Belfast International Arts Festival

IF YOU wanted to deliver a blistering attack on today's US-influenced news media, you might not choose modern dance as your vehicle – how about a juicy TV drama like Succession? Yet Belfast dancer and choreographer Eileen McClory has produced a powerful dance theatre piece titled Gutter – as in the 'gutter press': Rupert Murdoch's empire, CNN, Fox News, Question Time and some BBC News output should not expect an easy ride.

GUTTER will be performed at The MAC in Belfast this month.

THE first time Nicholas McCarthy noticed his right hand missing was a sort of revelation – not because, as a bright and boisterous five-year-old he hadn't been aware of the absent appendage of course, but because someone else had had the nerve to point it out.

ARTISTIC director Richard Wakely described this year’s Belfast International Arts Festival at its launch as 'fertile ground' to promote the brightest and bravest talent.

THERE's nothing like a little bit of introspection to help make sense of life's great imponderables and probably no-one better placed than a poet to help the rest of us arrive at some conclusions.

Marc Almond, The Waterboys, Cara Dillon and Moroccan contemporary circus show FIQ! are some of the early acts revealed for this autumn's Belfast International Arts Festival.

Writer Maria Fusco grew up in Belfast’s Ardoyne during the Troubles. Her latest project, History of the Present, is a semi-autobiographical experimental feminist film-opera about class and conflict, asking who has the right to speak and in what way? Jenny Lee finds out more

Ruth McGinley – Aura album launch at Belfast International Arts Festival THE piano is a stringed keyboard that works via a static keyboard.

PAUL McVeigh, the dramatist behind Big Man at The Lyric Theatre (until November 6), remembers his first Festival offering: "Many years ago I set up a production company in Belfast and put on The Handsome Cabin Boy, based on an old folk song Kate Bush used as a B side to Hounds of Love.

IN what she describes as a "love letter to old musical theatre", Joanna O'Hare is in her happy place, shaking down her long red tresses as photographer's muse, Hanna, and posing seductively in Conor Mitchell's new musical satire, Propaganda, running at the Lyric Theatre as part of this year's Belfast International Arts Festival.