Winter isn’t exactly renowned for its festival abundance in the city of festivals, except, of course, for that one. So as October draws to a close again, a satisfied man, I figuratively hang up my festival hat for the year. The last month saw me working again with Luminate, Scotland’s creative ageing festival, on a programme of events that spanned the regions of Scotland. Performances, workshops, classes, discussions and fairs on subjects from cinema to historical research through to poetry and contemporary art. The umbrella of ‘creative’ is straight-away a broad one.
So too is the handle of ‘ageing.’ I captured a selection of events from the programme and both audiences and participants ranged hugely in years. Nothing in the events were exclusive to older generations, and none of the issues and themes across the works were unique to them either. My assumptions were certainly bruised. New ideas and new technology go through the same processes with older as they do younger. Broad mindedness doesn’t fall out of style as you grow, it’s human nature to search for new means of expression and hidden creative outlets.
From the small moments I shared with the different groups, I realsised ageing is something we all have in common. And not, to contradict popular consensus, necessarily a parallel of maturity.
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| Underpass Mural in Livingston |
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| Stone Carving Workshop at the Burrell Collection, Glasgow |
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| 24 Carat Gold performance at Dancebass, Edinburgh |
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| Open Mic Night at Glad Cafe, Glasgow |
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| Poetry Slam at Ghillie Dhu, Edinburgh |
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| Music Workshop at Howden Park Centre, Livingston |
Over the last 6 months, my local Leith Walk has had its grey and shady veneer peeled away to the vibrant, motley heartwood underneath. Leith has always had the handle of being a colourful neighbourhood, but the curatorial eye of LeithLate has seen this put forward in vivid hues. LeithLate chief Morv has paired visual artists with local businesses whose street shutters are lent as a steel canvas to their ideas and artwork. With no shortage of interesting businesses on the walk, and some truly excellent artists in the local, the range of expression and creativity has been awesome.
Speaking as someone visual – it has not only been a great idea, but a great success. My roving eyes have more luscious pigmentation on which to feast on my walk up the street. I think we could all happily see more artistic collaboration within our commnuity – bravo folks.
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| Games Master – Jamie Johnson |
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| Fairtrade Coffee – Bernie Reid |
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| Paradign Shift – Dave Lemm |
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| Inner City Sanctum – Liana Moran |
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| Word Of Mouth – Fraser Gray |
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| Origano – Richie |
Here we go then. As of this week, there is enough Festival mayhem on the horizon to put anyone’s blood pressure through the roof and have an escape plan hatched for August. I’m not there quite just yet thankfully. Instead I still have some work to show off from festivals been.
The engaging Imaginate Festival, which ran last month, boasted a raft of theatre and performance aimed at children, but largely enjoyed by grown-ups as ever. I was asked by Curious Seed to work on Chalk About, an interactive dance performance that shed layers on issues of identity and growing up (and pizza). Me, Chris and Leandro worked on a poster together early in the year with only chalk and cloth at our disposal. Proper Arts & Crafts!
I joined them again months later after the show had taken shape and toured Europe to shoot the production in Edinburgh. It always amazes me how organic shows are. Like other art forms, they are never finished. Especially so when your raw materials are chalk and children, it is always nice to be part of something unrepeatable.
This weekend ushers in the end of The Arches Behavior Festival for 2013. A heady five weeks of completely new work for the stage from Scottish and international artists. Eclectic and contemporary as only the Arches can, even the term “stage” is only applied loosely. This year saw a new creative partnership come to fruition between the Arches and NTS, which I am very indebted to have been involved in from early on.
The project gave five rising Scottish devisers an opportunity to research, incubate and perform new work at the festival. Each with their own developing trademarks and disciplines, some of them out and out rogues, but all of them auteurs of their craft. Having had the chance to meet them together for the school portrait lineup for a feature in The List, I was brimming to shoot all of their performances individually over the course of the month.
First was Gary McNair’s brilliantly referential investigation into stand-up comedy: Donald Robertson is not a Comedian.
Kieran Hurley explored notions of community and ideals of Scottishness in, effectively, a living room jamboree. Intimate and foot tapping: Rantin
Claire Cunningham’s ongoing curiosity in the body brought her to and back from Cambodia to begin a work meditating on the effects of landmines. A framework of disability through which the indiscriminate excess of war can be viewed from a humble perspective: Pink Mist
Finally, Rob Drummond’s centenary revisiting of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring, through a screen of contemporary dance and music as well as recent societal dysfunctions. Leaving the outcome in the hands of the audience: The Riots of Spring
There have been heaps of great writing documenting the Festival, but for a succinct in house perspective check out Rosie’s blog.
Sunday is classically the day for putting your feet up and doing nothing. It’s not often you find an offer good enough to have you on your feet doing everything. Sunday at Edinburgh’s Electric Circus saw a raft of great music dominate the entire day from the early afternoon playing live into the early morning.
Having some great work up our sleeves from an earlier shoot with Discopolis, this was my first chance to see the guys play. With Dems and Dutch Uncles also on the roster, it was really a no brainer where my Sunday was going. Easy knowing it was a bank holiday…
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From the chaos of March and the illness of April (changing seasons after all), I haven’t been able to man the blog and have had to let it rust by the way side. Well no longer, I have much to talk about.
What better to start with than the most recent and most interesting. Last week, before succumbing totally to a bout of tonsillitis, I attended an event organised by ASCUS, as part of the Edinburgh Science Festival. They hosted an open workshop where members of the public were presented with a collated version of a published scientific paper and had to in turn interpret the academic rhetoric into a poem.
Teamwork! And interestingly, the room was split accidentally into scientists and artists who banded together. The results were curiously different. Myself, Mark and Graham concocted our own method to blindly extract individual words from the prose. Through the legendary power of the post-it, we curated our words into a work that obeyed rules of poetry but also lovingly summarised the paper at hand, and the nature of academic articles in general.
High Five! It was a very fun way to apply our disciplines to something unfamiliar. Our team’s word choice was so random and so repetitive that we would have been delighted to contrive anything at all, let alone our interesting two stanzas that are posted below.
Tara is a writer, and as I have learned, many other things. The learning is at the very beginning though, and it is a two way exchange. Tara has been selected by the Traverse Theatre, off the strength of her script Tourists, to be one of their 50 writers for their 50th Year.
This is a great programme, both in scale and in promise. And like all great things, it needs to be properly documented. Enter the foresight of the staff at Writer Pictures, who have cleverly elected 50 photographers with which to partner each writer. A personal chronicler for a time that is pivotal in their career. Tara is my writer and last weekend, we met for the first time.
A difficult balance to strike, when two people first meet. Thankfully for us, we both recognise a blank canvas and the opportunity to create something. And thankfully for us, we met for a meal in The Shore, where no wrong can be done! Talking without a script, about flats, about painting, about forgetting, big changes,sisters and brothers, style, about Ireland, a very rounded image of Tara emerged as a writer, worker, person. Someone unique for a unique project. Creating can be a solitary process, and I am very much looking forward to sharing it with someone not only with a different perspective, but a separate medium to express it.
I will produce a portrait of Tara over the course of this partnership for exhibition in the Traverse during August.
All too aware that this March is turning into this April all too quickly, I had better step up my pace and keep the world up to date with my whereabouts. 2013, slow down will ya?
To coincide with the release of Steve Mason’s Monkey Minds in the Devils Time, The Skinny asked me to shoot him for this month’s cover. I heard the words “protest” and “somewhere like kind of a wasteland”, and my head skipped a few chapters and went straight to “smokebombs!” We took a walk to a lesser-known spot overlooking Leith Walk and stirred up a storm of smoke and flashes. In hindsight, only in hardy Leith could this go unacknowledged.
