum

Thursday 9th August 8.30 p.m. Hawk's Well Theatre

€10 ( €8 Concessions YISS students free)

Drama Workshop performance "Calvary"

Calvary is one of Yeats’s 'Plays for Dancers,' taking its form from the Japanese Noh, with opening and closing choruses, central conflict and climactic dance. In the course of the action, Yeats dramatises the final moments of Christ on the cross: as the Chorus observes, he 'dreams hispassion through.’ Yet the play is not merely a re-enactment of the Biblical story but a philosophical exploration of the nature of godhead and sacrifice.

                                                                   Followed by  

A Recital of Yeats's Poetry

by

Sam & Joan McCready

 Lectures and Exhibitions

  Lectures 

Monday July 30th – Friday August 10th

Yeats International Summer School

Morning Lectures: Hawk’s Well Theatre

9.30 am – 11.15 am (weekdays)

Lectures open to the public.

Exhibitions:

Venue:       The Cat & The Moon Gallery, 4 Castle Street ,Sligo  

                 The Blue Raincoat Theatre Space, Quay Street , Sligo

 Date:          28th July to 21st August 2007

"Yeats realises the wisdom in being careful what you wish for".

ANNIE WEST, humorous visual interpretations to Yeatsian theme

GRAINNE MCLOUGHLIN, ceramic masks inspired by the love poems of W.B.Yeats

"Dooney Rock"

JONATHAN CASSIDY,

"Yeats Country" - landscapes in oil paint

Venue: Sligo Art Gallery , Yeats Memorial Building , Hyde Bridge , SligoExhibition:

Iontas Small Works Exhibition 2007 will be on view at Sligo Art Gallery

The exhibition will include works from over 130 artists. This  exhibition, now in its seventeenth year, is well worth a visit.

Venue: Model Arts and Niland Gallery, The Mall, Sligo

Niland Galleries

Niland Galleries

8th May ­ 2nd September

Jack B Yeats: A Thought of Sligo

2007 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Jack B Yeats, one ofIreland¹s most important twentieth century painters.  To mark the occasion, an exhibition featuring an impressive selection of  Yeats¹ work from the Niland Collection will be on view through-out the summer months.
 
Yeats was raised in Sligo and was deeply influenced by the landscape and the characters he encountered here in his formative years.  So great was the impact of Sligo on the painter that he once declared that he had nevercreated a painting without it having in it "A thought of Sligo" This show will feature works from every phase of his career from early pen and ink illustrations to later period expressionist oils.

Red Hanrahan's Vision created to illustrate  the W.B. Yeats poem

.
Landscapes of the West

This is a small show of landscapes of the West of Ireland from the Niland Collection.  It features some of Ireland¹s most renowned artists of the twentieth century, such as Paul Henry, Sean Keating, Patrick Collins, Charles Lamb and Gerard Dillon.

Guided group tours can be arranged, free of charge, within gallery hours, provided the Gallery is given 1-2 weeks notice.

Admission free

  For Booking contact venues:

 Hawk’s Well Theatre 071 9162626/9161518

 Model Arts and Niland Gallery 071 914 1405

 Yeats Memorial Building 071 914 2693

 www.yeats-sligo.com

 Ticketmaster: www.ticketmaster.ie

  or Ticketmaster outlets anywhere.

                                                The Festival is supported by: