Preparations for Wales Smithsonian Cymru 2009 on the National Malll in Washington, from 24 – 28 June and 1 – 5 July are gearing up. Below, Jon Gower, author and broadcaster, writes about Wales' presence in Washington this summer.
This year they’re expecting a million people at the Eisteddfod. That is, if you accept that the Welsh presence at this year’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival will not be unlike the National Eisteddfod. There’ll be a range of marquees filled with poets and musicians. Cookery exhibitions to prove that we’re not all still eating leeks. They’re even building a sustainable house. But all on the National Mall in Washington instead of a field in Wales.
Each year the Smithsonian highlights a country overseas as well as aspects of culture in America and this year the spotlight turns on Wales – ‘highlighting the creative culture of this dynamic country.’ Some 160 artists, makers, musicians, scholars and writers will set up camp for ten days to engage the attention of some million tourists who’ll be walking there and, hopefully, dallying awhile. So it’s an important shop window for Welsh culture, with an inspiring range of talents on display, all selected by a curator from the Smithsonian, Betty Belanus, who spent three months trekking around Wales and learning about the country in order to select her representative samples (together with researchers and curatorial group in Wales).The festival programme will be enriched by arange ofactivities taking place outside the Mall from lectures organized by the Centre for Alternative Technology through theatre performances to an exhibition of contemporary tableware, a balanced mix of tradition and innovation.
This will be Wales’ largest cultural presence overseas and will serve as a comprehensive reminder of our cultural wealth which is sometimes underestimated. So the young rapper Aneirin Karadog will be proving you can inject new energy into an old language as he shares the stage with our National Poet Gillian Clarke. She penned a praise poem to the new US president at the start of this year. It’s appropriate that one of the US topics of the festival this year is Afro-American oratory, as Barack Obama revels in words just as Clarke does. They both know how to harness this power. The other theme at this year’s Folklife festival is Latino music, so I know which parties I’ll be trying to gatecrash.
For the politicians who are helping bankroll this overseas adventure it’s a complicated proposition. They want to encourage trade and show how modern and connected Wales is while the festival is by its very nature rooted in tradition. Selling aerospace skills off the back of folk songs isn’t easy, yet culture more generally has gainfully led the vanguard of trade missions in the past. Visits by Welsh National Opera to Milan, New York, Tokyo and Paris were acknowledged to have helped stimulate important inward investment. As chill economic winds continue to blow it’s important that the Welsh presence in Washington works as both development tool and cultural summary.
The summary you often encounter depicts a Cool Cymru and while it’s important to register the success of the likes of Duffy, the Stereophonics and Ioan Gruffudd as they top the charts or star on screen in the transatlantic culture it’s important also to celebrate aspects of our lives that aren’t just particular to Wales, but are unique.
Take ‘cynghanedd,’ for instance, the harmonious form of Welsh language poetry verse that will certainly be heard when poets take the stage in Washington. No less authoritative a source than the Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetics describes this as ‘the most sophisticated system of poetic sound-patterning practised in any poetry in the world’. We have unique knowledge too in medicine. In the same area in the Black Mountains where the ancient school of herbalists known as Meddygon Myddfai practised their green art, we now have modern companies making drugs to arrest Alzheimers using extracts from Welsh daffodils. It seems they knew some valuable stuff back then. In traditional music too, we have exponents whose take on old tunes is beautiful and contemporary. These arts aren’t frozen in aspic. While poets such as Ceri Wyn Jones and musicians such as pipe-player Ceri Rhys Matthews are respectful of their various traditions, they’re mindful of the need to re-energize and invigorate them. They take the old and make it anew.
The National Museum’s playing its part in maximizing Welsh impact in the rest of America by rolling out a prestigious show, ‘Turner to Cezanne,’ based on the paintings acquired by the Davies sisters of Gregynog. This is on an 18-month journey around four American venues and has been attracting glowing reviews ever since the show debuted at the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina. It features 58 paintings, a mix of French works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Old Master paintings by British artists, and is sure to delight the eyes.
With so many elements of culture on display in Washington it’s a shame nobody is piggy-backing on all of the Smithsonian activity and publicity and arranging a series of alternative pop and rock music events, creating the equivalent of the Edinburgh Fringe to the Edinburgh International Festival. Putting on the Super Furry Animals in the famous 9.30 Club, or even getting the Manics to play an arena gig, would have underlined the breadth and focus on the contemporary end of culture.
There’s one event which possibly in itself sums up where we’re at. It’s a showing of Gideon Koppel’s low-budget film
Sleep Furiously, which was filmed over seven months in a Ceredigion village and is now garnering extravagant praise.
Sight and Sound magazine described it as a masterpiece, ‘a mutedly gorgeous, moving and deeply poetic work of art’, while the
Guardian called it an ‘exquisite and moving meditation.’ This portrait of life in a mid-Wales farming village demonstrates connections to the past, underlines the importance of community and tells a familiar story in a vibrant and engaging way. This confident film seems to summarize aspects of our culture of which we can be impossibly proud, things we can happily show off to a million and more Americans.
The festival will be held on the National Mall in Washington DC from 24
- 28 June and 1-5 July 2009. For more information see:
www.wales.com/smithsonian
Jon Gower, author and broadcaster