Derry and Donegal to host climax of major Europe-wide Ulysses festival this summer

Derry City and Strabane District Council has agreed to award up to £35,000 in funding towards an “exciting” Yes Festival in Derry and Inishowen.

The Irish Department of Foreign Affairs also providing funding for the events, which are being produced and curated by Arts Over Borders.

The festival will take place from June 13 to 16 and will see women artists from across Europe travel to Ireland to present work in venues and public spaces across Derry and north Donegal as part of the Creative Europe project, ULYSSES European Odyssey.

The multi-arts programme will include a huge three-hour, free ‘come and go’ production at Ebrington Square with up to 200 actors and a 10-day massive bed art installation on the square, as well as theatre, dance, visual arts, installations, film, writing, photography, textiles, circus, music, rap, and song.

The Yes festival is the culmination of the ULYSSES European Odyssey, a €3 million European Commission Creative Europe project running since 2022 and involving 18 cities in 16 countries across Europe. Each city has taken Irish author Jame Joyce's novel as the starting point to explore contemporary issues, with elements of Homer’s Odyssey weaved in.

On Sunday June 16, as part of YES Festival, there will be the world premiere screening in Derry of The Molly Film, featuring Miriam Margolyes, Fiona Shaw, Harriet Walter and Cush Jumbo and four other internationally renowned stage and screen actresses, each reading one of eight long sentences that form Molly Bloom's stream of consciousness monologue from Joyce’s novel Ulysses.

The streets of Derry will also be reimagined as Joyce’s Dublin in a celebration of Molly Bloom, with the Yes festival having an overall focus on ‘The Future: A Female Vision’.

The cities of Oulu, Vilnius, Marseille, Cluj, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Eleusis, Leeuwarden, Berlin, Dublin, Trieste, Lugo, Athens, Budapest and Istanbul have partnered with Arts Over Borders to identify female artists who embody the festival’s theme.to take part in the Derry & Donegal events.

During the festival, the Return of Ulysses trail will showcase international work at Derry and Donegal community organisations, with the European city partners sending exhibits of their European Odyssey projects to be housed in each of these organisations spaces. The trail will run from Derry City Football Club to Ebrington Square.

The ‘Molly Bed’ meanwhile will be installed at Ebrington Square in the run up to the festival and stay in situ from June 8 to 17. It will involve an interactive Gulliver-sized bed, including a headboard video screen to show messages beamed in by leading women around the world. It will have two gigantic wooden pillows, one of olive wood to echo the Penelope episode of Homer’s Odyssey and one of oak to acknowledge Derry’s history. People will be encouraged to sit on the bed, pose for photos, and the two pillows will each have a letterbox built into them for women to drop in their own messages and aspirations. These messages will subsequently go live on the screen in the lead-up to the YES Festival.

‘Sirenscircus’, also takes place at Ebrington Square on Saturday June 15, from 4pm to 7pm and will involve 100 to 200 performers. This will be a rendition of John Cage’s Musicircus, bringing together all the sounds mentioned in Ulysses, with actors readings sections through microphones.

Other highlights include ‘Molly Bloomsday’, an 18-hour cultural journey across Derry and Donegal on June 17 re-interpreting Leopold Bloom's journey across Dublin, with some specially staged events and others highlighting parallels. As part of this there will be music at 8am at An Grianán and a guided tour of prominent women buried at Derry city cemetery at 11am, the same time as a curated walk on Lisfannon beach, and marching bands from both traditions at 3pm on the City Walls.

There will be a ‘Dance In!’ participatory event inspired by the women that worked in Derry's shirt factories, a dance performance responding to the Derry Girls mural and TV show, and a concert at the Millennium Forum on Sunday, June 16 to celebrate the inaugural Molly Bloomsday.

The festival was mentioned during a meeting of Derry & Strabane Council’s Business and Culture Committee on Tuesday, when Head of Culture Aeidin McCarter recommended that councillors approve a National Events Subvention Fund allocation to the Yes Festival.

Previous successful National Events Subvention Fund applicants include the Ulster Rally and the Cricket International Series.

Ms McCarter said the council had made “provision for subvention for one-off national events which could be attracted to come to the region if subvention were available”.

She added: “It was anticipated this would be a very small number and that an allocation from the festival and events budget is allocated to facilitate this.

“Officers have developed a standardised mechanism for the assessment of this type of one-off opportunity event. The criteria are total visitor numbers greater than 5,000, an overall budget of £100,000 or more with funding requests between £10,000 and £50,000.

“Additionally, the event must highlight the district council area as an events and tourism destination.”

Ms McCarter said that, following a panel assessment, this event “scored highly in terms of strategic fit, partnership and media profile”.

SDLP councillor Rory Farrell said the festival was an “interesting and exciting proposal” which would “get us international visitors and international exposure”.

UUP Alderman Derek Hussey agreed that it was “definitely and exciting project”, but questioned how the festival would highlight the district council area as tourism destination, as set out by the funding criteria, if it would take place in Derry City only.

“How do those two equate, if it’s to be a district council event and here we have a city-wide event?” Alderman Hussey asked. “Or will there be stipulations that this must impact district-wide as well?”

Ms McCarter assured Alderman Hussey that she would be “happy to talk to [festival organisers] about their programming throughout the city and district”.

By Andrew Balfour, Local Democracy Reporter and Brendan McDaid