Fire Dancer, Clifden

This was the first time I made it to the week-long Clifden Arts Festival, just in time for the final weekend (I wrote a bit about it in the subsequent blip, Joyriders, which I posted before finally getting around to this).

I had already seen them setting up an outdoor stage and taken a few photographs of the guys on stilts. Later, I was sitting in the lovely old Station Hotel, talking with J and his wife S. When we heard the music and saw movement (the parade going by), I snatched up my camera again and followed it as it snaked around the little town. Very much a circus atmosphere, sights to delight a child's eye, not that there weren't plenty of adults in the bewitched crowds lining the roads. Something time-arrested about it all. Not merely nostalgic or soft-focused, but more vital, fire-breathing. Plenty of children too, many of them face-painted and costumed, participants in the procession.

W.B., and his artist brother Jack especially, would have been right at home. And perhaps some of these scenes might emerge, utterly transformed, in one of the latter's richly, muddily colourful, passionately oily paintings, or W.B's poems, such as his strange and marvelous 'High Talk', which begins with this declaration:

'Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.'

Why? 'Because', as the poem explains a few lines later:

'...piebald ponies, led bears, caged lions, make but poor shows,
Because children demand Daddy-long-legs upon his timber toes,
Because women in the upper storeys demand a face at the pane,
That patching old heels they may shriek, I take to chisel and plane.'

Welcome to the garrulous voice of stilt-maker/poet, 'Malachi Stilt-Jack'. And there were, as mentioned, men on stilts, and women too. And if there were no women left patching heels at a high window, there were plenty alongside the men and children in the crowds scream-cheering their delight, at those who were stalking on stilts (i.e. walking on air) or dancing in hoops of fire, such as the flame-licked lady above.