Galway International Arts Festival Shines Through Despite Covid-19 Challenges

The internationally renowned Galway International Arts Festival, Ireland, took the difficult decision, due to the ongoing impact of Covid-19, to move for this year from its usual July dates to September 2021.

Despite all the challenges which it has faced in preparing and planning during stringent Covid-19 restrictions, the festival team have delivered an extraordinary programme with a number of stand out events in particular, which are spread across Galway City and north and south Connemara.

Medicine - A theatrical tour-de-force by Enda Walsh with a cast featuring Domhnall Gleeson

Medicine is a new play presented by Landmark Productions and Galway International Arts Festival, written and directed by Enda Walsh. Devastatingly funny and profoundly moving, Medicine examines social responses to mental health concerns, while deconstructing the fabric of theatrical performance.

The production stars multi-award-winning actor Domhnall Gleeson (Ex Machina, Brooklyn, Star Wars VIII & IX, Black Mirror, Catastrophe, The Lieutenant of Inishmore) alongside a sensational cast including Clare Barrett, Aoife Duffin and drummer Sean Carpio.

This remarkable production has wowed critics and audiences alike in Edinburgh and Galway and will play St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, November 11 - December 5.

The Medicine creative team reunites Enda with his long-time collaborators Jamie Vartan (Set Designer), Adam Silverman (Lighting Designer), Teho Teardo (Composer), Helen Atkinson (Sound Designer) and Joan O'Clery (Costume Designer).

Extraordinary visual art located on a 4,000 year old bog

The much-anticipated second part of John Gerrard's Mirror Pavilion, Leaf Work (Derrigimlagh) 2020 (a Galway International Arts Festival commission for Galway's European Capital of Culture 2020) opened the 2021 Festival premiering in Derrigimlagh Bog Connemara.

The first part of this mesmerizing work, Mirror Pavilion, Corn Work, was experienced by over 120,000 people last autumn at the Claddagh in Galway City. The Pavilion is a beautiful and striking structure, with three sides and the roof clad in a highly reflective mirror and the fourth wall a high-resolution LED wall. This year, Mirror Pavilion hosts a new artwork, Leaf Work, which will unfold on the LED screen. The artwork is powered by sustainable energy sources.

Watch the 60 second highlights video here: Mirror Pavilion, Leaf Work by John Gerrard

Experience in south Connemara until 18th September or view the virtual performance that will be shown on the LED screen via a 24 hour livestream from anywhere in the world at https://www.giaf.ie/livestreams/leaf-work-stream

Derrigimlagh Bog was the site of the station built by Marconi to send his new transatlantic messages and where Alcock and Brown crash landed after the first transatlantic flight in 1919. In Leaf Work a character performs a lament for the effects of these and other accelerating human advances on the non-human world. Interpreted by dancer Finola Cronin the leaf figure performs a lament for a heating planet. Cronin's movement was motioned captured in the artist's studio and transformed into data. This data is then constantly recombined to create an endless flow of movement, which we see on the LED screen.

In Leaf Work Gerrard has taken digital technology, usually employed by the commercial gaming industry, to create virtual worlds that simulate extremely detailed and authentic landscapes. The character and landscape we see on the LED screen may look like video or film but they are not; they hover in what the artist describes as the 'slippery space' between the real and the unreal.

Staged on the gorgeous Inis Oirr, one of the Aran Islands in the west of Ireland, Company SJ in co-production with the Abbey Theatre, presented Beckett sa Creig: Laethanta Sona [Beckett in The Rock: Happy Days]. This stunning outdoor production was performed in a unique setting at the back of the island of Inis Oirr, with a set sculpted and designed by Ger Clancy and built with help from stone masons on the island.

With costumes inspired by flowers that grow between the cracks in the rock, as Winnie herself appears from the cracks in the rock, this piece resonated deeply with lovers of Beckett, language, the environment and the visual arts. The Irish language seeped into the searing beauty of Beckett's imagery contained in the landscape of the island. This project came from the collaboration between Company SJ and the people, landscape and language of Inis Oirr, facilitated by a residency in Áras Eanna.

Company SJ brought their aesthetic tools of language, site, the body and visual art to bear on Beckett's haunting exploration of human relationships, in Happy Days. Sarah Jane Scaife directs this haunting Irish translation by Mícheal Ó Chongaile. Actress Bríd Ní Neachtain was born to play this part and was joined by movement artist and actor Raymond Keane. Laethanta Sona emerges from the landscape, language and people of Inis Oirr, off the West coast of Ireland.

From Tony Award-winning Director Garry Hynes, a magnificent capture of The Seagull [after Chekhov], performed in the historic Coole Park

Audiences and critics alike applauded Druid's production, The Seagull [after Chekhov] by Thomas Kilroy, directed by Tony Award winner Garry Hynes with director of photography Colm Hogan.

Performed in the magical surrounds of Coole Park, this outdoor production was filmed exclusively for GIAF 2021 and is available for audiences all over the world to enjoy on demand. Kilroy sets Chekhov's play in a large country house in the West of Ireland which makes Coole Park in County Galway the perfect location.

Isobel Desmond and her son Constantine leave London to spend the summer at the family home in Ireland where they will battle artistic disappointments and unrequited love in this classic tragicomedy.

This remarkable production stars Brian Doherty, Jack Gleeson, Liam Heslin, Bosco Hogan, Bláithín MacGabhann, Marie Mullen, Agnes O'Casey, John Olohan, Marty Rea, Eileen Walsh, John McHugh, Mary McHugh, Peter Shine and is available to view online until 12 Sept. For more see giaf.ie

The Donmar Warehouse's Blindness came to Galway after hugely successful runs in New York, Hong Kong, Mexico City, New Zealand, and the UK. Described by the New York Times as "brilliant" and by the Guardian as an "exquisitely told story of resilience, violence and hope" the production is based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago in which the world is gripped by a pandemic of infectious blindness. Audiences experience this riveting story through immersive narration, lighting and sound as the rise and, ultimately, profoundly hopeful end of an unimaginable global pandemic plays out.

Narrated by Juliet Stevenson with additional voices by Angus Wright, Blindness was adapted by award-winning playwright Simon Stephens, directed by Walter Meierjohann with immersive binaural sound design by Ben and Max Ringham.

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