Elgy Gillespie reports on the month-long San Francisco Irish festival.
For four years the Irish Arts Foundation of San Francisco headed by Derryman Peter O’Neill and Clareman Eddie Stack have produced the very successful Celtic Music Festival, which ran over a weekend in March and included the best of Irish music, traditional and otherwise. This year the pair ambitiously decided to expand the festival and mounted a month-long Irish Arts Festival that included not only the music of Sharon Shannon, the Saw Doctors, Tommy Makem, Martin Hayes, Arcady, Old Blind Dogs, Boys of theLough and something of a departure, non-Irish rockstar Richard Thompson, but a whole slew of other events.
There was the Famine Commemoration Garden contest for U.C. Berkeley architectural students; a Film Fleadh of new Irish movies which premiered the Secret of Roan Inish, and the “Sheelas,” an Irish Oscars night. (A Sheelana-Gig statuette went to Joe Wall for his role in his brother’s low-budget movie.)
They ran the “Green Ink” weekend on new Irish American writing with novelist Peter Quinn and Oakland writer Ishmael Reed. Irish artist AnnFitzpatrick was awarded her own day by the city’s Irish American Mayor Frank Jordan. Humanities West launched “Imagining Ireland,” about poets and visionaries in Irish literary history, starring a hilarious Senator DavidNorris and flame-haired poet Nuala ni Dhomhaill, and for a postscript, O’Neill and Stack promoted Kate Perry in her show, No Mate for the Magpie.
But the unrivaled success of the month-long festival was the West Coast premiere of Sweeny by the Galway performance ensemble Macnas. Literally translated into English as “joyful exuberant abandon,” Macnas has gained substantial international recognition in recent years with its spectacular street parades, its participation in the 1993 Zooropa tour with the Irish supergroup U2, and its acclaimed indoor theater production Tain, which was nominated as best performance at Expo 92 in Seville, Spain.
O’Neill and Stack were treading a particularly tricky path in bringing over the ground-breaking theater company from Galway. The cost in airfares and container trucks for their huge puppets and sets topped $200,000, which was subsidized 85 percent by the Cultural Relations Committee, the American-Ireland Fund tossed in $10,000, and local hotels, The Sheehan and Fitzpatrick’s, gave rock-bottom rates to the cast of twenty.
They also talked the United Irish Cultural Center and the City Hall’s committees into co-hosting Macnas for the annual parade, and thanks to former Grand Marshal, Plasterers’ Union Chief John Moylan, they installed the whole Macnas troupe into the Pier 23 building, where they built sets and rehearsed along with several hundred local kids who would take part in the St.Patrick’s Day Parade.
Macnas received ecstatic reviews in the San Francisco papers, and played to capacity houses at the Theatre Artaud, but despite the mark they left on San Francisco, the festival was an artistic but not a commercial success. The Irish Arts Foundation could be $20,000 in the red when all the bills are paid. As O’Neill puts it, “We’ve sacrificed life for art.”
“I’d like to think we made a special case for Macnas,” O’Neill sums up, a little wistfully. “In our modest way, we’ve managed to integrate the cultural landscape here, with a new voice. And if I could do it all over again tomorrow, I would. We’ve made a lot of headway.”
And more importantly, comments local book dealer Conor Howard of AnnaLivia Books, “They’ve built bridges between the old and new Irish and exposed a whole new audience to what’s going on as opposed to rehashing the same old fossilized forms.”
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the May/June 1995 issue of Irish America. ♦
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