Post Festival Blues...

It’s all over. The fat old lady has sung! At our rap party in The Cobalt Café on Sunday night the wonderful Young@Heart Chorus gave us their disco set including three Irish numbers they’d rehearsed just for us – Dirty Old Town, Teenage Kicks and a particularly salty version of An Poc ar Buile. We partied until late and woke up with a hang-over and a gnawing sense of anxiety – weren’t we supposed to be somewhere, hosting a reception, welcoming a delegation, opening a show?… nope… it’s all over. The old ladies and gents are on a bus to Ennis, Kretakor are on a plane to Budapest, and the hundreds of international artists whom we’d befriended for oh-so -brief a time have returned home. How we will miss them all.

I’ve heard a lot about the down that follows the Festival high, but I was having none of it. I had paced myself fine, got as much sleep as I could and knew what to expect. But oh no, come Monday morning I could hardly speak. I had a tightening in my chest and I lacked the will to live. But why the depression when things had gone so well? We had surpassed even our own ambitious box office targets (taking over €1 million at the box office for the first time in the Festival’s history), presented over 33 productions, almost all of which were warmly welcomed by audiences and critics, and we had achieved our overall goal of dramatically increasing the impact of the Festival on the city. Why so glum?

The received wisdom is that it’s to do with the adrenaline that courses through your body at Festival time. The only way to get through the madness and continue to function at such a hectic pace is to push your body and mind further that it naturally wants to go. Your system responds by declaring a state of emergency, and when the emergency passes, your system crashes. Nothing to be done about it. I said in an earlier blog that festivals are a drug and we’re their junkies – and as with all drugs, you must eventually come back down to earth with a bump.
So now we must find the motivation to begin the clean-up. Numbers to be crunched, loose ends to be tied off. And then it’s holidays for me before I begin the rounds of my travels again in search of next year’s programme. First up is a trip to the Festival D’Automme in Paris, followed by Speilart in Munich, then the Impulse Festival of experimental German work, and a national Israeli showcase in Tel Aviv. No rest for the addicted. Forever chasing that high that we crave so much. See you in October 2008 then, when we’ll be recklessly soaring skywards once more!

Loughlin Deegan
Artistic Director / CEO