| Wed Mar 17 |
Slide Show |
Ireland Music and Travel |
Mary Dineen |
Clare, Sligo, and the Connemara Welcome to the West and Northwest of Ireland. Mary Dineen is an Irish-American citizen, artist, and story-teller presenting a visual, musical, and story-telling tour of the wild west of her ancestral homeland. The West of Ireland is considered the countrys wild place. Mary Dineen will guide the audience on a poetic journey through this countryside rich in music, culture, and history, from ancient to present. We begin in Doolin, Co. Clare, known as the traditional Irish music center in Ireland. Though small, this village has nightly Irish "trad" music sessions every night. The annual Matchmaking Festival in September in nearby Lisdoonvarna exends its festive atmosphere to the surrounding towns. We pass through the grey limestone landscape of the Burren, on the way north to Co. Sligo. Yeats called Sligo "land of hearts desire". To be there is to feel what he meant. Sligo contains many megalithiuc sites, including Carrowkeel, which dots the hills in the Brickslieve Mountains with at least 14 tomb chambers and cairns. Queen Maeve is buried beneath Knocknarea, visable from Carrowkeel. Many mythic battles occurred in this mysterious region. Southwest we go towards the Connemara, a region in Co. Galway. The rugged quartzite mountains, the Twelve Bens, creates a dramatic backdrop for some of the most beautiful land in all of Ireland. A "terrible" beauty, as it has been called, the Connemara has very different in feel from, say, the gentle qualities of Clare. This land has not been tamed. Irelands only fiord is near the small village of Leannane. The entrance to the Connemara National Park, near the Quaker-founded village of Letterfrack, invites visitors to enter the surrounding Twlve Bens. Clifden is a small town that presents the annual Clifden Community Arts Week. This ten-day celebration has music filling the town, art events, and the smallest, finest parade , which is so short that it circles the town twice! The different regions are reflected in its peoples. Mary will bring forward some of the most memorable charachters that she has known in her many journeys to the old country. |
| Sat Mar 27 |
Slide Show |
Milking the Rhino |
Jeannie Magill |
The clichés of nature documentaries ignore a key landscape feature: villagers just off-camera, who navigate the dangers and costs of living with wildlife. The Maasai of Kenya and Namibia's Himba - two of Earth's oldest cattle cultures - are in the midst of upheaval. After a century of "white man conservation," which displaced them and fueled resentment towards wildlife, they are vying to share the wildlife-tourism pie. Community-based conservation, which tries to balance the needs of wildlife and people, has been touted as "win-win.' The reality is more complex. Charting the collision of ancient ways with Western expectations, MILKING THE RHINO tells intimate, hopeful and heartbreaking stories of people facing deep cultural change |