The Irish Literary Landscape from International Festival of Arts & on Vimeo.
Arts & Ideas got into the podcast game a couple of years ago, releasing audio versions of various lectures and discussions held during recent festivals.
Having just announced its 2012 festival, A&I recently posted two new podcasts with content from last year’s event, some of it relevant to this year’s:
“How Pleasure Works” is a talk by Yale Psychology Professor Paul Bloom. The stated theme of the 2012 festival is “Serious Fun,” and one of the scheduled “Ideas” talks will feature Tamar Gendler discussing “Five Ancient Secrets to Happiness and the Good Life” (June 17 at Yale Art Gallery).
“The Irish Literary Landscape” (embedded above) is a discussion between Colm Toibin, the esteemed novelist and short story writer and Belinda McKeon, a novelist, playwright and curator of poetry festivals.
McKeon reads from her first novel, Solace, set in Ireland (with the author acknowledging how much has changed in that country in just the past few years).
Toibin opens his reading, of the short story “Two Women” (from his collection The Empty Family), with a long anecdote about the actor Jack Mac Gowran (known for his mastery of the works of Beckett and O’Casey) coming to the small Irish town he lived in when he was a teenager. Beckett is evoked, as is another famous Beckett interpreter Jack McGee. Toibin explains the strange dimensions of being an “Irish genius actor, slightly lost or at sea when they’re not playing the leading Irish parts.”
They might have added a Brooklyn subtheme to this conversation—McKeon now lives in that part of New York, and Toibin titled a novel Brooklyn.
There is no pronounced Irish element of Arts & Ideas this year. Closest perhaps would be a Scottish theater event, the National Theatre of Scotland’s site-specific drama The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (June 20-30 at the Wicked Wolf Tavern on Temple Street).
There are now 27 Arts & Ideas podcasts streaming on vimeos or downloadable for free in the iTunes store.
The list is here.
The most applicable to this year’s festival is a conversation with Mark Morris, from when he revived and conducted his own 1970s production of Dido and Aeneas for the festival in 2009. Morris returns to Arts & Ideas this year to conduct several repertory pieces he created for his Mark Morris Dance Group (June 21 & 22 at the Shubert on College Street).
I’ve written about the Arts & Ideas 2012 announcement here. I’ll be gushing further about the festival offerings on this site and at the New Haven Advocate site in coming weeks.