Arts Insider – Chris McCreery, Artistic Director and CEO, Belfast International Arts Festival

You have worked across arts and culture in Northern Ireland for almost two decades. Do you recall any formative memories that inspired you growing up to get into this work?

I wish I had a great story about seeing one extraordinary performance as a child and instantly knowing this was what I wanted to do but my route into the arts was much less straightforward. Music was always around me. My mother and her family were particularly musical, so there was a soundtrack to growing up. I was also incredibly lucky to go to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, a school with Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett woven into its history and where music and literature were greatly valued.

Looking back, I think what really took hold was sheer curiosity. I’ve always been intensely curious about the world around me, and that has probably been the thread running through everything I’ve done since. I still love that feeling of encountering something completely new, whether it’s music, theatre, film, a museum, a book or simply an idea, and suddenly seeing the world slightly differently. It’s probably why I’ve always been drawn to festivals. 

Can you share, from your perspective, why the Belfast International Arts Festival is so important?

I’ve always believed that a city’s international festival is one of its most important cultural assets. Belfast International Arts Festival has been doing this work for more than six decades, through some of the darkest and most difficult periods in the city’s history.

At its heart, I think an international festival does two things. It takes the creative voice of a place and amplifies it to the world, while bringing ideas, artists and perspectives from across the world back into that place. That exchange feels particularly important in Belfast. Everywhere I travel, I’m struck by the level of curiosity people have about this city, its history, its music, its stories and its artists. Culture is one of Belfast’s great competitive advantages, and the Festival provides a window onto that creativity.

There’s also something quite special about the sheer breadth of the Festival. You might wander into the Ulster Museum and discover the Royal Ulster Academy exhibition, spend an afternoon with the Ulster Orchestra, encounter remarkable theatre or dance, and end the night standing in a packed room listening to a brilliant band. You can move through Belfast and through completely different artforms in the course of a single day. That sense of possibility, never quite knowing what you might encounter next, is one of the things I love most about an international festival.

Festivals are also about gathering. In an increasingly fragmented world, I think there is something incredibly powerful, and profoundly human, in that simple act.

An exciting development in this year’s programming is of course the new immersive strand, some fantastic work from Rory Friers and BICEP to name a few. Can you speak to why this was important to include in this year’s festival?

One of the great privileges of taking on a festival with such a rich history is thinking about what its next chapter might look like. The Festival has always celebrated the sheer breadth of art in all its boundless and beautiful forms, so exploring immersive work felt like a natural next step.

Some of the most exciting creative work happening today sits in the spaces between established artforms, where music meets film, technology, installation, visual art and performance. And I think immersive art has really come of age over the past decade. When I was running the NI Science Festival, I encountered lots of early work using emerging technologies and, if I’m honest, sometimes the technology was more interesting than the art. You could admire the technical wizardry without necessarily feeling very much.

What feels different now is that artists are leading the conversation, with technology there to amplify the artistic idea rather than being the idea itself. 

Belfast International Arts Festival always maintains showcasing the best local and international creative talent across many artforms. There is so much to choose from, can you give us some of your top picks for this year?

This is always an impossible question because the honest answer is that I want people to see everything! Behind every Festival event is a remarkable story, collaboration or creative journey that has brought it to Belfast, so picking favourites feels slightly unfair.

We open with Senegal’s legendary Orchestra Baobab, who have been making incredible music for more than half a century, and our music programme this year is one of our most ambitious yet. I’m particularly excited about Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien bringing his new Blue Morpho project to the Ulster Hall.

Also at the Ulster Hall, I can’t wait for The Devil’s in the Dance Hall, which we’re presenting with Belfast TradFest. Edwina Guckian has created this wonderful collision of traditional music, dance, theatre, oral history and the roaring energy of a big band, inspired by the story of Ireland’s rural dance halls and the attempts to suppress them. Theatre and dance remain at the heart of the Festival, and we’re really excited this year to be celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Lyric Theatre.

Our Voice Together Now is particularly special because it represents the culmination of three years of international collaboration, bringing artists from Belfast, Cairo and Palestine together through dance. It has been about much more than presenting finished work. Artists have travelled, exchanged ideas, created together and built relationships across borders, and this October those different journeys finally converge in Belfast. Michael McEvoy will work with three Egyptian dancers, while the brilliant Cairo-based choreographer Shaymaa Shoukry presents The Light Within with three Palestinian dancers. I’m equally excited about Nōs, which closes the Festival, and about further developing our relationship with Luail, Ireland’s National Dance Company. I think there’s something really exciting about what becomes possible when we work on an all-island basis, connecting artists, audiences and institutions north and south.

But I’d also encourage people to take a chance on the things they don’t recognise. Some of my greatest festival experiences have come from walking into something knowing almost nothing about it and emerging completely exhilarated. That sense of discovery is half the fun of a festival.

Outside of the festival, what art are you enjoying right now? Can be any artform!

Music is probably the artform I live with most day to day, and my listening habits are completely chaotic. This week I’ve had the new Spell Songs album on repeat, with Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis and that extraordinary collection of musicians. It feels like perfect autumn music. I’m also really enjoying watching my kids develop their own taste in music. There’s something wonderful about going back through records you’ve known for years because they’re hearing them for the first time. 

I’ve also rediscovered my love of reading and the simple pleasure of getting completely lost in a book. When my kids were really small and I was going through the sleep deprivation stage, I could just about manage an audiobook in the car because every time I picked up an actual book I seemed to fall asleep after about three pages!

I’m just back from four days at the brilliant Sonica Festival in Glasgow, curated by Belfast’s own Cathie Boyd. The absolute highlight for me was Paraorchestra’s extraordinary performance of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. Rather than sitting in rows watching an orchestra on stage, the audience was invited to move among the musicians, completely immersed in this beautiful, hypnotic landscape of sound. It was one of those rare experiences where you almost lose your sense of time and place, becoming completely absorbed in the music. I came away genuinely thinking it might have been the most beautiful live arts experience I’ve ever had. And after nearly two decades working in culture, that’s quite something to be able to say.

We are proud to be Principal Funders of The Belfast International Arts Festival. Check out the full programme here - Belfast International Arts Festival