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Brigid Bergin: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin, reporter in the WNYC newsroom. When you think of St. Patrick's Day celebrations in New York City, I bet your head goes straight to the iconic St. Patrick's Day parade. It's definitely a big event. Millions of people dressed in green line Fifth Avenue to watch step dancing and hear bagpipes. Maybe you also think about the controversy that's surrounded it.

It was less than a decade ago, only in 2015 that the parade finally allowed members of the LGBTQ+ community to march in it, but on a day celebrating Irish heritage in the city with the most Irish Americans in the country, should all the attention be paid to the parade? This is New York City, surely there are so many other ways to celebrate Irish culture here, especially on St. Patrick's Day.

Now, we want to shed light on a place that'll definitely focus on Irish culture, particularly music, dance, and literature. With us now is Aidan Connolly, the Executive Director of Irish Arts Center, here to talk about the celebratory programming that they have planned for St. Patrick's Day weekend this year. Spoiler, that fiddler that we just heard will be one of the performers this weekend. Hi, Aidan. Welcome to WNYC.

Aidan Connolly: Hi, Brigid. Nice to be on. What a lead-in.

Brigid Bergin: We are so glad to have you, and, listeners, we want you to join this conversation. We want to know how you are planning to spend your St. Patrick's Day. Do you usually go to the parade on Fifth Avenue or do you go to a more local event? If you are Irish in New York, how do you feel about how you see the day celebrated? Give us a call at (212)-433-WNYC, that's (212)-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Aidan, as I mentioned in the intro, New York City has the largest Irish American population in the country. Can you talk briefly about how this city became the epicenter of Irish America?

Aidan Connolly: I think it's fascinating and it speaks to our mission as well, which as you indicated a little bit in your lead-in, we lean a little more to the contemporary, but we stand on the shoulders of tradition. Of course, the Irish have a proud tradition in construction, in police, in fire safety, in so many professions. I think that what I love about being a New Yorker and about being an Irish American New Yorker is that we are bound by an immigrant tradition, and I think at our best, as Irish Americans, we really celebrate how we share that immigrant tradition here as an aspirant culture.

Brigid Bergin: I visited the center for the first time last month for a family concert to celebrate Saint Brigid's Day. Listeners, did you know-

Aidan Connolly: Oh, wonderful.

Brigid Bergin: -that's right, there's also a Saint Brigid's Day? Can you tell us what the center is and what visitors can expect to encounter when they get there?

Aidan Connolly: Just a shout out to Dani Larkin, who's the artist that you would've seen at that concert, who's a really wonderful contemporary folk artist from Northern Ireland. That was her New York City debut, which was really exciting for us to be able to present. Broadly, we're a multidisciplinary art center in Hell's Kitchen here on the west side of Manhattan. Our mission is to project the dynamism of Irish arts and culture in a way that leans contemporary, but's inclusive of tradition and showcases Ireland in maybe more of a modern European context while appreciating that everything has a historical lineage.

What's great about New York is that you don't have to choose. We can be fully authentic and still be really leaning forward in terms of how these traditions are evolving and changing. We present work across a range of artistic disciplines, as you indicated: Music, theater and dance and the performing arts, also literature and humanities, visual arts and film, interdisciplinary work.

In addition, we have more than 40 classes in Irish language and literature, storytelling, music, dance, at a real community level so folks can engage with the culture at a entry-level way and also build community and friendships and learn something. For your listeners who may not be familiar with us, I think a fun way to think about us is an intimately-scale Irish hybrid of the 92nd Street Y, and bam.

Brigid Bergin: I'd love that.

Aidan Connolly: Bam, we're on the ground internationally across the island of Ireland, so artists like Dani Larkin, who you saw, and others that we have coming up, like Liz Roche in the Lyric Theater of Belfast, and what have you. We're on the ground at all the festivals across Ireland and serving as a pipeline for folks to get to New York and connect with New York artists and New York audiences.

I guess there's probably a small p cultural progressivism in what we do in that we're really trying to be affirmative in our efforts at inclusion and in engagement with other cultures here in New York and to provide a great experience for artists. Then, like the 92nd Street Y, of course, we have a range of classes and a great Eastside institution, really a sort of epicenter of community education here in the city, among others, but also that we jump off of a particular tradition, in their case Jewishness, in our case, Irishness, and try to really forge the connections with the broader cultural bloodstream of the city, and really try to meet the diverse cultural appetites of the city.

Brigid Bergin: I want to jump in and invite one of our listeners into the conversation. Deidra in Brooklyn, who is, I think, taking a class at the center now. Deidra, welcome to WNYC.

Deidra: Oh, hi. [Irish language] I'm taking a language class at the Irish Arts Center. It's actually online, but I'm just starting and it's really hard, but it's really great. I was so happy to find--

Aidan Connolly: [laughs] Is it an intro-level class?

Deidra: Yes.

Aidan Connolly: That's great.

Brigid Bergin: Deidra, can you give us a little bit of what you've learned? Maybe say it in Irish and then translate for us.

Deidra: Oh my goodness.

Brigid Bergin: No pressure. No pressure. Can you say Happy St. Patrick's Day?

Deidra: Oh my gosh, no, I don't think so. She did send us that, our teacher. We're just learning literally the sounds and all the letter combinations, which are so difficult, but it's making so much sense because my mom came from Ireland and my grandparents spoke Irish. I remember some of the things they said now that I'm seeing the language and learning how it's written.

Some of the phrasings when they translate things into English now make so much sense because I understand the grammatical reasons why when people say a question in Irish and an Irish person answers just in affirmative, like, "Did you go to the store?" "They did." Instead of saying yes or no, because there is no yes or no in Irish and I never knew that before taking this class.

Brigid Bergin: Wow, so interesting.

Deidra: It's so fascinating in just reminding me I wish I had the interest when I was younger, when my grandparents were alive to learn more from them. It's really fun and the teacher's amazing and also shares a lot with how young people in Ireland are using the language and there's Irish rappers and musicians and that it's really alive and it's not a dead language. That's just been fun to see.

Brigid Bergin: Deidra, do you have plans for tomorrow?

Deidra: My only plans really, I am speaking to some of my classmates in the Irish class and we are practicing together. I'm going to do that and maybe listen to some music.

Brigid Bergin: That's great. Deidra, thank you so much for your call. Call us again. Aidan, I want to talk just briefly about this center itself. I know it just went through this huge renovation, a 15-year-long project. How has the new location enhanced some of your programming?

Aidan Connolly: It's been incredible. The project is really a new construction adjacent to our existing building on 51st Street and then a new build on 11th Avenue just immediately adjacent. It's expanded our capacity where-- We fundamentally prize intimacy as a core value. It's still for those folks who've been to our old space on 51st Street, which is just one of those classic 99-seat, hyper-intimate theaters that there are so many wonderful spaces around the city.

We really treasure that sense of intimacy, but the new space is about double that size, so it's about up to 199 seats, but it has also significantly expanded artistic capacity so that we have the ability to provide a much more full experience in terms of some of the work that's happening in the world of theater and dance. That would've been harder to do at our smaller scale. As well, we found an incredible canvas for visual arts in town-

Brigid Bergin: Oh, that's great.

Aidan Connolly: -using the flexible space for visual arts is great.

Brigid Bergin: Let's talk about some of what you have coming up this weekend.

Aidan Connolly: Sure. Absolutely.

Brigid Bergin: I know you've got a book event. Can you tell us briefly about what that is and where people can participate in it?

Aidan Connolly: Absolutely. Book day, gently pushing back on some of the Irish stereotypes that we hear more about on St. Patrick's Day. Just on the train coming down today, I heard an announcement on Metro-North about alcohol being prohibited on the Metro-North so I bristle a little bit. We have our tradition on St. Patrick's Day is about celebrating reading and books. We distribute thousands of books across the city, all five boroughs.

We'll have titles from authors like Sally Rooney and Colin Barrett as well as some translations of Beckett into Spanish and translations of Claire Keegan into Chinese. Scores and scores and scores of titles. Across the five boroughs, folks can visit irishartscenter.org and find out where we'll be giving out free books to all New Yorkers. We are also partnering as we often do with a different community, and so we're highlighting this year LGBTQ+ authors as well.

Brigid Bergin: That's great.

Aidan Connolly: We'll see a lot of great LGBTQ+ literature out in the streets in the five boroughs. Then in the evening, if I could just add, we have an incredible singer-songwriter where there's just a few tickets left for Loah, who's just absolutely magical art soul singer from Dublin who will be presenting a range of work from her most recent EP, When I Rise Up, which highlights settings of poems from Irish and Sierra Leonean and American writers from the 1920s.

Brigid Bergin: That's so interesting.

Aidan Connolly: That reflects her personal background.

Brigid Bergin: I'm going to jump in because we have a little piece of music from Loah that we want to share with our listeners. Let's go ahead and share that.

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The night is beautiful

Brigid Bergin: That was Loah who is performing at the Irish Arts Center in a concert. That is tomorrow night, is that correct, Aidan?

Aidan Connolly: Tomorrow night at 7:30, yes.

Brigid Bergin: You said a few tickets are left, so presumably, people have to hit your website soon if they want to get in on that.

Aidan Connolly: Yes, I would say this hour, go scoop up those last few tickets. She's a really, really special artist and I think this is the fourth or fifth time we've had the chance to present her. She really is wonderfully emblematic of what we're all about.

Brigid Bergin: That's so great. Let's get some more callers in on the conversation. Kelly in Brooklyn, Welcome to WNYC.

Kelly: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Brigid Bergin: You have some different plans for St. Patrick's today, I see.

Kelly: Yes. Saturday, I mean tomorrow, I'll go watch the parade. My family member used to actually lead the bagpipers in the parade until he retired last year. Then on Saturday, my cousin and I, who are both, our grandmother came over from Ireland when she was 16 and landed in New York City, we are going to watch Ireland play England in the rugby match. We're very excited to go do that together.

Brigid Bergin: Oh, wow. That sounds like a great weekend of plans. Kelly, thank you so much for your call. Let's go to Gregory in Harlem. Gregory, thanks for calling.

Gregory: Hi, there. How are you? Listen, there are lots of things to learn about the Irish and I found that out last year when I went to the Hunger Memorial down on Vesey Street, oh, it's devastating, but it's very, very instrumental to know that there's much more to the Irish history in New York City. Many of those people came over during the famine, and now, they're in scouts in this little Rockefeller Park right near the World Trade Center.

Me and friends are going to go visit there tomorrow and [unintelligible 00:14:46]

Aidan Connolly: It's a beautiful setting.

Brigid Bergin: Yes, it is a beautiful setting in a really stirring memorial. Gregory, thank you for your call. Thank you for another thing that folks can do on St. Patrick's Day. Aidan, I know you have more events planned throughout the weekend. Can you tell us a little bit about what's coming up on Sunday?

Aidan Connolly: Yes. On Sunday, we have something called St. Patrick's Open Day, which is a long tradition at Irish Arts Center, celebrating our community education programming, and really, just throwing open the doors for an afternoon of free events. There will be pop-up performances throughout the building, different opportunities to experiment with different classes that we offer here, some lovely food offerings in our Devlin Cafe on the ground floor, and just a great old-fashioned open house.

Of course, with our new facility, we've got substantially more capacity than we used to. I think we have upwards of 600 reservations already. We're really, really excited to really engage with folks at that level. There'll be lots of old friends who are coming to see us, and of course, folks who are just learning about us for the first time. That's just what makes being a cultural institution in New York so special, is just those long friendships that you build with your artists and your audiences. Then just the constant inflow of new people who really help make it a dynamic experience for everybody.

Brigid Bergin: Aidan, thank you so much. We're going to have to leave it there. My guest was Aidan Connolly, executive director of Irish Arts Center. Aidan, thank you for joining me, and happy St. Patrick's Day.

Aidan Connolly: Thanks, Brigid. Happy St. Patrick's Day to you and your listeners.

Brigid Bergin: [chuckles] This is The Brian Lehrer Show. The Brian Lehrer Show's producers are Lisa Allison, Mary Croke, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen takes care of the podcast. Megan Ryan is the head of Live Radio. Our interns are Brianna Brady and Trinity Lopez. Juliana Fonda, Matt Marando, and Milton Ruiz are at the audio controls. I'm Brigid Bergin, and this is The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Thank you so much for listening.

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