Travel beautiful evening

Travel beautiful evening in front of thousands in Eyre Square. Light, masks, flight, legend, pageantry, drums, storytelling and the turning of the streets into a theatre are all part of Galway 2020, taking a lead, perhaps, from Macnas, the world-renowned Galway performance group whose name means ‘joyful abandonment’. For Galway 2020 it’s creating its most ambitious project yet, a year-long interpretation of the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s first story. Amid the light installations illuminating mountain ranges and displays of pageantry in the streets, there will also be word, melody and song – long the ascendant mediums in Ireland due to poverty, long dark winters by the fire and the need to entertain and be entertained. Virtuosity in speech or music can accord a status not attainable through wealth or power. Galway has had and continues to have more than its share of exemplars in both. I sat with several of its new literary wave at the Black Gate, a performance space in Francis Street, where eloquent speech rolled in like the waves. Where the art is (above) Mark O’Donnell of renowned theatre company Macnas; (below right) novelist Elaine Feeny at the legendary Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop. (below) Galway University alumni include famous politicians, poets and actors Among the poets and publishers and novelists was Elaine Feeney, a rising force whose first novel As You Were has been acclaimed as one of the most important debuts in fiction in 2020. She comes from an east Galway farm so isolated and steeped in its ways that she still travelled by pony and cart when she was a child. A maverick, feminist, prize-winning performance poet, she has now brought these attributes along with an imagined vernacular into her novel. She’s an enabler as well as a producer, encouraging the young, interviewing visiting writers and editing collections, and will be active in all of these things throughout Galway 2020. “I know what a poor rural background here can be,” said Feeney. “It’s a difficult land, not industrialised, still conservative and limiting. There’s a disconnect between city and countryside. I go into Galway two or three times a week, and I get recharged. I’m hoping that Galway 2020 can effect some repairs to the disconnect, to bring art to the rural areas, for I know what being starved of it feels like. I have faith that it will.” You feel different in the West to elsewhere in Ireland. It’s a little like driving through the desert in America, where you are free and anonymous in a vast space and it seems everything is possible. The sea seems to make the light more vivid. The great unknown is right beside you. It is the untameable, largely barren land onto which Cromwell’s soldiers drove the Gaels because they coveted the arable central plains for themselves. A way of life grew here thereafter. Steps were danced in kitchens, poetry was in the speech, figures from legend lived next door. Chain stores and Instagram influencers are here, too, but people still come to touch the timeless, the beautiful and the authentic. J High-water mark In the vibrant city of Galway, the sea is a constant presence and an inspiring influence 68 / Jaguar Magazine Jaguar Magazine / 69