AS THE only editor of the journal since its inception ten years ago, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

HOWEVER, a succession of e-mails, Facebook comments and personal communications have confirmed that I am not alone, and many of them have been extremely gratifying, both to me personally and the Northings team, of which more below.

As Robert Livingston noted in his eloquent explanation of why we cannot continue in our present form, Northings has created a record of a decade of fascinating activity in the arts in this region and beyond. It will remain accessible online for at least a year as things stand, and I hope that in that period some way of reviving the site may be found.

James Hawkins - The Rough Bounds of Knoydart

Our demise comes at a point when it is difficult to escape the feeling that many of the gains put in place in that time are eroding at an alarming rate. Northings follows The Booth, venues are struggling to maintain audience numbers, and money gets harder and harder to find – Moray Council have just axed their arts budget completely (and there may be more such blows to come).

And yet, I don’t see it as a completely gloomy outlook. Yes, times are hard, some companies and organisations will go the wall, the infrastructure may be weakened. The arts are no stranger to this kind of dilemma, though, and I remain confident that artists in our part of the world will continue to do what they do, creating good work whatever the duress, and will be there to step in when matters improve again, as they surely will.

I have had the privilege of editing Northings since we launched the site, but I had already decided to step down as editor at the end of this month. I feel ten years is long enough under a single editor, and if Northings is to be revived in some way at some point, it is time for new ideas and fresh energy.

Although I am continuing with a little writing, this will be my final substantial job, and I’m looking forward to pursuing some of my other interests – it won’t be slippers and pipe so much as walking boots, binoculars and bike (at least as long as the legs will allow)!

I would like to thank Robert Livingston for both his vision and unstinting support, and apologise for dropping him into several stushies for which he was in no way responsible, but took the flak. Likewise, my thanks to all at Hi-Arts, notably Marcus Wilson and Fiona Fisher (without whom, etc), and also, in no particular order, John Saich, Peter Urpeth, Karen Ray, Laura Martin, Elizabeth Sinclair, Avril Souter, Jelica Gavrilovic, Caroline MacLeod, Maggie Dunlop, Sian Jamieson, Pamela Conacher, Alistair Peebles, Andy Ross and the late Helen Slater (apologies if I have missed anyone). It has been a pleasure working with the team, and given that none of the core team was ever remotely full-time on Northings, I think we did a pretty good job.

My thanks also go to all of the contributors who have provided such rewarding material over the years. I believe the quality of much of the work we published was as high as anything currently happening in arts commentary in the UK, and it is difficult to imagine that events up here will get a similar level of attention in the media.

Although their support is now ending, we owe a debt of gratitude to Highlands & Islands Enterprise for ten years of funding, and to Creative Scotland and its predecessor, the Scottish Arts Council, for additional financial support.

Final thanks, though, has to go to all of you who have used the site, whether as regular visitors and commentors or occasional lookers-in to see what was going on. My best wishes go to everyone involved in the arts – we may have reached the end of this phase of our journey on Northings, but I am confident that the artistic spirit will continue to thrive in our beautiful region.

Kenny Mathieson

Editor

© Kenny Mathieson, 2013

BACK at the turn of the Millennium, I was keen to set up an online journal that would properly represent the dynamism and diversity of the arts and culture in the Highlands and Islands.

REMOTENESS —real or perceived—continues to deny those based in the Highlands and Islands a fair coverage in the national press, and, with a few honourable exceptions, local press rarely have space, or the confidence, to deal with the arts.

Northings was the result, and we were very fortunate right at the beginning to be able to recruit, as editor, Kenny Mathieson, a highly experienced and well-connected arts journalist who is based at Boat of Garten. Kenny quickly established editorial templates and standards which have stood the test of time, and recruited a network of writers, new and established, from across the Highlands and Islands.

The National Theatre of Scotland's Black Watch was one almost 2,000 events reviewed in Northings

In its first year Northings won a Broadband Britain national award, and in the subsequent ten years it has published 761 features and 1,961 reviews, as well as countless news items. It was a fundamental policy of Northings that all writers and reviewers should be paid. A website made up of purely voluntary contributions would have been valid, but it would have been a very different site. Our aim was to take a professional approach to writing about the arts, and in many cases that meant that the online format could allow for a much deeper and more considered coverage than would be feasible in print. This means that scores of artists and arts companies, over the years, have been the beneficiaries of detailed and thoughtful assessments, by writers who, if they were not already recognised, came to acquire a reputation through their work for Northings.

But all this comes at a price. The actual cost of hosting the Northings site has been minimal since we moved to a WordPress platform a few years ago, but to maintain an appropriate level of new content each month means a budget for writers’ fees.

Up till now those costs have been met by Highlands and Islands Enterprise, but with shrinking budgets and changing priorities, HIE is no longer able to continue that support. It’s with the greatest regret, therefore, that, with effect from the end of March, Northings will become a static site and we’ll be unable to commission new material.

A key part of our aim was to build up an archive, and we now have a ten year portrait of the extraordinary wealth of cultural activity in the Highlands and Islands. For at least the next twelve months that archive will remain fully accessible and searchable, as a unique document of a period of growth and change in the area. Our aim will be to find a permanent host for that archive and also, if possible, to relaunch Northings in a new form which can remain true to the original vision of presenting the arts and culture of the Highlands and Islands to the rest of the world in an inclusive and professional way.

Finally, I’d like to thank Kenny Mathieson for his skill and dedication in the task of editing Northings over the past decade, and also everyone who has written for Northings, and indeed everyone who has logged on, read, and shared our articles

Robert Livingston, Director, HI~Arts

© Robert Livingston, 2013

IT’S SAFE TO say the parents of Stuart Henderson, who died in a road accident in 2007, can have had no idea what they would set in motion when they suggested to director John Haswell that their son’s youth theatre should create a play in his memory.

FIVE years later, and with Shetland Arts and the National Theatre of Scotland on board, Ignition is the culmination of an islands-wide arts project on an unprecedented scale. Besides the innovative performances taking place in Brae, Bigton and Yell, there has been an extensive six-month programme of activity throughout the community.

Ignition (image NTS)

Children have written songs with Hugh Nankivell, teenagers have sharpened up their parkour skills with Chris Grant, care-home residents have reminisced with choreographer Janice Parker, knitters have created giant woollen artworks with writer Jacqui Clark and designer Becky Minto, and drivers have shared stories with Lowri Evans as she hitchhiked across the islands dressed as the ghostly White Wife of local folklore.

It is from this vast store of material that director Wils Wilson has drawn to piece together the final production. Despite the project’s tragic inspiration, this is no didactic show about road safety. Instead, it is an impressionistic consideration of the motor car’s place in island life. Although some older residents have never learnt to drive and many younger ones think nothing of walking three miles home from the ferry terminal, it is impossible to imagine today’s Shetland economy without motorised transport. Not only is off-shore oil a major industry, but in a sparsely populated region, almost nothing happens without a car.

Ignition is a celebration not of cars in themselves but the things they make possible. Appropriately, most of the show takes place inside moving and stationary vehicles. Everyone’s journey is slightly different, but it will include a choreographed display of free-running and ballroom dancing set to a soundtrack of travel-related interviews played over your car radio. You will give a lift to a hitchhiker who will tell you their story (mine had come from the mainland in search of the home of his forebears) and you will get into someone else’s car for more tales of vehicles loved and lost.

The unusual format, involving long drives and precision parking, inevitably means it’s not as technically slick as a regular NTS show, but all the strands come movingly together when we return to the village hall. It’s laid out as if for a Sunday tea and, as we tuck into coffee and cakes, we join in with the choir singing songs written by children and other local people about the landscape they know and love. “All the journeys we’ve made . . . All the places we’ll go to,” goes one refrain as Lowri Evans reads out the dream destinations we have written down earlier in the evening. The effect is a big-hearted celebration of life as it is lived, a community looking at itself and liking what it sees.

© Francis McLachlan, 2013

Links

• NTS

AN ANNUAL installation by the students on the Art, Space and Nature masters course at Edinburgh University has now become part of the An Lanntair calendar.

COURSE tutor Donald Urquhart established the Western Isles connection. It is possible this will alternate with course visits to Orkney. The pattern is that a group of students first visits as a field trip. They then have a period to continue their investigations and research.

When they return to the Island, they install a group show, exploring responses to what has struck the individual artists and sparked off further work. The first installation, three years ago, was in the corridor and bar area but the quality of work led to last year’s offer of installing in the main gallery. I felt it was a show brimming with ideas so was not surprised to see the space offered to this year’s students. Sadly it is only on show for a week.

It’s fortunate that Northings is still active, just long enough to draw attention to a body of work that might otherwise hardly be noticed. And I’m glad to be able to sign-off from a happy long-term relationship with this excellent forum, on a positive note. But where will we find its like – a skillfully edited and well presented Journal, fairly presenting comment across all the arts, as they relate to the Highlands and Islands?

This is a body of work brimming with a sense of adventure. Pieces vary from provisional expressions of a developing idea to pieces which seem to me to have already found a satisfying form for the ideas behind them. The range of media is wide but all works do home-in to our small geography. But there is an implicit sense of comparison – our context in a wide world.

Take Stephanie Getta’s Dic | Seanphacail | Sayings. It is a work in three languages. A simple but well-designed pamphlet gathers the proverbs of an area in the Dolomites and those of the Isle of Lewis. The work is the gathering and comparison, diligently researched, quietly presented and likely to be ongoing. A small group of plastic cups for the ear are suspended as an offer to listen to the languages of Gaelic and Ladin.

Tanja Geis represents the luxurient sea-foam which has been such a feature of recent storms. The meeting of ocean and shore is recorded in photography but this becomes two large scale long rectangles, inviting comparison. They are like positive and negative images, richness come from sheer energy. She sets this by a “haleidoscope” where salt crystals turn inside a hand-shaped cylinder carved from a piece of discarded shipyard oak. The timber, from a decommissioned fishing vessel, has been giving a new life. Both pieces are beautiful objects but are also part of an exploration.

Sara Ockland - Walk Away

In contrast, the exploration of possibility seems more to the fore than a finished presentation in the work shown by Sara Ockland. She continued the group’s relationship with the traditional boat society, Falmadair. The whole group sailed the last of the original north Lewis lugsail boats, sgoth Jubilee, during their field trip. Sara was taken back out into the approaches to Stornoway harbour by skipper Jim McWhir. A series of like discs were painted with a fairly wild shade of red to enter the water, but tethered together so all could be recovered. Although they did not present enough surface area to be affected by wind, the drift induced by tidal current and small waves sent them drifting in divergent lines.

For me, this is an idea that could continue to be explored. The discs themselves looked startling on the grey gallery floor and led you to a small, simple image of their distribution on the sea. But it’s surely part of a Masters Degree course that there is room to set an idea in motion. Perhaps some artists work by forming the idea and thinking out its practical representation in advance and others have to try this and try that till it all seems right. It’s interesting too that some artists on this course come from a background in architecture or in landscape architecture and others from fine-art. For some it may be the first time they have exhibited a made work, outside a formal commission.

Luskentyre beach has proved a draw on all the course field-trips. It’s character is caught by Javier Vidal Aguilera, who exhibits 99 small prints. They are derived from photographs of seaweed traces. It reminded me of Helen Douglas’s work, gathered in one of Alec Finlay’s pocketbook series in the sense that it is a subtle, sustained study of a simple but beautiful found thing. But something mysterious happens here, in the translation from digital photograph to monochrome print on semi-transparent paper. The whole series taken on one day (another number 9 in the date) adds a shamanistic element. The observed natural debris has become a mysterious calligraphy.

Sandra Teixera - 32000 Folds

This work naturally chimes with Sandra Teixera’s “32,000 folds”. It is a prayerful commitment – representing 1,000 salmon, in small origami models. These are suspended on monofilament line and allowed to move to any air-currents. They ask more then they tell – perhaps there is a native North American parallel to the Gaelic tradition of the salmon of knowledge. Perhaps there is an implicit comparison with the free-swimming wild fish and its densely-farmed, genetic cousin.

Flavia Salvador has observed what Robert Livingston once called “the zen of passing places” in a Northings blog. You look ahead and show courtesy, guaging your speed so perhaps you might not even need to stop. The idea uses the space offered by the particular gallery to meditate on an observed tradition of passing a waved greeting across the space outside the nearly-meeting cars. One text is carefully painted on one wall and you look twice to see how it corresponds with the answering phrase, opposite. The work is a poem. It is gentle but depends on wit to express the observation.

Flavia Salvador - The Passing Place

A direct quotation catalogues the work of Zhongying Ren: “Man is ruled by land, land is ruled by heaven, heaven is ruled by Tao, and Tao is ruled by nature.” In one sense this work relates to the seafoam wall, round the corner of the L-shaped space. Crumpled metal foil replicates the strange natural phenomena in a contrasting material. It’s like a metaphysical conceit in poetry – where an extravagant or daring metaphor brings you to study one thing by likening it to another. I had to stoop low to see the foil reflected in a floor-level band of uncrushed foil on the wall. Perhaps this is another work where the present visual form is not the final result of a developing idea.

There is a turning point in any L shape and Jonathan Hemelberg probably unwittingly follows his tutor, Donald Urquhart, in carrying a work around that corner. Urquhart’s last show here, really did play music with the opportunities of the space. Drawing has returned, big time, to the art world. This artist draws a simple, alternative map. Significant features – a lighthouse, a broch, are placed in a landscape of swirls that could be contours. Written diary-like comments note a personal reaction to our landscape. But you could argue that any phrase in common use was someone’s personal reaction once. To quote from the lore of a region in the Dolomites:

“Då lå Madònå dei Chèrmin i òrjes doveså ˘spièr.”

“On the day of our Lady of Carmel the barley should start to spike.”

It’s good to know there’s a summer of some kind coming.

© Ian Stephen, 2013

Links

• An Lanntair
• Art Space and Nature Programme
• Ian Stephen

COMBINING dance with digital media is often attempted but rarely succeeds as well as it does in Labyrinth of Love, the work which opened Rambert’s welcome return to Inverness and gave its name to this tour.

A PARTITIONED backdrop of back projection screen hangs behind what can only be described as a bar counter, itself fronted with screens, on which are projected images responding to the sung text.

Labyrinth of Love (photo © Chris Nash)

Kirsty Hopkins, soprano, sings words written by or about women and love spanning the last two and a half millennia. She also moves, and decorously dances, sometimes partnered. It’s a glorious voice, a bravura performance; and yet completely integrated into the whole.

At first the moving backdrop is a little distracting but as the images dim and evolve elementally and poetically – earth, air, fire, water, moon, smoke, cloud, stars – its simple elegance proves its worth. Although the texts include Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, the lyric that stands out is composer Daugherty’s own ‘Liz’s Lament’, a regretful monologue for Elizabeth Taylor about her relationship with Richard Burton;“my husband….my ex-husband…I can’t remember which”.

For this, the backdrop shows rocks and pebbles tumbling and falling – and in amongst them, one huge, brilliant-cut diamond. A lovely touch, one amongst many,

Labyrinth is an excellent showcase for the physicality and musicality of the dancers. The choreography, and the company’s delivery of it, throughout this work is as good as anything you’re likely to see this year and enchants everyone within earshot of this reviewer’s seat.

After a short interval, Monolith, by Tim Rushton with music by Latvian composer Peteris Vasks is, however, the outstanding work of the evening. The design is pure, simple and exquisite. The choreography is punishing, full of abrupt transitions from fast to slow, flowing to static, smooth to angular, requiring – and getting – superb technique from the company. This is a world-class piece and a world-class performance and fully justifies Rambert’s claim to be the UK’s premier contemporary dance company.

The final third of the programme affectionately revives the version of Nijinsky’s L’Apres-midi d’un faune originated by Marie Rambert herself in the 1930s and maintained in the repertoire for decades afterwards. The costumes are Bakst’s designs brought to three dimensional life. The lush sweetness of Debussy’s music contrasts with Nijinsky’s succession of hieratic moves and static poses designed to evoke ancient bas-reliefs. How shocking it must have been on its first showing in 1912! Now it has the quaint, engaging charm of a silent movie.

It’s paired with Mark Baldwin’s response to it, made on the company with a commissioned contemporary score by Gavin Higgins and designed by Michael Howells in a style that could be described as “Sgt Pepper’s Stag Night at a Rave”. There is a collective gasp and murmur from the audience as the curtain rises to reveal three huge wasps suspended over the stage. We are, according to the programme, in the Forest of Dean, although many of the energetic moves recall native dances from North America and (perhaps) Baldwin’s native Fiji.

Once again the company draws on its seemingly endless reserves of stamina and skill, as do its excellent musicians.

It’s good to finish dance reviews at Northings with a show, and a company, of such excellence.

© Jennie Macfie, 2013

Links

• Rambert Dance
• Jennie Macfie

“WE sacked Seamus (Fogarty),” quipped Pictish Trail Johnny Lynch when he and James Yorkston emerged together following the interval, “he didn’t sell enough merchandise over the break.”

IT WAS a comment which set the tone for an evening of bantering camaraderie and do-it-themselves minimalism in the typical Fence style, with our three hosts having lugged their own assortment of guitars, samplers and (in Yorkston’s case) an elaborate-looking nyckelharpa onstage and assembled them around their feet.

James Yorkston

Yorkston, Lynch and Fogarty’s styles are all different, but with enough overlap to allow this three-way package tour to work by taking it in turns to be each other’s backing group. Between Yorkston’s rich, pastoral alt.folk style and Fogarty’s similarly earthy balladeering there was most crossover, and the pair employed a trad combination of guitar and voice on songs like the former’s Steady As She Goes (“a song about taking acid with your girlfriend’s sister,” apparently) and Surf Song, it’s lyrics jokily messed around with, or the latter’s John Martyn tribute Song For John.

Lynch’s new album Secret Soundz Vol.2, on the other hand, is a treasure chest of electro-acoustic delights, and his wonderful contributions were more leftfield, including a subdued version of his other band Silver Columns’ song Columns or the dense electronica of Michael Rocket. These were only two of many stand-out moments, including Yorkston’s wistful cover of Erasure’s A Little Respect, the trio’s a cappella harmony on Fogarty’s God Damn You Mountain and Yorkston’s striking closer Queen of Spain, although by the end it might have felt to many as if our appetites for each singer’s music hadn’t been entirely satisfied.

James Yorkston, Pictish Trail and Seamus Fogarty play the Eden Court, Inverness, on Tuesday 19th March and the Universal Hall, Findhorn, on Wednesday 20th March.

© David Pollock, 2013

Links

• Fence Records

THE CHAIR of An Talla Solais, Dave Falconer, has been working towards this exhibition for years.

IT CELEBRATES the art of the print, by showcasing work produced by a wide range of artists at two institutions: the Highland Print Studio, in Inverness, and Hot Bed Press, in Manchester. The resulting exhibition is eclectic and enthralling.

Untitled (collograph) by Jan Breckenridge

There are many different printing techniques on display, and linocuts sit next to much more high tech prints, without explanation or apology. The show is therefore not an introduction to the methods of print, although if that is your interest, there are workshop opportunities at the gallery while the exhibition is on.

The work of both studios is blended without making it obvious which artists are from which area. Arguably this means that the exhibition misses the opportunity of allowing comparisons to be made, but the result is pleasingly diverse.

The stand-out print is an extraordinary seascape of the Shiant Islands, which is actually formed through clever use of greyscales on a printout of a traditional Hebridean story as told by Ian Stephen in a collaboration between him and artist Emmanuelle Waeckerlé and printer John McNaught. Another Ian Stephen story forms part of a print of Fair Isle, created in collaboration with Christine Morrison.

John McNaught’s own work is also story-based, with brightly coloured cartoons of footballers with associated bizarre tales. These are works that take substantial time to absorb.

Other pieces are much more immediate. My favourites are Katy Spong’s wildlife prints, of which there are two in this show. Roebuck at the Forest Edge is a beautifully atmospheric dusky image, appropriately hung in the corner of the big room in the gallery, as if about to vanish from sight. Arrival is marvellous image of geese landing, their splashing almost audible and their bright red feet making best use of the limited range of colours in the print.

Presumably because of the inking methods used to produce the prints, the use of colour is often limited and several of the artists make wonderful effects with a narrow palette. I particularly enjoyed Carolyn Murphy’s linocuts; the stark green Fern is an effective study of form, Morlich a dramatic black and white shore scene, and the demonic Scottish Shee captures the essence of ram in a few brilliantly chosen marks.

Brian MacBeath uses a few vibrant colours in his starkly simple, strangely beautiful abstracts, and Jane Frere achieves an explosion of raw emotion in her questioning What’s the colour of betrayal?

A piece I kept returning to was Elisabeth Shepherd’s Four Pansies, apparently the same image printed with four different colour combinations, the result a meditation on petal shape and shade. Another piece of hers, In the Country, is also mesmeric, with its delicate ferns, butterflies and orchids in a composition with surprising depth, while Josephine’s Poppies is a stunning burst of red. These are subjects with a real risk of being merely pretty, transformed into pieces that use colour to achieve affects that are both arresting and contemplative.

Some of the artists do amazing things in black and white. Samuel Horsley’s work features strange creatures with mammalian skulls and four legs, but their wiry hair and weird proportions and postures make them somehow both insect-like and full of feeling. Anne Campbell’s screenprint I never enjoyed anything as much as the sheiling is an evocative piece reaching back in time, the printed images and space giving the sense of both memory and forgetting. Irena Przby captures the essence of tree in Frosty Tree, and of water in Flow, and her apparently simple illustrated books of legends and myths use imagery that seems timeless, making best use of print techniques connecting back to early woodcuts.

The show is a fine demonstration of the diversity of effects that can be achieved by transferring images from one surface to another. The constraints of colouration and of the marks possible on the engraved surface often seem to be transformed into methods of achieving emphasis and style. This is an intriguing exhibition. Anyone interested in the potential of print should make their way to Ullapool to see it.

© Mandy Haggith, 2013

Links

• An Talla Solais

INSPIRED by Scottish and Italian landscapes, Sam Cartman’s first solo exhibition at Kilmorack Gallery represents a significant progression in the artist’s work to date.

THIS IS a show of absolute clarity in the skilled handling of paint, distillation of visual language and command of composition. Characteristically the relationship between elements of nature and human architecture create a sense of immediacy and tension, with linear draughtsmanship and gestural brushwork exquisitely balanced throughout. Moving more deeply into abstraction has arguably strengthened the artist’s composition, and there is new verve and dynamism in this latest body of work, taking Cartman’s practice to a whole new level.

Towards Glenshee

The artist’s acute understanding of the essential crafting of images through line, form, colour and texture is resoundingly evident. Driven by paint handling and with the element of design less consciously visible than in earlier work, formal elements of structural deliberation become fully integrated with the most articulate and subtle handling of paint. Bold planar treatment of oil on board, strong lines and a magnificently controlled palette are tempered by a variation of mark that can only be fully appreciated in viewing the original work. Cartman draws the eye and mind of the viewer into the image with remarkable consistency, a confident rhythm which is sensed and felt from the smallest scale work to the largest in the exhibition.

Towards Glenshee (Oil on board) is a beautiful example of finely tuned pictorial, structural and human elements within the landscape. A pure, bold expanse of aqua sky, undulating interlocking hills and geometric forms are punctuated by singularly decisive marks of russet. Warm accents of colour, typically rust, ochre or flashes of vibrant orange sit in contrast with a predominantly cool, contemplative palette. This restrained use of colour gives Cartman’s work a distinctive edge.

In Towards Glenshee the striking crescent of white feels like a signature and a sense of unexpected depth is created by larger forms in the far left foreground receding into a curvature of seeing and perceiving the landscape. On closer inspection the plane of sky reveals gentle stippling of paint, this together with areas such as a triangle of fluid layers in blue, green and smeared charcoal, encourage consideration of the qualities of the medium from flattened almost industrial treatment to delicate stains. Allowing the white ground to emerge beneath the horizon line creates an impression of luminous, Northern light often glimpsed behind a curtain of sky or dense seemingly immovable cloud. Human dwellings are suggested but largely subsumed in a complex arrangement of abstracted form. It is the feeling of pure blue that immediately draws the viewer and like a great piece of music the underpinning structure of the composition is seamless in its execution.

Usan Diptych

The large scale Usan Diptych is another superb example, an expanse of sky and scattered semi industrial/residential buildings that brings the eye masterfully to the centre of two equally balanced halves. The imprint of palette knife and roller in a geometric cascade create unexpected nuances in the dominant sky; comprised of two blue variations separated by a jagged band of white ground emerging from beneath the painted surface. The loose treatment of the foreground, opaque or stained pigment and animated gestural marks cleverly add to the viewer’s sense of perspective, while the sparing use of eye catching warm colour: ochre, yellow, russet and orange, placed with the utmost precision and instinct, achieve a perfectly balanced composition. In his Single Panel Tryptich Cartman presents a complex arrangement of interlocking man made architectural and semi organic forms testing the structural and compositional boundaries of the image. This exploration of the picture plane, paint quality, density and mark, allows the artist to create a multi-layered response to humankind in the environment.

Temple 5

Temple 5 is a fascinating work in the suggested relationship between human architecture and nature. The jutting apex of the building suggests a stark purity of intent and aspiration in its heightened perspective. The sharply defined vanishing point adds to the sense of human presence in the landscape; the outline of stone walls, tiny darkened window and shaded solidity contrasted with the more ephemeral smears of charcoal and ever present blue/grey sky. Delicate textures of drizzled turpentine and a light touch of ochre path invite closer inspection while sharp geometric accents of purple and linear orange trace the eye’s movement to the horizon line.

Castle Road

Stylistic contrast in works such as Castle Road where drafted, precise lines of architecture and tonal definition meet fluid paint handling and pure abstraction are convincingly balanced in visual counterpoint. This dynamic between design and spontaneous mark is exemplified in the reaction between pigment and board creating a shifting sky of bled ultramarine in Roccasecca. Here the white architectural façade of the building is juxtaposed with liquefied sky. Sharp linear perspective guides the eye into the image but it is colour and paint density that governs our emotional response to the image.

Outpost

Another highlight of the exhibition is Outpost, an image divided by a serpentine line between foreground and mid-ground. To the left of the composition, hard-edged abandoned structures in greyish blue and black contrast with large boulders, stones and viscerally sketched grass in ochre, tinged green, russet and orange. Treatment of the sky is poetically distilled and immediately tactile, stained grey beneath white, with a curvature of thickened paint bringing movement of cloud to the profound stillness and isolation of the scene. Human habitation and its figurative absence in Cartman’s compositions remains poised and enigmatic, an eternal dance between natural and human marks in the landscape. Throughout this latest body of work the artist delivers a sustained and potent exploration of the plastic elements of image making and his chosen subject, creating finely balanced compositions of expansive depth and insight.

© Georgina Coburn, 2013

Links

• Kilmorack Gallery
• Sam Cartman

SITUATED in the plaza of the Sir Duncan Rice Library, University of Aberdeen, a magnificent newly commissioned sculpture by artists Marian Leven and Will Maclean draws its inspiration from ancient standing stones in the landscape and the graceful precision of naval architecture.

Waterlines is an inspired visual statement; a significant cultural marker reflecting the continuity of visual traditions and rich maritime history of the region. It is also a celebration of the collaborative work of two of Scotland’s most respected artists.

Artists Marian Leven and Will Maclean

Multidisciplinary lines of enquiry; aesthetic, archaeological, historical, scientific and architectural are displayed in the exhibition, bringing together contemporary Visual Art; sketchbooks, paintings and box constructions by Leven and Maclean with objects drawn from Aberdeen University museums, collections and archives. The result is a wonderfully fluid dialogue between the Waterlines sculpture, the exhibition and the inner architecture or aspiration of the library as “a luminous landmark for the community”.

Within the library building The Sir Duncan Rice Library Gallery and expansive ground floor entrance hall provide an on-going opportunity to showcase works from the university museums’ collections and for creative collaborative exchange between different disciplines or ways of seeing. The Waterlines sculpture and exhibition powerfully illustrate the ways that contemporary art can inspire deeper examination and rediscovery of our history and ourselves.

Peter Davidson’s poetic response to the sculpture as “a lasting presence”, “seamark and landmark, anchor, metaphor” is extremely apt. The presence of this sculptural diptych, two monumental forms punctuated by a beautifully defined negative space through which the library tower beyond can be viewed, is almost figurative. The Waterlines sculpture integrates traditions of seeing; the human eye and mind perceiving the Northern landscape as land, people and memory and it is fascinating to see the evolution of its design in the visual practice of Leven and Maclean together with original source material in the exhibition.

Waterlines sculpture and library (photo by Kate Sutherland)

Sculpted from Kilkenny blue limestone, Waterlines responds to rain, wind and sunlight with an entire spectrum of tonality and mark; from bleached white grey in frozen winter sun to deep blue, stained by rivets of rain. Its elegant curvature contrasts and compliments the linear asymmetrical designs of the library’s glass facade. The choice of Kilkenny stone echoes beautifully the subtle qualities of Marian Leven’s paintings which in their textural, tactile rendering capture the nuances and intricacy of Northern light.

This shifting perception and human vulnerability is sensed and felt in the paint handling, beautifully balanced by expansive, abstract form. Summer Memory II (Watercolour 2011) is a fine example, harnessing the natural fluidity of the medium with formal compositional/design elements. The pigment feels residual, applied in layers like misty rain and naturally random patterns of mark, while the dominant form to the left is defined by a singular edged stroke of paint. Characteristic of Leven’s work there is ambiguity between seemingly organic marks emerging from the ground of greenish grey and the deliberation of staccato brush marks of vibrant orange.

In larger scale paintings this quality is distilled and transformed from an intimate frame of reference; the fleeting and ephemeral quality of human memory /perception to the timeless and monumental presence of nature. Northern Light (Acrylic On Canvas 2011) is a prime example, the division of the canvas providing both compositional structure in terms of the crafting of the image and a dominant feeling of the sky as both an emotive physical presence and an idea within the work. The delicate, almost plaster-like surface and palette of subtle variations white on white create a contemplative space; a mindscape in direct response to the landscape.

The sense of movement in this work is achieved with incised, drawn and textural marks and minute tonal shifts. An adjacent work Meltwater (Acrylic On Canvas 2011) explores this idea further in textural layers; from the speckled sand-like texture at the top of the composition to the horizontal white bar division of the canvas and stained movement of water with drawn charcoal marks beneath. Each shifting strata has its own texture and rhythm; a microcosm of minutely observed change of matter and consciousness. This awareness of the picture plane in abstraction, skilful handling of the artist’s chosen materials and the ever present expressive human mark, define Leven’s visual language and inform her sculptural collaboration with Maclean.

Will Maclean - The King's Fish (University of Aberdeen Museums Collections)

John Stuart’s Sculpture Stones of Scotland (1856), including an illustration of The Maiden Stone (Chapel of Garioch), is juxtaposed with Leven’s sketchbooks in the exhibition, providing insight into the design process and inspiration behind Waterlines. The spatially divided stone fragments as formal elements of design, like the diptych arrangement of the dogfish in Will Maclean’s large scale etching of Traditional Story: The King’s Fish, are part of a shifting frame of visual perception. Part of the Night of Islands series inspired by Gaelic poetry and prose, The King’s Fish contains many visual frames of reference in its delineation and its internal narrative. This indigenous understanding of visual traditions or language linked to the natural environment is central to the work of both Maclean and Leven in its reverence and insight. It is also part of a wider movement of cultural reappraisal acknowledging a continuum of visual traditions in the North of Scotland from ancient standing stones to the present day.

Revealing that which is hidden and prompting rediscovery of original visual sources, Leven’s contemplation of ancient standing stones in a series of line drawings takes on a luminous quality, with the shaded background defining form. This presence through white space illumination evokes the inherent mystery of the stones and a spirit of enquiry in exploring their potential meanings. The display of the Fairy Green Stone, a Class I Pictish Symbol Stone, found in Perthshire in 1948 and now part of the University museums’ collections, is a cultural marker of knowledge and understanding in its making and design.

Maclean & Leven's Waterlines (photo by Kate Sutherland)

It is also an object representing rituals and meanings that for all our technological advances and “civilization” remain unknown to us. Like Einstein’s statement that “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all art and science” Leven’s drawings highlight the human need for creative enquiry. The artist’s practice, the Waterlines sculpture and the inner architecture of the library building, are all potential meeting points for human aspiration, discovery and knowledge.

The inclusion of a ship’s model, a gift from Marian Leven to Will Maclean, references their personal and creative partnership; the vertical inversion of line and form in this small scale wooden model providing the initial spark of inspiration for a permanent sculpture of two equal and complimentary halves. The fusion of ancient markers in the landscape with the sheer elegance of naval architecture can be seen in the incised marks on the Waterlines sculpture, reinterpreting the draughtsman’s lines for the Thermopylae, one of the fastest clipper ships constructed in 1868 by Walter Hood & Co, Aberdeen. This blurring of lines between disciplines; functional engineering with the aesthetic in drawing and draughtsmanship, together with the implication of directional lines of navigation, create a fascinating dynamic or imaginative trajectory in the work and in the curatorial scope of the exhibition.

Thermopylae (Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums Collection)

The poetics of visual language in Will Maclean’s work with its use of found objects and multi-layered box construction, informed by family maritime history, seafaring stories and poetry is exemplified by Fear-bata The Boatman (Found objects, construction on board 2012). A weathered boat fragment belonging to the artist’s Grandfather takes the form of a cross section of hull, reimagined as the figurative form of an angel or totem inlaid beneath the picture plane. A tracery of drawn marks on the predominantly white ground casts the totemic object beneath the waterline of our collective unconscious. The interplay of shadows cast by the three dimensional construction of the central figurehead heightens the sense of an object spiritually unearthed. It is a powerful work in its conception, transcending personal associations and ancestry to connect with the universal archetype of the boat. Fear-bata The Boatman is a statement of creative resilience and a potent investigation of the crafting of images in its evolutionary use of box construction.

Voyage of the James Caird I, Elephant Island (Mixed Media on Board 2011) is similarly a journey of heightened perception with the suggestion of a monumental artic landscape of opaque and finely textured tonality, shifting like the ocean under sheets of ice. The curvature of drawn marks and their trajectory feel like a descent beneath the surface of the picture plane; a cut away revealing leaden contours of land and nailed wooden fragments. With the clarity of a draughtsman and the tactile physicality of a sculptor Maclean creates a multi-layered work of poignancy and grace. This frozen vision references a monumental voyage undertaken by Shackleton in a small open boat between Elephant Island and South Georgia. Voyage of the James Caird I, Elephant Island is an expansive mindscape of visual association, a testament to human endurance and a superbly balanced abstract composition.

It is inspiring to see the work of Marian Leven and Will Maclean represented permanently on site at the University of Aberdeen and in this temporary exhibition, acknowledging contemporary art and visual literacy as an important means of re-examining and illuminating cultural histories. It is equally encouraging to see vision in the fabric of an institutional building; incorporating spaces for research, learning, conservation and imaginative contemplation from which all knowledge ultimately stems. In many ways the architecture designed by schmidt hammer lassen embodies this creative engagement with public space. Striking asymmetrical designs together with the ever changing Northern climate animate the 760 glass panel façade of this striking contemporary building. Inside, the spiralling oblong atrium illuminates seven floors of study and collection space, with the lower ground floor beneath the building housing the Special Collections Centre. Significantly the centre contains learning, reading and seminar rooms for conferences, research, and outreach work, the university collections of books, manuscripts, photographs and archives dating back as far as the 3rd century BC and the Glucksman Conservation Centre specialising in the preservation of works on paper.

The design of the building as a meeting place and site of discovery for students, academics and the wider community is reflected in the Waterlines exhibition, providing different points of entry to contemporary visual art and in the scope of its accompanying programme of talks and events. Representation from different disciplines including Social Anthropology, Contemporary Visual Art practice and Archaeology together with creative events for adults and children working with box constructions, collage, sculpture, boat craft, stories and Pictish symbols will continue throughout March and April. Marian Leven and Will Maclean’s Waterlines is an exciting new marker in the Northern cultural landscape, signifying The Sir Duncan Rice Library, Gallery and Special Collections Centre as an emerging site of creative thinking and learning.

Public Talks & Events Accompanying the Waterlines Exhibition. Free Entry, Booking advised Contact: scc.events@abdn.ac.uk

As By Line Upon the Ocean Go with Professor Timothy Ingold, Chair in Social Anthropology, Thursday 14th March 6-7 pm

Thinking Visually with artists Will Maclean and Marian Leven, Sat 16th March 2-3pm

Standing Stones and Circles, Thursday 21st March with Dr Elizabeth Curtis 6-7pm

© Georgina Coburn, 2013

Links

• Sir Duncan Rice Library
• Video introduction to the work by Will Maclean and Marian Leven

THE LOCAL community centre, in popular imagery, is a traditional space which is under threat, a hub for people to congregate around and form a social group in the face of funding cuts and the decrease in activity which runs alongside those cuts.

YET that doesn’t tell the whole story of people’s determination to keep their communities alive across the country, and the network of village halls in the Highlands and Islands is representative of that.

Ron Emslie in rehearsal for Watching Bluebottles

Based in Alves in Moray, theatre production company Right Lines have created a new, cross-generational performance event which celebrates both this fact and the role the village hall continues to play in people’s lives. Across six local halls, Hall Tales has been an ongoing community engagement project which saw filmmaker Tim Flood run basic film production courses for young people in each village, with the students then going out to film the village hall recollections of elder members of their communities for one Hall Tales film to be shown at each final performance.

This month’s tour of six shows spread over a fortnight will also feature exhibitions of artefacts related to the village halls they’re staged in and a central performance of a past Right Lines production, the one-man, site-specific play Watching Bluebottles, in which actor Ron Emslie plays a hallkeeper preparing for his own retirement.

“The local hall has a very special place in our hearts,” says Euan Martin, who runs Right Lines alongside Dave Smith. “Both Dave and I were brought up in church and village halls and see them as fantastic, adaptable venues. Since we set up Right Lines ten years ago we’ve principally toured our shows there, and it’s only recently we’ve started creating them for more traditional theatre spaces.”

When he points out that these places are adaptable and versatile, he’s suggesting that the imagination really is the limit for those who want to use them for new and interesting purposes. “One of our first shows was called Accidental Death of An Accordionist,” Martin points out by way of illustration, “and it was set at a ceilidh in a village hall. So we took the show out to these small venues and the people arrived at the hall as if they were coming to a ceilidh, getting involved in dancing and listening to music before the actual show broke out around them.”

Ron Emslie - the allure of the draughty old hall

A lot of the allure of such places, he suggests, is the individual character they’ve built up over time, the fact that each one is different. “Although over the last few years, a remarkable number of halls have managed to get grants to do them up,” he points out. “One of the funny things about Watching Bluebottles is that we very much wrote the story about the old hall and the old hallkeeper, and in the show he talks about the new hall being built down the road and how he’s not going to transfer. So what we wanted was the old, crumbly, draughty halls to perform it in, because they had the greatest character. But when we booked it the committees were so excited they decided to stage it as the first show in their brand new, centrally-heated and wonderfully decorated hall instead.”

For their next project Martin and Smith are debuting a version of Roger Hunt’s book Be Silent Or Be Killed, a true account of the Scots banker’s days caught amidst the Mumbai massacre. Opening at the beginning of May and touring throughout the month, the piece was made possible by a little seed funding from the National Theatre of Scotland and full funding for the tour from Creative Scotland. Yet Smith believes that the future climate for such projects will become more difficult given the controversial news about Moray slashing its entire arts budget.

“It’s a very short-sighted move,” says Smith. “I think it’s much less likely that larger organisations will want to bring shows into Moray, and it also hits your personal enthusiasm for doing this. Everyone knows you just have to go out there and make things happen, but that’ll be even harder now in terms of the level of administration involved.” The loss of a dedicated arts officer, the feeling is, will be the biggest blow, with nobody on hand to discuss arts projects with the council on a daily basis.

“Yet there are two wonderful organisations in the Highlands and the north-east,” points out Martin. “There’s NEAT (North East Arts Touring) and the Touring Network (formerly PAN, the Promoters’ Arts Network), with both of their specific aims being to support touring theatre companies in the area, so they’re helping keep village halls and village hall theatre alive. And if this is under threat, that’s why people should put all the more effort into making things happen.”

Hall Tales opens tonight (15 March) at Kinloss Church Hall, and runs until 30 March at Dyke Village Hall. Full details at Right Lines website below. 

© David Pollock, 2013

Links

• Right Lines

IF THERE is one thing guaranteed to get my back up when going to a show that I do not know, it is to sit in my seat and open a nice glossy programme booklet to read up about the show before it starts only to find that someone has decided that the pages containing all the crucial information should be black, with small white, and sometimes red, lettering.

I WONDER if whoever came up with that thought at all about whether the audience would be able to read it in normal pre-performance auditorium lighting, let alone in the subdued lighting that had been decreed to reflect the darkness of the show.

Jekyll & Hyde (photo Inverness Opera)

Before going to Eden Court, what I had found out about this adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson novella was that there had been a few tours of the United States, followed by a four-year run on Broadway during which it haemorrhaged a king’s ransom and failed to attract any stellar reviews from the critics. There was also a UK tour in 2011 featuring a certain Mr Marti Pellow from the popular ensemble known as Wet Wet Wet, but it never reached the West End.

The fact that Leslie Bricusse, who has made such a huge contribution to musical theatre, mostly during his partnership with Anthony Newley, was responsible for the lyrics boded well. Sadly, Frank Wildhorn, one of the pair behind the original show, decided not to use Bricusse for the music but to write it himself. A competent composer would have finished it before breakfast and had it published by lunchtime as “Variations on a Simple Motif”.

So what made the normally reliable Inverness Opera Company decide to try and make a silk purse out of the sow’s ear of this pig of a piece of musical theatre? The fact that the company had a lead actor in James Twigg who was capable of carrying off the hugely demanding dual title role, and carrying it off extremely well, would have been one factor. Another would have been the dozen or so supporting roles available for the stalwarts of Inverness Opera and thirdly there was a substantial amount of chorus involvement for all the other members.

James Twigg (photo Inverness Opera)

James Twigg was on stage very nearly from start to finish, either as the urbane and charming Dr Henry Jekyll or as his drug induced, schizophrenic, evil alter ego Edward Hyde. Both faces were equally accomplished although perhaps Hyde succeeded in slaughtering his victims with insufficient effort. His musical highlight came just as he was about to enter his laboratory to begin experimenting on himself. “This Is The Moment” is a crescendo based on the original motif of practically all the music in the show but Twigg delivered it well from the opening piano right through to the final fortissimo.

As co-starring ladies, Jekyll has his fiancée Emma Carew played by Sasha Devine, a slightly two-dimensional character with occasional flashes of independence and determination, while Hyde has the lady of the night Lucy Harris, played by Lesley MacLean with a good amount of feistiness and the two best songs of the show, “Bring On The Men”, and “A New Life”, both of which diverge from the basic motif.

The supporting characters read like a Who’s Who of Inverness Opera and all of them, young and not-so-young, played and sang their roles to the hilt. Lucy’s co-workers at the Red Rat, a house of ill repute, had to dance as well as sing and showed great ability with Caroline Nicol’s choreography. The members of the chorus performed well, with just the right degree of animation, and their delivery of “Murder, Murder” to open the second act was one of the highlights of the evening.
For the most part the set and costumes were hired in, but the slick stagecraft shown by George Reynolds and his team, and the atmospheric dressing under the direction of Wardrobe Mistress Marian Armstrong and her assistants all contributed to a very professionally presented performance.

And last but certainly not least, the Orchestra, under MD Fiona Stuart, provided a steady and reliable, if unobtrusive accompaniment to what was going on above their heads on the stage. Come Saturday night they are going to have been driven to distraction by that repetitive motif.

The past few years have shown the high standard that Inverness Opera normally achieves with shows like Anything Goes, Titanic or Guys and Dolls. The track record of Jekyll & Hyde should have warned that this is a show that lacks audience appeal, a fact born out by the Empire Theatre being scarcely a third full on opening night. One of the readable pages in the programme says that this musical was “Conceived for the stage by Steve Cuden and Frank Wildhorn”. Somebody should have told them about contraception.

© James Munro, 2013

Links

• Inverness Opera

THAT this show had only been initiated five days before within the rehearsal space of the Tramway, with three days for the vocalists to perfect their parts, made it all the more strikingly different.

PERFORMED as part of the Tramway’s Rip It Up season of new commissions and work-in-progress pieces designed and executed within and with support from the theatre itself, Away With the Birds is a collaboration between artist and composer Hanna Tuulikki, choreographer Rosalind Masson and film-maker Daniel Warren.

Rosalind Masson in Away With The Birds

The core idea is simple, yet gives the impression of being intensely complex to actually arrange. A meditation upon both the sound of birdsong and that of Gaelic folk singing, the piece involves six female performers – Tuulikki and Masson amongst them, all dressed uniformly in simple black dresses and red tights – performing Tuulikki’s voice-only score ‘Voice of the Bird’ against a backdrop of films by Warren showing scree and cliffs, sea waves rushing by and the performers themselves on a desolate grey beach.

Backed by gentle but evocative field recordings made on the Small Isles by Geoff Sample, the performers vocalise the song of birds as a series of squawks and syllables which are lent a chorus-like quality when the voices merge together, and a real sense of relational interaction through Masson’s deft, delicate choreography. The performers are unhurried as they glide steadily around the stage, falling into a V-shaped flight pattern and away into pairs and trios who regard each other with curious interest.

Then on more than one occasion these voices coalesce into haunting Gaelic melodies – even more impressive given that not all of the singers are native speakers – and the effect is complete. This is not a high-concept experiment, more a complete and immersive evocation of place and sense, an attempted re-imaging of wilderness landscapes both without any human involvement and filled with the echoing resonances of history and tradition.

Even as a forty-five minute try-out it was mesmerising to watch and listen to. The nine-voice version at May’s Tectonics festival in Glasgow (Old Fruitmarket, 11 May) and the intended 2014 performance and installation on the Isle of Canna – a great inspiration for the piece – will be worth waiting for.

© David Pollock, 2013

Links

• Project website
• Tectonics Festival

ALAN Greig Theatre and Grant Smeaton‘s Do You Nomi? –  a melange of theatre and dance – kicked off Ullapool Dance Festival 2013. And two lithe male bodies, sinuously and sensuously traversed a stark white set, immediately commanded the attention of an expectant audience.

ICONIC, avant garde pop artist Klaus Nomi died before his unique style reached the masses. But he did come to the attention of David Bowie and Iggy Pop, for whom he is said to have been an inspiration. This show tells the story of Nomi’s short lived career and his premature demise from AIDS in 1983.

Drew Taylor in Do You Nomi? (photo Paul Watt)

It is a powerful reminder that the theatre is a forum for stories and that these stories have many directions of travel. Beyond the narrative unfolding on stage is a collective response on the part of the onlookers. Last night’s Highland audience was taken to the very brink of what might be considered socially acceptable. We were given insight into the gay scene of 1980s New York, where outrageous personal reinvention and casual sex were the norm.

However, an all-pervading quality of truth and innocence underpinned all four performances, so any confrontation or collision of values was averted. Instead, a tangible current of expression and resonance flowed between stage and auditorium and the possibility for a quantum shift in attitudes was born.

At one point, two characters each declare the other to be a freak. To which the reply is, “yes, a freak among freaks.” However, skilled direction on the part of award winning director Grant Smeaton, took the story way beyond the realms of cliché to expose a powerfully pulsating humanity in the hearts of its protagonists.

The two actors, Laurie Brown and Drew Taylor, danced admirably. And dancers Darren Anderson and Jack Webb, appeared, in turn, to take to acting with ease. There were seamless shifts between speech and movement and some slick changes of tempo, facilitated by a rollicking soundtrack and deft lighting. These ensured that the spell cast in the opening scene held to the last.

During the re-enaction of a TV interview, things could so easily have become static, but supremely talented choreographer Alan Greig was not going to let that happen. As the dialogue progressed, the performers gracefully moved on and around their chairs adding a visual dimension to the conversation.

To create a piece of theatre that is groundbreaking on so many levels is admirable enough. However, to do it in such a way that the audience is unaware of the shifts of awareness and acceptance that it is undergoing, is truly astounding. Do You Nomi? is a creative collaboration, underpinned by immense skill and shot through with vitality and passion. Now this tour has ended, we should lobby for its return.

© Jenny McBain, 2013

Links

• Alan Greig Dance Theatre
• Grant Smeaton
• Ullapool Dance Festival

THANKS to Helen for these photos from the current London exhibition.

READ Ian Stephen’s review of the show at An Lanntair and view the catalogues (see links below).

The exhibition runs at Art First in London until 6 April 2012.

© Helen Macalister, 2013

Links

• Catalogues
• Ian Stephen review

BETWEEN October and December 2012, as part of her Museums Galleries Scotland and Creative Scotland funded “Iconic Artists in Iconic Places” residency at Caithness Horizons, the Fibre Artist created a “Portable Museum of Curiosity” inspired by the hand-made moss collection box, which belonged to Thurso baker and botanist Robert Dick (1811-1866) that is on display at the Museum.

Joanne B. Kaar's Portable Museum of Curiosity

The “Portable Museum of Curiosity” is available for schools, community groups and other heritage organisations to borrow in order to learn more about the life and work of Robert Dick. The “Portable Museum of Curiosity” is already going out on loan to the St. Fergus Gallery, Wick and Mull Museum. It has been featured in a paper entitled “The Herbarium as Muse: Plant Specimens as Inspiration” by Maura C. Flannery, Professor of Biology, St. Johns University, New York at an American Association for the Advancement of Science Conference in Boston, which was attended by over 8,000 people.

If you would like to borrow the “Portable Museum of Curiosity” please contact Joanne Howdle, Museum Curator on 01847 896508 or e-mail: joannehowdle@caithnesshorizons.co.uk

The “Portable Museum of Curiosity” will be on display at Caithness Horizons from 21st February until 10th March. During this period the “Portable Museum” will be taken off display for a few hours each day for groups to use.

© Caithness Horizons, 2013

Links

• Caithness Horizons
• Joanne B. Kaar

AN EXCITED buzz filled the Empire Theatre, thronged with an audience which, while still predominantly female, had a healthy leavening of males by comparison with last year’s debut by this exciting all-male troupe.

FIVE of last year’s company of eight dancers were back, accompanied by five new recruits, whittled down from about five hundred applicants. Business is booming in the male dance world. This year’s programme featured just two works, the first of which was made on the company by Liam Scarlett, still only 26 but already a rising star of the choreographic world. In the video introduction, Scarlett talked about the challenges he’d faced creating a work for an all-male company when usually, the female dancers drive the work.

Balletboyz

Serpent started out mesmerically, the dancers lying prone on the stage, one lifting an arm with the fingers closed, questing almost like a bird, the others joining in. There was almost a hint of Dali’s Swans Reflecting Elephants.

The work continued with the dancers moving fluidly, flowing like herds, or flocks, or hordes of unnameable creatures, with some pleasing segments, of which a quintet against a warm, golden lit background was particularly lovely, and some interestingly sculptural groupings. The dancers were bare-torsoed, clad in flesh-coloured, cut-off leggings; a costume design which focused all attention ruthlessly on their (admittedly impressive) musculature; the overall effect sometimes recalled a classical Greek vase but, more often, a Calvin Klein commercial.

This wouldn’t have mattered had the choreography been a little more inventive; however, by paring the look of the piece down and using a limited repertoire of fluid movements, Scarlett was perhaps overly narrowing his options; despite achieving his aim of creating fluid, beautiful, strong movements, and a sound choice of score by Max Richter, Serpent at times felt slightly empty.

The second half was another new work, Fallen, by Russell Maliphant, a regular collaborator with BalletBoyz. In his video intro he talked about enjoying watching dancers learn from each other, but didn’t mention what must also be true, that choreographers learn from watching dancers.

Having worked for over two decades with some of the greatest dancers alive today, Maliphant has a vast array of choreographic experience to draw on. Opening with a sequence which could have been directed by Busby Berkeley, had he been given the script of The Shawshank Redemption, there was always a tantalising sense that there was a meaning behind the movements with a story unfolding on the bare stage (a factory? a prison? purgatory?) though it was never made explicit.

Maliphant demanded more from the dancers, and got it, with a rich complexity of physical structures, shapes, transitions and textures combining to make a hugely energetic, very satisfying work, of which Michael Hulls’ lighting was, as always, a fundamental part. Minor caveats aside, BalletBoyz are still one of the most exciting dance companies around.

© Jennie Macfie, 2013

Links

• Balletboyz
• Jennie Macfie

JOINING forces with harpsichord soloist Jan Waterfield the Scottish Ensemble’s latest tour featured musical earworms from across the centuries with works by Geminiani, Górecki, Williams, Holst, Vivaldi, Britten and Suckling.

EXPLORING repetition in rhythm, harmony and melody, the programme and performances highlighted the joy and energy of musical ideas expanded and held in the mind of composer and audience. Geminiani’s Concerto Grosso ‘La Follia’ (1727) opened the concert in a stately fashion, expanding into a cascade of 24 variations and providing a lively introduction to the programme that followed.

Scottish Ensemble (photo Joanne Green)

Górecki’s hugely enjoyable but rhythmically unrelenting Harpsichord Concerto (1980) provided a rare opportunity to see the instrument amplified and creating an extraordinary range of sound. From the opening, reminiscent of the intro to a Rock power ballad, the work moves cyclically with a rhythmic impetus that is surprisingly mesmerising. There are times when the music resembles the movement of a hurdy gurdy or broken down circus ride, with the oscillating harpsichord driving the work into an almost meditative state.

This constant presence punctuated by variations of key and tempo provided form and variation, with entertaining sequences evocative of Horror soundtracks or a slice of Hitchcock. Humorous interludes aside, the core of this work is in the hands of the soloist, at times pitted against the strings and Jan Waterfield’s compelling performance succeeded in revealing an entirely unexpected side to the instrument and its powerful capacity for expression.

It was a pleasure to hear British contemporary composer Martin Suckling’s third musical postcard, Chimes at Midnight, commissioned by the Ensemble. These postcard compositions have been exciting additions to the Ensemble’s repertoire, and this wonderfully atmospheric piece is no exception. The high squeezed sound of violins and deep double bass feel like nocturnal churnings of the mind, with sound emerging out of an inky ground of unconscious thought.

Vaughan Williams beautiful Violin Concerto ‘Concerto Accademico’ (1925) returned the audience to more familiar territory with its melodic folk tunes and evocation of the British countryside. The expansiveness of solo violin and strings create a sonic/spatial element of sky and hills and, although considerably more robust than his The Lark Ascending, is no less moving, especially in the second movement Adagio with solo cello.

Holst’s St. Paul’s Suite (1912) continued the English folk theme with its resoundingly familiar melodies contrasted in the third movement Intermezzo with an exotic and mysterious interlude by solo violin, like a musical tale from the Arabian Nights. The combination of introspective melody; Greensleeves and the jig-like rhythms of The Dargason Circles played in a series of intricate variations create a dynamic final movement to this captivating work. The quality of performance highlighted the sensibility of all the musical elements at play in the concerto, together with the repetition of thematic content in the work of individual composers as a catalyst for further development.

Górecki ‘s 3 Pieces in the Old Style (1963) was another highlight of the concert, an exploration of repetition over centuries of musical styles which in the second movement Menuetto echoes early sacred music making in its processional rhythm and underpinning dirge. Melodically anchored to the folk music of his native Poland, this work has an ancient and contemplative feel which resonated in the Scottish Ensemble’s beautifully articulate performance.

Vivaldi’s Concerto Grosso no. 10 in B minor (1711) featured magnificent solo performances in dialogue with each other. This joyful and vibrant performance of a familiar and well-loved work transformed it, highlighting the way that the Scottish Ensemble led by lead violinist and Artistic Director Jonathan Morton are able to actively alter the audience perception of standard classical repertoire. This heightened experience is facilitated by each member of the ensemble who clearly love and are invigorated by the music they perform.

Britten’s playful Simple Symphony (1934) provided a fitting finale to a programme infused with imaginative connections and the infinite variety of repetition. The obsessive, innovative and transformative dimensions of sound were brilliantly celebrated in a programme of pure enjoyment and insight.

© Georgina Coburn, 2013

Links

• Scottish Ensemble

A BILLBOARD on the stage, amid all the other jumble of a rummage through history, was a reminder that Scottish Opera is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary.

THAT billboard was to promote two operas in the King’s Theatre Glasgow, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande during the week from 5th to 9th June 1962, and with those performances the cherished dream of Alexander Gibson was realised.

Opera Highlights 2013 – Nicky Spence, Eleanor Dennis, Katie Grosset and Duncan Rock (photo Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)

Some might argue that Scottish Opera is in fact celebrating its fifty-first anniversary as nearly everything had been in place to present three performances each of Don Pasquale by Donizetti (with Ian Wallace in the title role) and a double bill of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale and Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle in June 1961. What had not been in place was a grant from the then Scottish Committee of the Arts Council of £1713; a request that was turned down on the grounds that the application had arrived too late to be included in the Council’s annual financial budget. Such things could never happen today. Could they?

One thing that Alexander Gibson did not allow Scottish Opera to become was a Glasgow-centric organisation. The intention was always for the company to tour around the Scottish centres, first in 1963 to Edinburgh, then in 1964 to Aberdeen and later to Perth. Scaled down productions were conceived to go into smaller venues, known affectionately as SOOT (Scottish Opera on Tour) and SOFA (Scottish Opera for All), and then there was Essential Scottish Opera, which morphed into the annual Opera Highlights – four young singers, a piano and a basket of props touring here, there and everywhere from Bathgate to Bowmore, from Barra to Benbecula, from Banchory to Birnam and many points in between.

One of these points in between was Inverness, where a packed OneTouch Theatre enjoyed this nostalgic journey of reminiscences and arias from operas in the company’s repertoire over the past half century in a programme put together by Scottish Opera’s Head of Music, Derek Clark with script and direction from Adrian Osmond.

This year’s cast was, for a change, completely Celtic. Making her Scottish Opera debut was soprano Eleanor Dennis, born in Aberdeenshire but trained in London and returning home for this tour. Hers is most certainly a voice to listen out for in the future. In the mezzo role was Edinburgh’s Katie Grosset, a Scottish Opera Emerging Artist, seen recently in these parts as Flora and Annina in the touring production of La Traviata, and returning to Eden Court in May as Edith in The Pirates of Penzance.

The well-kent face in the cast was Doonhamer Nicky Spence, the tenor who was recently seen as Tamino in The Magic Flute and will be The Steersman this spring in Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. Sadly his navigational skills will see him cruising along only the M8 and not up the A9. Making up the quartet of singers and a most welcome visitor from Wales was baritone Gary Griffiths, whose voice fully justifies his choice as the Wales representative in this year’s BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition.

In the pit, well, tucked behind a curtain and effectively impersonating an orchestra, was pianist Claire Haslin who must be one of the busiest musicians in Scotland – staff repetiteur for Scottish Opera, teacher at the Conservatoire, Glasgow University and Douglas Academy, accompanist with her husband, baritone Phil Gault, and mother.

As is always the case for Opera Highlights, the programme was a mix of well-known favourites and forgotten gems, running to twenty-one pieces, plus an encore. The first half opened and closed with drinking songs involving the full ensemble, from Verdi’s La Traviata to Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, book-ending Mozart, Britten, Tchaikovsky, von Weber, Bizet, Puccini, more Verdi, Smetana and Handel. If a highlight has to be chosen it would be Eleanor Dennis as The Governess in Britten’s The Turn of The Screw; or maybe Nicky Spence languishing in prison as Smetana’s Dalibor; or even the full quartet sailing “Over the bright blue waters” from Oberon by von Weber.

Neither well-known nor forgotten, the duet that opened the second half was a brand new piece, written for the tour, by Scottish Opera’s Composer in Residence, Gareth Williams. Eleanor Dennis and Nicky Spence are sitting at adjacent but single tables slowing forging a relationship in a somewhat Sondheimesque way. Delightfully sung and discretely acted, “Hand” was certainly a contender for Highlight of the Evening.

There followed pieces from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, then a spectacular “Oh pale blue dawn” from The Golden Cockerel by Rimsky-Korsakov, with Eleanor Dennis draped in gold with a lengthy train, more peacock than cockerel. Mozart’s Don Giovanni and the two couples from The Gondoliers by G&S gave way to a powerful if gruesome delivery by Gary Griffiths of “The Executioner’s Song” from Inez de Castro by James MacMillan.

It has to be asked whether practice made perfect for Katie Grosset in her delivery of “The Typsy Waltz” from La Perichole by Offenbach, especially looking back to her role as Frosch the jailer in the drinking song from Die Fledermaus. Luckily the Props Department back at Scottish Opera’s Production Centre in Glasgow maintains a generous supply of empties, courtesy of Moët et Chandon.

There was time for just two more excerpts, both from the period when John Mauceri was Music Director of Scottish Opera, having succeeded Sir Alexander Gibson in 1987. There was the emotive “Lonely House” from Street Scene by Kurt Weill – a final solo spot for Nicky Spence – and then a look forward to the next fifty years with an ensemble “Make our garden grow” from Candide by Leonard Bernstein, one of Scottish Opera’s greatest achievements as even the composer considered this production as the definitive version of his work.

This retrospective was about more than just the music of fifty years; the links provided anecdotes and stories of what has gone on behind the scenes, and the encore provided Eleanor Dennis with the opportunity to parade in a succession of costumes as well as sounding a caveat about the precariousness of the profession – Noël Coward’s “Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington!” Derek Clark, how do you follow that? What are you going to cram into the minibus for next year’s Opera Highlights?

© James Munro, 2013

Links

• Scottish Opera

THE NAME ‘six degrees west’ fixes a group to a measured distance from the prime meridium which goes right through Greenwich but it gives you quite a bit of latitude.

SIMILARLY, this group exhibition, INCH KENNETH, curated by Alicia Hendrick, stems from limiting the scope to one particular island, west of Mull. There’s no shortage of islands that way, from the iconic line of the Dutchman’s Cap in the Treshnish islands to the basalt of Staffa or the sickening jagged nature of the Torran Rocks. But the more pastoral Inch Kenneth has a significant history in its own right, layered over centuries.

David Faithfull (photo Shannon Tofts)

If you take Murdo Macdonald’s approach that ancient artifacts can’t simply be sidelined as historical objects but can be seen simply as made things, just older ones, then the carved stones I witnessed, reclining on Inch Kenneth some thirty years ago, are important works of art. There was a tradition of burying the noble dead here if conditions prevented reaching Iona. Equally iconic now is the layer of history linked to the once grand house on Inch Kenneth where the residency actually took place.

The house was owned by the Mitford family during the second world war. The society daughters chose varying paths. Diana went on to marry Oswald Mosley, founder of the British fascist party. Unity corresponded intimately with Hitler. And Jessica thought uncle Joe Stalin was just fine and communism was the road to the future.

Veronica Slater - Map Shadow, the house on Inch Kenneth (photo Shannon Tofts)

The family tension must have come to a head when Unity attempted suicide, on the mainland, but returned as an invalid to live out some more damaged years, on the island. It’s a script you couldn’t write, for fear of being thought theoretical or sensational. But that’s part of the history of this house.

It’s picked up directly by David Faithfull in his bound folio of digital prints with a screen-printed cover. The colour background alludes to both Nazi and Communist sympathies. The print medium and its presentation in this bound folio lends itself well to presentation of a body of work made in response to being a resident artist’s group in this place. I spoke in depth to Veronica Slater, who attended the opening in An Lanntair with David.

She explained that some work in the show came, as you might expect, as a spontaneous response and other pieces came later, as a hard-won body of work. There is a range of styles and favoured media in the show and this seems a healthy thing in bringing together such a residency. I suggested to Veronica that there could be parallels with the ethos of the Triangle Trust international artists’ workshops which led to a pilot project in North Uist then a series of three Scottish Island workshops.

The difference is that there is no exhibition or product in mind in the Triangle ethos – a deliberate policy. You might say there’s a risk of a possible lack of focus but a gain in that artists, both early in their careers and established, are encouraged to think, experiment or interact – or all of these – and possibly arrive at something which could be outside or extending the scope of their usual working practice.

No doubt thanks to a range of factors, the 6° WEST concept has resulted in a very worthwhile exhibition. These factors must include sensitive curatorial input, including choice of artists, management of challenging logistics and support of the galleries the show will be linked to. But most of all, the commitment of the individual artists has to be the crucial element.

Mhairi Killin (photo Shannon Tofts)

Mhairi Killin takes a more minimal approach than the others. In An Lanntair, a wall is built so a corridor is simulated. The sort of tag you might find on vintage luggage, hints at more clues to elusive lives. There is a particular mirror, with layers of allusion, but you have to look for clues. Outside, there is the most delicate assemblage which is so striking it revitalizes a possible cliché in the art of working with things found – a Gaelic/Japanese aesthetic seems present. There is also an editioned print which combines some of these elements as motifs.

Anne Devine (photo Shannon Tofts)

Anne Devine’s work is cleverly placed adjacent. This is drawing essentially, though colour is used too – it is discovery by doing. The fluency and energy of the drawing provides the interest as opposed to the delicate balance in her neighbour’s pieces. The figures in the drawing suggest folklore and mythology. Many elements are gathered in a large scale vibrant work, oil wax and resin on linen. It’s a bit like placing a more sprawling but energetic novel beside a tight series of short-stories. Again, a print has also been produced, this time in stone lithography.

Veronica Slater has gone for one telling thing – the porthole-type window. Then she repeats it, expands, plays with it. So windows are contained within windows. She has taken a colour swatch from the interior décor and painted a large circle on the gallery wall. Within that are circles which could either be looking out, through weather, towards a mainland or looking within the rooms of the house.

Veronica Slater (photo Shannon Tofts)

I have been within these walls but more than thirty years ago. A friend was invited by the then caretakers and brought me along. I’d been expecting something more opulent. Instead there was a consistent arts and crafts look and feel to the quite spare but elegant furnishings. Veronica Slater is clearly an artist who loves her materials as well as her subject. She has observed how damp has affected the fabric of walls and reproduced its effect with a wide range of media, orchestrated within her large circle. On an opposing wall, a group of smaller circles uses similar techniques.

You could say that her vision sees ageing and weathering as a gradual enrichening.What might have been once quite spare has become opulent. Similarly her Giclee print – a straightforward photographic means of reproduction which I must say doesn’t excite me the way the slightly uncertainties inevitable in other print media does – has an additional layer imposed by screenprinting.

David Faithfull takes us back outside to the tidal regions where bleached cetacean bones can be found amongst whitened driftwood. He shows a whole body of work, enough for an exhibition in its own right, linked to a 20th century literary reference to a leviathan – a text from William Golding’s Pincher Martin. The list of materials reads like poetry. A central large-scale drawing, on paper and linen is made in “gouache, meteorite and oak gall ink”. Although the drawings are mainly monochrome and the subject matter is exterior, the allusions are as often literary classics as family-history. The overall effect is again rich.

Shelved and floor-mounted sculptures reproduce the beautiful bone shapes in cedar-wood – a transformation from the bible. This is an artist who loves the book as a form in itself. I’m sure one day soon artists will make work from the dead shells of Kindles, but right now I find that difficult to see.

Shannon Tofts documented the process of the workshop and the acts of making in still and moving images, installed to make good use of the busy An Lanntair foyer and to lead custom into the show. Veronica also shows an intriguing attempt to draw the moving shadows cast by a tenacious small tree, in pebbles or shells. I loved her title for a video piece focusing on this strange, tall, island house –‘Home’ Movie.

Veronica Slater’s printed works were made at Highland Print Studios (David Faithfull is a master printer and printed his own prints; Anne Devine worked with master printer Elspeth Lamb to produce her stone lithography, and Mhairi Killin worked with Edinburgh Print Studio). The idea of using HPS as a mainland hub is one seen before at An Lanntair in their touring exhibition Is A Thing Lost?, exploring storytelling in mainly visual terms. It’s inspiring to see this excellent facility continue to take traditional and contemporary printmaking techniques to such a level of excellence.

Ian Stephen is assisting Christine Morrison this week at Highland Print Studios, making a series of four prints, derived from voyages to outlying islands. Each uses the photo-polymer process (monochrome) and screen-printed texts in colour.

© Ian Stephen, 2013

Links

• 6° WEST Artists Collective
• Ian Stephen

IN THE BAR after the show, two of the staff are playing cards.

IT looks like a game of snap rather than the poker that has dominated the second half of Conor McPherson’s play, but you can see where they got the idea from. Like the endless stream of Irish whiskey and American lager consumed on stage, the card playing is as addictive for the characters as it is compelling for us. It takes extra will power not to leave the theatre and go straight to a gambling den.

The Seafarer (photo Eamonn McGoldrick)

But if you did, who knows what demons you might conjure? The Seafarer is about James “Sharky” Harkin who is joined, in his brother’s house on Christmas Eve, by a man called Mr Lockhart. It seems Sharky has forgotten the card game he played with Lockhart 25 years ago when, in return for his freedom from police custody, he wagered his very soul. Now, Lockhart is back, ready for the follow-up game they promised. The stakes are just as high.

Not that anyone else on stage realises it. Much of the tragi-comic tension of the play lies in the contrast between Sharky’s life-and-death dilemma and the all-out hedonism of the other characters. While he looks the devil in the eye, his blind and elderly brother Richard carouses with Nicky and Ivan, his hard-drinking pals. They’re the sort who have whiskey for breakfast, spend the day on a pub crawl and return home for more drink until they crash out on the floor.

You learn everything about their attitude to alcohol in a brief exchange between the brothers. After they agree to go into town to get supplies for Christmas Day, Richard insists on dictating a shopping list. He goes into loving detail about the drink, paying attention to everyone’s favourite tipple and taking care to order enough. When it comes to the food, however, he says they’ll decide when they see it. He’s irritated even to be asked.

In Rachel O’Riordan’s production, there’s a squeamish comedy about all this. Sean O’Callaghan’s Ivan is on the self-destructive path to losing his wife and kids, but is more concerned about losing his glasses. In his white socks and designer jacket, Tony Flynn’s Nicky sees himself as a high-flyer, but is as much a slave to drink as the rest of them. And Ciaran McIntyre’s Richard is an irascible egotist whose apparent generosity and friendship is, like that of a spoilt child, always provisional.

They create the noisy backdrop (sometimes a little too noisy) to the sober confrontation between Louis Dempsey’s cautious, hard-bitten Sharky and Benny Young’s otherworldly Lockhart. What emerges from behind the play’s ribald banter is a reflection on lives wasted, mistakes made and memories lost in a haze of alcohol. Performed with ferocity by the five-strong ensemble, it is compulsively watchable.

© Mark Fisher, 2013

Links

• Perth Theatre
• Mark Fisher

ALTHOUGH a large-scale theatrical project which attempts to use the length and breadth of the Shetlands as its stage and involves months of artistic interaction with the inhabitants of the islands seems like a celebratory venture, Ignition was borne of a deep tragedy within the community.

“THE project goes back five years ago, to the death of a young lad called Stuart Henderson in a road accident,” says John Haswell, arts development officer of Shetland Arts, who have teamed with the National Theatre of Scotland to bring Ignition to life. “Stuart was very much involved in the youth theatre which I ran, and his parents were very anxious afterwards that perhaps a piece of theatre could be created which would address road safety issues. I ummed and ahhed about it, because I wasn’t sure that a piece of issue-based theatre would have any sort of lasting impact.”

Ignition (image Simon Murphy)

Keen to do something to honour Henderson, who was killed alongside his friend Marcus MacPherson in November 2007, Haswell kept the idea in mind, and the eventual pitch he took to – and had accepted by – the NTS was for a project which would attempt to examine our entire relationship with the automobile as a society.

“Like all rural areas Shetland is heavily dependent on the motorcar,” says Haswell, “and like all rural areas there’s an even greater sense of freedom amongst young people when they pass their test and get a car, because it allows them to become independent of their parents. But the other thing about Shetland is that its whole economic infrastructure is bound up with Sullom Voe oil terminal and the money it brings in, so we have an even more complex relationship with the oil industry, rather than just the car itself.”

It was after the project had been approved that theatremaker Wils Wilson (whose border ballad-cum-supernatural comedy The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, co-created with David Grieg, has become one of the organisation’s most enduring shows) came on board to help facilitate it, having previously worked on the Shetland leg of the NTS’ launch event, Home.

“I spent time thinking about what this project could do that any other couldn’t,” says Wilson. “It’s an exchange of information between people like myself, who are coming in with a certain set of skills, and the people of the island who are the real experts on the subject.” Haswell reiterates that the process of Ignition is “not imposed from outside, it’s very much gathered and generated from within Shetland.”

The White Wife hosting a Sunday tea in her campervan (photo Chloe Garrick)

What followed was a series of community events and interventions geared towards collecting testimony from islanders about their stories of the road and relationship with it, most notably through what Wilson calls their “hitchhiker-in-residence” the White Wife, a creation of Manchester-based performance artist Lowri Evans.

Beginning in October last year and continuing until late February 2013, Evans has been riding around the island in cars, on buses and on ferries divining the text which will be used in the final performance at the end of March. There have also been or will be workshops, children’s events, parkour tours focusing on travel without roads and ‘Car Yarns’, a series of public storytelling and knitting events aimed at creating a full-size car out of wool (“mak’ing and yakking sessions,” Wilson calls them).

“When we think about cars, we wonder if they isolate us from one another,” says Wilson. “There we are, all driving round in our little metal boxes. We wanted to challenge that and break through it, so Lowri threw herself on the generosity of the islanders. Immediately, as a hitcher and a woman on her own, people are concerned for her safety, but as a driver a stranger getting into your car is also an interesting relationship. As a woman, do I pick up a hitcher? Already there are lots of interesting areas to explore. People took her to their house and made tea or to a special place they’d been to, and they told her very personal stories about journeys which had changed their lives. There’s something about travelling along in a car together which creates a kind of confessional environment.”

Knitted Car (photo Seth Hardwick)

The stories gathered and texts cultivated will be merged into the fluid final performance, which is still in a state of flux, but which will be held across the island (in locations reached by car, naturally) and which will feature as many residents as want to get involved, be they the youth theatre, dance groups, parkour groups or those appearing on pre-recorded video inserts, particularly through choreographer Janice Parker’s work with care home residents with dementia. Composer Hugh Nankivill has also composed a new score for the piece, entitled The Road.

“We set ourselves a challenge to try and reach everyone on the islands,” says Wilson. “Other than that we had to be open and responsive to what we found. The car is our spark, but it leads you to places you weren’t expecting. Even asking ‘do you have a pet name for your car?’, the question quickly expands to become about how they live their lives or why they came to Shetland, for example. It’s widening out to become about people’s journeys through life and their relationships with the landscape around them.”

Is it possible to say their work so far has reached any conclusions? “It’s reinforced our utter and total dependency upon the car,” says Haswell, “and what a difficult relationship that is. I mean, we’re generating funny stories, tragic stories, we’re hearing about the financial impact, the environmental impact, that fact that the public transport network here is pretty poor, which puts us back into the car… . I suppose ultimately it’s showing us we’re totally dependent on the car, but that we know that can’t last for ever. We’re not going to change the world overnight, but it’s made us wonder where we might go from here.”

The final Ignition performances will take place around Shetland between Monday 25 and Saturday 30 March.

© David Pollock, 2013

Links

• National Theatre of Scotland
• Shetland Arts

IT’S not easy making theatre in the Highlands.

EVEN though a full house in a village hall might involve a sizeable proportion of the local population, it can’t compare with a four-week run in a city theatre. Theatre companies, and individual performers, directors and writers, are scattered across a huge area and rarely have the kinds of opportunities to get together that their urban counterparts take for granted. And getting the Central Belt media to take notice is a perennial challenge.

UHI Drama

But the rewards can be great. There’s a closeness to the audience that it’s hard to match in urban venues, especially when the subject matter is of local interest and relevance. There’s a wealth of material to work with, historic, linguistic and contemporary, as well as the opportunity to draw on the rich musical traditions and talents of the area.

Nonetheless, it requires a special kind of person to be based in the Highlands and make theatre here. They need to be adaptable and resourceful, to manage what’s often called a form of ‘cultural crofting’. They can’t rely on just auditioning for other companies, they have to make their own opportunities, and above all they have to work closely with the communities in which they live.

So here at HI~Arts we were delighted to get the news that from September 2013, Inverness College UHI will be offering a new BA (Hons) Drama Degree (subject to approval), not least because it’s a Drama Degree with a difference, as the College’s own description makes clear:

The distinctive BA (Hons) programme aspires to explore, make and take forward performance in the Highland region. It has been devised to ensure that the study and making of performance in the Highlands is reflective of the specific challenges and opportunities presented to creative practitioners in areas of low urban density and mixed economy. However, to ensure the programme maintains an outward looking perspective, it will continually relate its work to that of the international contemporary performance community. Our emphasis will be on contemporary, rural and folk performance, but historical practices will be examined as a way of better understanding the theatrical present in which the students learn and will eventually work. Our mode of study will encompass a strong practice based approach informed by more conventional scholarly activity.

Throughout their studies, students will be encouraged to work as independent scholars/artists/performers. As a cohort they will be trained and developed as a creative producing company/troupe and will be encouraged and supported in maintaining this collaboration on exit from their studies. To that end, students will be trained in the myriad skills of performance-making including skills in acting, devising, technical, writing and cultural planning. By developing multi-skilled and multi-disciplined individuals we expect our graduates to be well equipped for a broad range of vocational roles within the cultural sector, including independent performance initiators and makers, as well as for further study at postgraduate level.

The degree has been specially designed for those students who have undertaken an HNC or HND in Acting and Performance (or equivalent). Direct entry into Year Three will be available from September 2013. From 2014, direct entry will be available into Year Two.

While the growth of drama and dance in the Highlands owes a huge amount to some long standing companies, from Mull to Dogstar, and from Right Lines to Out of the Darkness, it’s been heartening to see some new companies emerging in the last year or two, as new graduates aim to create opportunities for themselves back in their home territories. So, this new course should be a major step forward in both equipping the drama workers of the future, and also in encouraging them to stay and make work in the Highlands. Definitely a case of ‘watch this space’!

© Robert Livingston, 2013

Links

• Inverness College

THE repertory success of My Name is Rachel Corrie around the globe can surely be attributed to a number of factors, not least its impetus as a piece of drama and the ease of staging a play with only one simple set and a single castmember.

EVEN more so, though, the sheer resonance of the story, of Corrie’s establishment as a normal young woman of hope and principle who undergoes a journey of discovery to the heart of a personal and international tragedy, is the kind of tale you experience and then wish everyone you know had seen with you. That it’s repeated so often is a good thing for our knowledge of the world, but it’s the kind of text that should be treated with care or left alone.

Mairi Phillips in My Name is Rachel Corrie (photo Tim Morozzo)

Director Ros Philips and actress Mairi Phillips have previous where My Name is Rachel Corrie is concerned, having staged it at the Citizens in Glasgow before embarking on this Scotland-wide tour with Mull Theatre. Crucially, Phillips gives a strong and endearing performance as Corrie, the 23-year-old American peace activist who was crushed to death in the Gaza Strip by a bulldozer driven by a member of the Israeli Defence Force in 2003, while attempting to stop it advancing on a Palestinian home.

Adapted from the journals, e-mails and even answerphone messages of Corrie herself, a keen writer, by the actor Alan Rickman and Guardian journalist Katharine Viner, this is crucially not a polemic or a story which imagines our opinion or knowledge of the Palestinian situation is set when we enter the theatre. It’s literally Corrie’s own story, her journey from an excitable early-90s adolescent who immerses herself in the “trivia” of small town life and obsesses over boys she likes in Olympia, Washington, whose eyes are opened to the breadth and depth of the world on a visit to Russia.

Phillips’ Corrie is vibrant and believable, the American accent perfectly-pitched and her unceasing movement around the stage placing us right there within a state of earnest emotional restlessness. One of the great subtleties of the text is that, while Corrie’s youthful idealism presents an eventually one-sided and arguably naïve view of the overall conflict, her eyewitness testimony dramatically brings home the on-the-ground horror ordinary Palestinians experience.

More than that, though, this is a definitive tale of political and spiritual awakening with some real lump-in-the-throat moments, not least a frank and beautifully tender email conversation between Corrie and her “neoliberal” father just as things are getting dangerous. The staging amid a bedframe, some anthropomorphic table lamps and a rucksack full of gear is efficient although obviously low-budget (two small televisions detract somewhat from the impact of the video inserts), but this high-quality version is effective enough to carry an impact long after Phillips has taken a well-deserved bow.

© David Pollock, 2013

Links

• Mull Theatre

SORREN Maclean spent much of his childhood in and around An Tobar, Tobermory’s renowned arts centre where his father Gordon is Artistic Director.

LISTENING to a comprehensively wide range of musicians, the younger Maclean has forged his own musical path, informed by traditional Scots music but also incorporating dollops of Americana, jazz and pop. He is also a founder member of indie-pop outfit Kitty The Lion.

Sorren MacLean

That he’s comfortable with a wide-ranging musical palette is evident from the first chord, where he sings conversationally, accompanied by his own guitar, Luciano Rossi’s piano and later Danny Grant’s restrained percussion. It’s country-ish and jazz-y all at the same time, and very beguiling. Other songs also show an alt-country influence, like the fine ‘Way Back Home’, which fits into the territory of infectiously catchy songs also occupied by the Delgadoes and Biffy Clyro, with nicely shaped lyrics “Glimmering, shimmering in the Northern Lights”.

Fiddle players Hannah Fisher and Seonaid Aitken and cellist Su-a Lee (well known to fans of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Mr McFall’s Chamber) are thanked for their help arranging the strings, which have some interesting dissonances and unpredictability. Lee switches to the musical saw, Aitken to the piano and Rossi picks up lead guitar for the next song, the impressive ‘Rows and Rows of Boxes’.

Written over Christmas and Hogmanay on Mull, his collection of songs for this Celtic Connections commission is entitled Winter Stay Autumn. The title track is particularly lovely, with smooth warm vocal harmonies and lots of space, restrained percussion offsetting passionate cello and building to an ecstatic resolution before jumping sideways into a fast driving rock-style finish. Maclean demonstrates in his addition to the new:voices strand that he completely understands the craft of song-writing.

Last year’s winner of the BBC’s Young Traditional Musician of the Year competition, Oban’s Rona Wilkie, debuted her new:voices commission Ceangailte (Connected) the previous week. Starting with a setting of the Carmina Gaedelica sung by clarsach player Rachel Newton accompanied by Patsy Reid (fiddle), Marit Fält (octave mandolin), Hayden Powell (trumpet), Colin Nicolson (accordion) and Allan MacDonald Jr (pipes/percussion/vocals) and Wilkie herself, it was a delightful musical exploration of the history of the Highlands.

Competitors in this year’s Young Trad final included very impressive showings by Inverness fiddler Graham Mackenzie and Argyll pianist Andrew Dunlop, while Lewis singer/songwriter Miss Irenie Rose’ debuted at Hazy Recollections; for those who haven’t had the pleasure of hearing her, imagine the fusion of Nick Drake, Amy Winehouse and Joni Mitchell with flashes of gospelsinger fervour.

Meanwhile entrants on the Danny Kyle stage included Charlie Grey, currently a student at Plockton and tipped as one to watch by a noted radio producer…. On the strength of these and many other performances, including the traditional music students at the Royal Conservatoire in their annual show, shared this year with students from Stockholm, the future of traditional music is looking very bright indeed.

© Jennie Macfie, 2013

Links

• Celtic Connections
• Sorren Maclean on Facebook

SOMETHING extraordinary happened to the late Tommy McHugh.

HE WAS an ordinary Birkenhead bloke with a bit of a shady past. He’d had scrapes with the law when he was younger and had subsequently made a living as a builder and odd-job man. Then, at the age of 60, two blood vessels burst in his head. When he awoke a week later from a coma, lucky to be alive, he found himself possessed by an irresistible urge to create.

Having never shown any artistic interest before, McHugh had suddenly become a compulsive painter and poet. He produced hundreds of artworks, was given to talking in rhyme and discovered untapped reserves of sensitivity.

Paul Cunningham and David Toole (photo Eamonn McGoldrick)

Playwright Danny Start befriended him and saw the potential for a play about his rare condition, known in the neurological profession as “sudden artistic output syndrome”. You can see his point. Not only is it a bizarre and intriguing story in itself, but it raises questions about the nature of identity, the possibility of changing personality and the mysteries of the mind.

Fascinating stories don’t always make fascinating theatre, however. In particular, plays about the brain are frequently too inward looking to have much dramatic punch. They depend on random medical events over which the protagonists have no control, making them passive players in their own story. Even the mighty Peter Brook ended up more reflective than dynamic when he staged the curious true-life medical stories reported by Oliver Sacks in The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.

So it is with Start’s play, In an Alien Landscape, for Scotland’s Birds of Paradise. He positions the fictional Albie Quinn in a kind of dream world, drifting between the moment of his double brain aneurism and his rebirth as an artist, with mental journeys back to his youth and his fraught relationships with his hard-as-nails father and his forgiving wife. Into the mix, he throws the voice of an alter-ego and of an American doctor who has suffered a similar brain malfunction. The effect is poetic and impressionistic, but also bitty and low in forward momentum.

We already know the most amazing part of the story – that a builder woke up one day as an artist – and none of the background detail changes that or tells us what happened next. Still, in Julie Ellen’s production there are three good-hearted performances from Paul Cunningham as Albie, and Morag Stark and David Toole as the voices inside his head.

© Francis McLachlan, 2013

Links

• Birds of Paradise

MEMORY defeats me when it comes to recalling the last visit to Inverness by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra accompanied by their Chief Conductor.

THAT IS not to say that we have not enjoyed many memorable concerts from this orchestra, it is just that Inverness has been failing to register on the radar of a succession of Chief Conductors. The present incumbent, Edinburgh born Donald Runnicles – his voice still showing traces of seventeen years in California – apologised in his pre-concert talk for taking so long to reach the Highland capital, not just the three years or so since he took the helm of the BBC SSO, but in fact in his life. Maestro, after Saturday evening, you are forgiven!

Donald Runnicles

The concert title told us that “Runnicles conducts Beethoven’s Fifth” but it not tell us that the whole evening was an exploration of generations of music in Vienna. Opening with Austria’s alternative national anthem, Runnicles showed that it was possible to imbue the Blue Danube Waltz of Johann Strauss the younger with a fresh interpretation by breaking up the standard flow of the waltz tempo by introducing very short pauses between the sequence of dance themes. This was a well thought out and reconstructed interpretation.

Moving forward a mere two generations to 1935 to the Second, or post-Mahlerian, Viennese Musical School, the Lithuanian born violinist and Pinchas Zukerman protégé Julian Rachlin joined the BBC SSO for the Violin Concerto by Alban Berg. The work is dedicated to the memory of an angel, the 18 year old Manon, daughter of Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius and his wife Alma Schindler, the widow of Mahler.

From the very opening notes of the short ‘Preludium’, Rachlin had the measure of the atmospheric contrasts between his violin and the brass and wind sections. As this opening section segued into the ‘Scherzo’, naturally the listener was expected to adjust to the less familiar twelve tone music of Berg, but once that step had been taken Rachlin had the emotions of both a requiem and occasional waltz rhythms flowing out with intense depth.

Much of the second part of the Concerto is a ‘Cadenza’ for the soloist, but with fairly frequent orchestral interjections, and Rachlin followed Berg’s flights of possibly fearful imagination into what the composer may well have known was to be his own requiem as well as that for the young Manon. The Concerto comes to a stirring climax marked ‘Adagio’ with a set of chorale variations that are inspired by J S Bach. At times complex with Rachlin playing pizzicato with simultaneous bowing; at times spiritual, with instruments of the wind section playing together in the manner of a small organ, there is the gradual crescendo until death triumphs over life and the ethereal angel floats away to Heaven.

To open the second half the BBC SSO played Anton Webern’s orchestration for strings and winds of Schubert’s Six German Dances, D.820. All are positively charming and so illustrative of the way that melodies could flow from Schubert’s pen. Rushed off and scored for piano they were six of many dances that Schubert used to keep the wolf from the door. Ironically after they were rediscovered in 1931, Webern orchestrated them for a flat fee rather than royalties from which he would have done quite well as their popularity far exceeded anything else he wrote.

And so to the symphony of the concert’s title – the Symphony No 5 in C minor, op.67, by Beethoven – and probably the most popular and frequently played of all the symphonies in the orchestral repertoire. The older members of the population will remember the opening motif, dit, dit, dit, dah, being used by the BBC during the Second World War to introduce inspirational broadcasts by Winston Churchill as the four notes were the morse code for the letter V, for Victory. How ironic that Beethoven was arguably the greatest ever German composer!

But in all likelihood it was this symphony in the programme that had the Empire Theatre filled to the rafters. Runnicles launched himself into the work even before the audience were fully settled and gave it a freshness and vibrancy that is often missing in the famous recordings by Karajan and the like in the 1960s. The rhythms were tight and precise, the playing was on the edge and the result was thirty five minutes of sheer joy and excitement. It even passed the ultimate test – the audience stopped coughing.

Maestro Runnicles, haste ye back!

© James Munro, 2013

Links

• BBC SSO

A HIGHLAND production which puts Scotland’s DNA under a theatrical microscope has been sparking imaginations and inspiring audiences across the country.

INFINITE Scotland, touring now as part of the Year of Natural Scotland, explores the country’s contrasting landscapes, coastlines and cities using breathtaking images, music, film and words.

David Allison, Blythe Duff, Kenny Taylor and Bryan Beattie (photo Douglas Robertson)

‘Scotland small? Our multiform, infinite Scotland small?’ was a famously incredulous question posed by poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and inspiration for the groundbreaking multi media show, narrated onstage by Taggart actor Blythe Duff and writer and Culbokie-based broadcaster Kenny Taylor.

“Scotland’s environment and culture are inextricably linked strands of the country’s DNA,” explained producer Bryan Beattie, who is also from the Black Isle. “We wanted to explore that, using images, music and words. Putting Scotland’s DNA under the microscope in this way helps open our eyes to what’s around us.

“There are remarkable things around us every day that sometimes we just don’t notice – and some things that we have just not been aware of at all. Sometimes looking at what’s around us in a fresh way can reveal something completely new about it.”

Infinite Scotland blends scientific eyes and artistic creativity with astounding results. Grains of sand under an electron microscope, ancient sacred places, rocks, trees, mammals, birds – discovering the life and landscape around us and how we have interacted with it over millennia is profoundly compelling.

The stage show weaves awe-inspiring images by National Geographic photographer Laurie Campbell with atmospheric live music composed by David Allison and Gaelic singer Maeve MacKinnon. Films feature explorer Mark Beaumont, writers and broadcasters Richard Holloway and Muriel Gray, architect Malcolm Fraser and Gaelic singer and folklorist Margaret Bennett.

Video and production designer John McGeoch of Highland company Arts in Motion brought all the pieces together to create a spectacular multi-media journey across the beauty and wonder of Scotland.

“Visually the show was absolutely superb and I loved the clever and imaginative way it drew together its various strands,” said Alison Bell of Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), who was among the audience at the packed opening night at Eden Court on Monday.

“Infinite Scotland combines superb literature with images, songs and music to give a great evening’s entertainment. I came away feeling I’d really learned a lot – and bursting to check out more. The first thing I did on getting home was dig out a book of Norman MacCaig poems!

“SNH funded the show along with Creative Scotland as part of the Year of Natural Scotland, which is all about promoting Scotland’s stunning natural beauty and biodiversity,” Alison added.

“Infinite Scotland does exactly that – it awakes a real interest and desire to find out more about our wildlife, landscapes and culture.”

An innovative web and social media presence is integral to the Infinite Scotland project, which invites audiences and online followers to interact and submit their own questions, words and images. Feedback on social networks has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic.

Catriona Ross is a freelance journalist and communications specialist who has been working on press and PR for Infinite Scotland.

© Catriona Ross, 2013

Links

• Infinite Scotland
• Infinite Scotland Facebook

THIS contribution to the Britten centenary celebrations may have been only a semi-staged performance of the opera, but it was a memorable one.

THE latest collaboration between the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and Scottish Opera revived Olivia Fuchs’ 2005 production for the Royal Opera House, and gave the cast an opportunity to work with the acclaimed director.

Countertenor Tom Verney as Oberon (© KK Dundas and RCS)

Hers is an (in)famously austere production, a contrast made all the more vivid for me by having recently watched a recording of a very colourful French production. To judge the full impact of her work, it would be necessary to see the stage production reserved for Glasgow and Edinburgh, but this semi-staged performance gave something of its flavour, all austere black costumes (the white-suited Oberon excepted) and cool blue lighting.

The logistics of moving the full set up here for one show apparently proved too complex, but the trade-off we enjoyed was hearing Britten’s wonderful score with greater clarity and presence from having the orchestra, conducted by Timothy Dean, on stage behind the singers and a few simple props – a purple armchair, a couple of crates and a hanging rope, later augmented by some smaller chairs.

Britten’s magical sound world reflected the shift in emphasis which he and Peter Pears initiated in converting Shakespeare’s drama for the opera. The focus here is more on the fairy world than the human one, a realm musically contrasted with the pastiche of Italian opera created for the Rude Mechanicals and their hilarious performance of Pyramus and Thisbe.

The young cast coped well with the challenges of the opera. Countertenor Tom Verney was impressive as Oberon, while aerial artist Jami Reid-Quarrell was a vibrant, hyperactive Puck. A mixed chorus of boys and girls stood in for the boy trebles as Tytania’s band of fairy helpers, the Queen herself was ably sung by Elinor Rolfe Johnson, as were the roles of the four mortals – Catriona Morison as Hermia, Anush Hovhannisyan as Helena, Andreas Backlund as Lysander and Daniel O’Connor as Demetrius.

Peter Quince’s band of rustics all revelled in their comic opportunities, led by Andrew McTaggart as Bottom, and their performance before Theseus (Dominic Barberi) and Hippolyta (Elfa Dröfn Stefándóttir) was a gem.

Given that the piece was not written in the 19th century and thus likely to put off the generally conservative Inverness audience, the turn-out was both respectable and appreciative; with luck it will be enough to encourage the RCS and Scottish Opera to include Eden Court in future collaborations.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2013

Links

• Scottish Opera
• Royal Conservatoire of Scotland

AT A time when our civic authorities, both local and national, are embracing the possibility of change and attempting to plan for and to facilitate a new future then it is to events such as this exhibition that they should look for inspiration, writes George Gunn.

ON THE preview night around 100 people filled the gallery and there was a real sense that here was a project which united the community in common cause with the artists who produced the work.

Detail from work by Aimee Begg

On the walls of the Caithness Horizons gallery hang works of great imagination and colour, and the energy of youth – literally in the case of Aimee Begg’s Moulin Rouge/Madonna-esque theatre designs – leaps off the wall. Here is a fine example of the wit and confidence with materials, colour and form which runs through this exhibition.

There are other, perhaps less successfully realised, designs for restaurant fronts and CD covers, yet there is contained within them the indication of a talent for draughtsmanship most specifically in the conceptualisation of the Japanese pagoda-style designs by Jack Dunnett. It is these glimpses of what is to come from these artists which is the tantalising and exciting element of this exhibition.

Work by Jack Dunnett

The confidence in colour and form and the ability to express it is highlighted in the series of self portraits most notably in the strange feather headed self-vision of Terri McCallum which has an expressive flair and a sure use of colour – all blood splattered and rag doll cheeky confidence.

This is in marked contrast with the haunting work of Charlotte Gordon, where the artist stares wistfully out from a green canvas where the sky is filled with doomed atmospheric gliders. In mood and exposition these two pieces demonstrate that these young artists follow their own path.

Work by Charlotte Gordon

The still life work also displays an ease in the use of colour and technique. Often these are not mere representations and as in the case of the work of Georgia Clyne, where a steel cooking pot and couple of yellow peppers appear to melt before the eye. This is a different vision of reality from the beautifully drawn and mature set of compositions by Nicola Gray where the bottle and onion are most definitely what they appear. There is a certainty to the work which promises much for the future.

Work by Nicola Gray

One has to constantly remind oneself that these artists are, technically, children, and yet it was Picasso who said that all his life he tried to get back to painting as he did when he was a child. On the other hand there are artists here who seem to have skipped childhood. Chloe Marks painting of two boats on a Caithness shore is a vibrant and colourful study of time and place with ominous surging waves and a threatening florescent sky. This is an accomplished piece of work.

Similarly successfully realised but more gently coloured is Ian McPherson’s headland-focused rendering of a beach with an assemblage of stones, rope and blocks – all pale blues and fading yellows. Both these paintings show artists who are at the beginning of an artistic journey which anyone who is interested in the future of painting will follow with interest.

Hat design by Sarah Douglas

There are also fantastic hat creations by Sarah Douglas and Kerri Sim, and the theme of time and clocks is apparent in many of the works on show but most eye-catchingly in the two pieces of assemblage by Rochelle Peat of a fish and a boat, both exquisite, both clocks.

Work by Rochelle Peat

Much emanates, mostly in hot air and policy documents, from central government and the local authority about community art and education and community interface. The Scottish Government and Highland Council should study the work of these young artists and admire and learn from their creativity, flair, imagination and talent.

Their skills are learned. We are fortunate to have teachers who can pass it on. This young artistic energy is the real alternative to the reducing monetarism of the modern state. These young visionaries will, by necessity, design the future so we had better make sure they are properly resourced to do so in the present. They are the future.

Come to Caithness Horizons and see an exhibition which will illuminate for you what exactly alternative energy means.

© George Gunn, 2013

Links

• Caithness Horizons

THE elaborately corniced, portico’d and vaulted hall of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery soars high above row upon row of chairs.

SOLD out for months, tonight the Strathglass Suite is the hottest ticket in rainy Glasgow; extra rows of seating have been squeezed in wherever possible and people are crowding on the balconies above. It’s also being filmed for later transmission on BBC Alba.

Duncan Chisholm (photo John Smith)

No pressure, then, on Duncan Chisholm and his band – Matheu Watson (guitar), Martin O’Neill (bodhran), Jarlath Henderson (pipes and whistles), Ross Hamilton (bass) and the statutory member of the Henderson family, Allan (piano and fiddle).

Accompanying them are a string & brass ensemble conducted by Gary Walker and led by Greg Lawson, known to some from Blazin’ in Beauly but here in his capacity as a freelance classical violinist.

One wonders, idly, what Donald Riddell would have thought, sitting in his croft in Abriachan, of the success enjoyed by his pupils who, as well as Chisholm, include Bruce MacGregor, Iain MacFarlane and Adam Sutherland.

In case you hadn’t noticed (and if you hadn’t, don’t worry, you will), this is the Year of Natural Scotland whose logo flashed up on the screen behind the performers. The Strathglass Suite is Chisholm’s musical tribute to the place of his birth and the home of his ancestors, where the valley of the Glass river widens out between Glen Affric and Aigas. It is drawn from a trilogy of CD releases, recorded over six years, Farrar, Canaich and the most recent, Affric.

Written in the thrall of what the Welsh call ‘hiraeth’, the deep love of one’s homeland, the Strathglass Suite inhabits an area of music thronged with popular favourites like Sibelius’ ‘Finlandia’, Smetana’s ‘Ma Vlast’ and many of the works of Vaughan Williams; on this showing Chisholm’s work is worthy of inclusion in the canon.

The opening notes are played by Jarlath Henderson – is there any sound more wistfully haunting than the Uillean pipes? – before the ensemble join in with some meltingly lovely strings. The suite would be a fine enough piece played only by Chisholm’s selection of traditional musicians, but with the addition of the ensemble’s rich musical textures it becomes a thing of great and lasting beauty.

Scottish Opera’s Stephen Adams has been in charge of the arrangements, which successfully bridge the folk/classical gap, the strings often echoing the cadences of the pipes and not merely framing the folk sections but weaving all the strands together. You can see it’s going well from the grins on the faces of the musicians; even the classical musicians are allowing themselves to tap their feet and nod their heads when the music heads off into the folkosphere.

The audience quickly abandons the stultifying classical convention (only introduced in the Victorian era) of not applauding between sections – to the extent of giving a standing ovation half way through after a fast, furious section driven by the great, lolloping beat of O’Neill’s bodhran.

Yes, the man from Wolfstone can break your heart with a slow air but he also knows how to rock. The barriers between classical and folk have been trampled over and it’s all just music. Things quieten down enough for Allan Macdonald to declaim, in Gaelic, an extract from Neil Munro’s ‘To Exiles’ before the last section, followed by a rapturous repeat of the standing ovation and a final, reprised encore. Magnificent.

Pride of New York, led by Cherish the Ladies’ force of nature, Joanie Madden, had the unenviable position of support band but gradually managed to win the audience over, delivering a knockout blow with an irresistible 400-year old tune on the whistle from Madden. If only the stage had been a little higher, it’d have been possible to see as well as hear them. The sound, too, is against them; Madden’s introductions, like Chisholm’s after her, are almost incomprehensible in the echoing acoustics.

© Jennie Macfie, 2013

Links

Duncan Chisholm

Jennie Macfie

AT Sabhal Mòr Ostaig’s birthday party the honour of playing the first notes was given to a native of that well-known Gaelic enclave, California: Dr Decker Forrest, director of the Gaelic Music course and winner of many a close-fought piping competition.

HE also plays one of the most sweetly tuned set of pipes you’ll ever have the pleasure of hearing. Earlier in the day some of his students had delivered a thoroughly professional second half in the Solas ur Tobar an Dualchais concert at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, full of delightful arrangements, solid musicianship and close-knit vocal harmonies but also notable for their calm assurance and stagecraft. They were a real credit to him and their other tutors.

Julie Fowlis

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig has been tutoring students full-time for some 30 years. By contrast, the first half of the RCS concert featured the first-ever students of the Applied Music B.A at the University of the Highlands and Islands, a degree course which builds on Sabhal Mor Ostaig’s experience of distance learning. Tutorials are usually in person but if no accessible tutor can be found, Skype allows tuition from as far away, this year, as New York.

There is extraordinary potential for cross-fertilisation among musicians studying variously opera, rock, jazz , traditional Scottish music and everything in between. To start the process the students had been set loose in the treasure house of Tobar an Dualchais to research a piece of music, learn it, work in groups to create a work based on it and then perform it – with the added challenge that the collaboration, apart from the final rehearsals the day before, would take place online.

As Julie Fowlis highlighted in her introduction, the recording of these treasured archive works in the 1930s was due to then-new technology, and now today’s technology is allowing today’s students to revisit their ancestors’ heritage. The wheel turns; this fusion of ancient and modern is the power that fuels many of the finest artists working in Scotland today. The students, tentatively at times, drew on that energy with a programme that consistently challenged expectations.

Unaccompanied Gaelic ensemble singing was augmented by whistling, as though some young blackbird had decided to join in. A charmingly indie-fied version of the ‘Eriskay Love Lilt’ showcased some neat fingerstyle guitar. Banjo duetted with bodhran and flute with accordion. Later, immaculate electric guitar had this reviewer idly wondering what would have happened if Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour had gone to Glasgow School of Art … The lack of live rehearsal time showed in occasional rough edges, but did not tarnish the overall glow.

At Sabhal Mòr Ostaig’s birthday party later that night, there were many more demonstrations of experimentation rooted strongly in the tradition. Allan Macdonald of Glenuig opened the second half with a bravura demonstration of what freeform piping, loosed from the bonds of strict military meter, can be. Tightly fingered notes and gracenotes cascaded off the stage and took the audience’s collective breath away.

Julie Fowlis is fast becoming the international face of Gaeldom, but is also a former graduate and postgraduate of Sabhal Mor Ostaig and her rendition of ‘Bothan Àirigh am Bràigh Raithneach’ showed why. Deceptively simple, the simplicity that stems from dedicated professionalism.

The evening was studded with songs from Margaret Stewart (whose pure, silvery voice outshone even the sparkle of her jewels), James Graham, Alasdair Codona, Mary Ann Kennedy, and Christine Primrose, backed by the House Band, itself not short of formidable names including Iain Macdonald of Glenuig, Alasdair White, and Angus Nicholson, plus members of the Henderson family (musical director Allan and his sister Ingrid) without whom no Highland musical festivity is complete. (There is probably a bye-law to this effect in the depths of Highland Council).

On the tune side, Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas are never less than impressive but their dynamic, vibrant performance in the City Halls dazzled. Dàimh stepped up to the mark with their laidback, virtuosity while Fergie MacDonald’s brief turn centre stage demonstrated why he has been a legend since before Sabhal Mòr Ostaig began.

Last but not at all least, Michael O’Súilleabháin, Professor at the University of Limerick, conducted the orchestra of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in some bravura jazz-infused works that highlighted the superb soprano sax-playing of Kenneth Edge, before everyone crowded onstage to uplift their voices in one final anthem.

© Jennie Macfie, 2013

Links

• Celtic Connections
• Sabhal Mòr Ostaig
• Jennie Macfie

ASKED to produce a touring family show – but not a panto –  on a limited budget,  Wildbird’s Chris Lee has come up with an interesting production which is part film, part theatre and part storytelling session.

THE eponymous Dreich House is an ominous baronial pile in a remote, bleak glen where children who are unloved are sent by parents who don’t wish to see them again. Ever. The small print on Dreich House’s brochure promises a money-back guarantee if disappointed.

Rod Morrison in Dreich House (picture by Gary Anthony, courtesy Wildbird and Inverness Courier)

The show features one adult and seven child actors. Never act with children or animals, goes the actors’ adage, and indeed they steal the show effortlessly, especially the enchanting Sophia Woolnough as baby Ollie. This despite the fact that their appearances are all on back-projected film – shot against a green screen at Arts in Motion’s Evanton studio on an unfeasibly tight schedule. The backgrounds were then added in post-production.

Particular commendation for Merle Harbron (Ruby Love) on whose young shoulders the show partly rests. As Ruby Love,  she is entirely believable as the resourceful heroine, long abandoned by self-absorbed filmstar parents, who rescues the others from the clutches of the evil, scheming Lord Boltfast and his henchmen.

Meanwhile the adult inhabits his roles mostly on stage. Rod Morison has an unusually demanding task in theatrical terms; Dreich House is essentially a one-man show with the necessity of generating all the energy entirely alone. However, Morison also has to switch between a host of wildly different personas, from a Hollywood starlet to a slavering bloodthirsty hound, with the added pressure of timing his performance to the back-projected visuals. Morison’s performance has settled down since I saw it earlier in the run and the audience (sadly sparse on a snowy Strathpeffer Monday evening) enjoys the experience. It’s all good, clean, cartoon-ish fun, the only notable drawback being the soundtrack level which occasionally muffles the children’s recorded dialogue.

© Jennie Macfie, 2013

Links

• Wildbird

THIS LATEST exhibition in the IMAG main gallery space presents the opportunity to view some magnificent works from the Scottish figurative tradition, drawn from the Highland Collection held by the Highland Council.

CONSISTING mainly of work by artists from the Highlands of Scotland, the collection reflects acquisitions from temporary touring exhibitions from the 1980’s and 1990’s, supplemented by part of the Scottish Arts Council Collection Bequest when the SAC’s permanent collection was dismantled in 2001. Featured artists include Joyce W Cairns, Ken Currie, Adrian Wisniewski, Heather Wade, Andrew Walker, David Donaldson, Patricia Douthwaite, Margaret Hunter, Calum Colvin and Peter Howson.

Joyce Cairns - Shadows of the Past

Scottish artists have contributed enormously to the figurative tradition in Western Art History and it is wonderful to see some of the greatest exponents of the genre represented in this exhibition. Shadows of the Past (also titled Shadows of the Past, Liberation Ceremony Rennes 1984, oil on panel) by Joyce W Cairns is one of the highlights of the exhibition. Described by the artist as her “first war painting” and inspired by a journey to Brittany where she witnessed the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the liberation of Rennes, Shadows of the Past marks the beginning of an exploration of personal and collective memory which culminated in the artist’s major retrospective War Tourist at the Aberdeen Art Gallery in 2006. In terms of Cairns’ oeuvre this is a significant painting, and the Highland Council are indeed fortunate to hold this work bequeathed from the SAC collection.

The painting draws a powerful link between Scottish figurative art in the 1980’s, German Expressionism and the Naue Sacklichkeit; specifically the paintings of Max Beckman, Otto Dix and George Grosz during the Weimar period in its compression of the figure within the picture plane. Cairns’ uncompromising vision, bold delineation and paint handling are uniquely tempered by an unsettling delicacy. Paint is applied fluidly and scraped or wiped away to allow luminous highlights of ground to emerge, like truth illuminated in darkness.

The depiction of the central female protagonist, a symbol of occupied France, is characterised not by the idea of liberation but collaboration; the choice of palette a distortion of the bright tricolour into steely militaristic blue and deeper hues evocative of caked mud and blood. The overlay of figures is claustrophobic and absolute, a composition of powerful intensity and subtlety, with ghostly elements visible on closer inspection; the childlike face above the woman’s exposed breast, the hand in the right hand corner with a milk jug, part of the genteel ritual of taking tea with the enemy. In the foreground, the female protagonist’s hand reaches for cake offered on a tray by a German soldier, while she gazes absently beyond the picture frame and the contained chaos of war and invasion.

The positioning of gun and bayonet and the immersion of the female figure within the composition achieves a level of psychological violence which is as unflinching as it is humane. Cairns’ great gift is placing the heart of the work within the viewer, causing us to examine our own complicity and vulnerability as human beings. There is care in every brushstroke and in the painstaking inner architecture of the image, characteristic of all the artist’s large scale figurative compositions. Form and feeling are rendered equally, inviting deeper contemplation of the subject.

Unlike the work of Peter Howson, an official war artist in Bosnia whose early work is also featured in the exhibition, Cairns achieves not a shocking display of violence distancing the viewer from the human condition , but a level of emotional gravitas and inner reflection befitting a major artist of consummate skill and insight. The image is of a country despoiled, a commemorative image of complicity and guilt, not just in the context of a single war but for all time. Joyce W Cairns is one of the UK’s greatest living artists and this important work of international significance should be on permanent display in the Highland capital as one of the highlights of the Highland Council collection.

Andrew Walker - The Bishop

Andrew Walker’s The Bishop (Oil on canvas) is a subtle and introspective work of unexpected beauty, echoing early Picasso in its abstracted, planar treatment of the face and body. The central ruffed figure, perched upon a stool with arms folded protectively around his bent legs, occupies a tonally charged space of light and shadow. The face is defined in a few elegantly poised lines, conveying with economy a pervasive mood of contemplation in the ambiguous, Pierrot-like central figure. The darkest shadow behind the figure to the left is almost a presence in itself and the way that the shifting ground pigment is handled adds to the atmosphere of inward deliberation. In a monochrome world warmer flesh tones bind our gaze to the figure, drawing the eye into this intriguing painting of profound stillness.

Heather Wade - In A Spiritual Place

Heather Wade’s beautifully enigmatic In a Spiritual Place (Mixed media on canvas) is a surreal composition of landscape, figure and symbolic still life, rendered in a finely tuned palette of greens, blues and accented flesh tones. The eye is immediately drawn to the central female figure with her head cranked awkwardly to one side, her stance and penetrative gaze evocative of an altered state of consciousness/perception, together with the clear liquefied depiction of three birds in flight to the upper right as archetypal symbols of the spirit. Like the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, Wade’s work is steeped in personal and collective iconography; the feminine vessel held aloft in the palm, the antique statue to the left in cold classical marble contrasted with an earlier cat-like deity depicted on a terracotta plaque beneath, two aspects of sensuality held in the background of the protagonist.

This expansion of self throughout the arrangement and display of objects surrounding the figure is also expressed in the angular shard of mirror, which disrupts the dream-like elevated state of the composition. Wade’s gently articulate palette and rippling brushwork are subtly rendered to great effect, creating a rhythm which is hypnotic, meditative and rather haunting. The juxtaposition of Christian and pagan imagery; the crucifix adorned with bones, the masks of sun and moon, expand our frame of reference in relation to spirituality. This attitude, the freedom for the viewer to make their own connections with Wade’s own personal iconography, together with the piercing, steady gaze of the protagonist infers that “spiritual place” held within the individual.

I Wandered ThroughThe 30’s (Charcoal/ Conte on Paper) is a fine example of Ken Currie’s superb draughtsmanship in heightened chiaroscuro, reflecting his early work on eight panels for the People’s Palace, commissioned for the 200th anniversary of the massacre of Glasgow’s Carlton Weavers. Influenced by the socialist realism of Diego Rivera and the biting social satire of Dix and Grosz as part of the Naue Sachlichkeit in Germany during the rise of Nazism, Currie’s murals contrast with his later intimate, ethereal portraits and larger scale figurative work focusing on human vulnerability, death and decay.

Here the robust rendering of the human figure and sense of forward movement in the crowd present a vigorous image of protest and self-determination. Figures gathered around the fire to warm their hands evoke the plight of the man in the street during the depression era, with reference to the fight against Fascism during the Spanish Civil War in the burning newspaper headline “Aid To Spain”. The mother and child drawn as one embrace together with the central masculine figure of strength and resistance hold the structure of this figurative composition in a great pyramid as a powerful visual expression of political struggle and human aspiration.

Calum Colvin’s Self Portrait (Cibachrome Print) presents a layered image of the subject, the act of seeing and the crafting of visual images typical of the artist. The visual game of exploration suggested by the checkerboard–like floor and the successive layers of print, photograph, mirror, three dimensional still life and stacked canvases as a multidimensional representation of self and creation in black and white tonality. The shaving mirror portrait in the foreground, open book of “truth” and photograph/postcard/billboard “walk a mile in my shoes”, together with a cuckoo clock provide the only accents of colour.

The placement of these elements together with the shifting, elusive nature of the self- portrait as an image of truth and deception create a fascinating and ambiguous comment on existence; “I exist and all that is not. I is mere phenomenon dissolving into phenomenal connections”. Both visual and written text in Colvin’s art provide the opportunity for varied connections to be made in the mind of the viewer, positioning the portrait in relation to ourselves, ideas of self and of seeing- none of which are visually fixed.

With no permanent survey of Visual Art in the Highland capital’s only public museum/gallery space, seeing even a small selection of this work on display is a joy. It is both inspiring and deeply frustrating to see what might form the core of not just a permanent collection invisibly scattered or in storage, but perhaps a future survey and programme of acquisition which places the work of Highland artists in a local, national and international context in a building suited for purpose.

While in a time of austerity this might seem like a distant dream, such investment in cultural infrastructure, which visibly exists in every other Scottish or international city, is an economic necessity, an important educational resource and a measure of worth. If we do not insist on seeing our own visual history consistently represented, we fail to value ourselves, and the image we project to the rest of the world is a great deal poorer. While the process of cataloguing works online is on-going, providing access to collections all over the UK through the BBC/Your Paintings website, doing a search for paintings in the Highland Council collections is arguably no substitute for seeing and engaging with original work presented in context, doubly so in light of the historic denial of that visual history locally and nationally.

A visitor from New York, Barcelona or elsewhere may as well stay at home and play with a mouse because if they came here looking for visual culture in the public domain they would be hard pressed to find anything other than the temporary or tokenistic. This exhibition points powerfully to an alternative and the Exhibitions Unit are to be congratulated on curating such a resoundingly strong show; however, the fact remains that this exhibition exists in a single room for a month and can only be viewed during reduced winter hours from Thursday to Saturday.

The work in this show, together with the current exhibition of contemporary craft and the display of two of Gerald Laing’s sculptures in IMAG’s revamped upper foyer are a step in the right direction. The extraordinary work of artists based in the Highlands and Islands presented here demands a greater expansion of space, time and consideration. What this display of works from the permanent collection highlights is the lack of growth and understanding at civic level that hasn’t significantly altered in the last decade of rapid social change. Visit just about any other city in the world and Visual Art has a presence not on a screen but visibly and physically as a cultural and economic statement of worth. There can be no pride or economic recovery if our greatest cultural assets remain hidden.

© Georgina Coburn, 2013

Links

• IMAG

THE title really does say what this bright, light, winter-solstice show in an Lanntair’s main gallery is about – “the sea that’s within me”.

THE tapestry-maker Fiona Hutchison points out that there is no spot in Scotland more than fifty miles from the sea. But she is also a sailor and therefore one who who has no option but to look closely at the surface of water for clues as to the forces which are acting upon it at any time. A sailing vessel can’t just disregard eddies if forward momentum is to be maintained. And I’d say the subject of this celebratory exhibition is the interplay of warp and weft, seen as cross-currents.

"warp and weft, seen as cross-currents" - work from the exhibition (Ian Stephen)

But the artist, trained as a tapestry weaver, takes her craft into a huge range of variations. Her materials do not simply criss-cross a chosen format but at times seem barely contained within the scheme. You get a sense of energy in all the diverse works. This is an artist who loves her medium as well as her subject. She is inventive in her range of different scales, in presentation and in materials. But restricting the palette to one dominated by the blue-grey-turquoise and whites range, gives a strong sense of unity.

There are two large-scale tapestry works, both of which seem to have found their own dimensions for the subject. One is simply called “wave”, but you get a sense of the sweep of a whole shoreline – the complex geography which results in the shape of a particular wave. It is balanced by another, more conventional woven work, “dark sea”, where wisps of reds suggest the extraordinary force of bright colour you often see in the natural world, shocking and near garish.

Diptych from the exhibition (Ian Stephen)

Elsewhere, several diptychs, sometimes boxed in acrylic glass, house woven objects which give close scrutiny to the results of turmoil in the natural world. There is also a triptych of harmonic pieces but with significant variations between the individual items. “The work is not a literal translation or a representation of the sea but something remembered, a metaphor for our lives.”

So the ‘tapestry” could be only a few inches square and could contain a shard of glass to represent a section of ice-flow. Monofilamemt netting can have a mind and memory of its own and leap into its own shape, known universally by fishermen as “a bundle of bastards”. But Hutchison harnesses phenomena, or rather she observes and represents. She doesn’t fight against the currents.

Floor show (Ian Stephen)

Part of the pleasure in this show is from the musical balance between the elements. The artist brought more work than she hung – the L-shaped gallery does not have the linear space you might think it does, at first glance. Instead, a floor-mounted installation, takes you round the corner. A series of paper scrolls, laid in salt, suggest a Paisley pattern swirl to sweep you through the space. Fiona reported a very good partnership with an Lanntair, in selecting the works and balancing them out.

I might have been tempted to make it a shade more spare still, but on the other hand would have found it difficult to decide which of the treasures to edit out. There is for example a series of five square format open box-frames. Each contains a small tapestry, not quite uniform in size and nowhere near uniform in the orientation of the form within it or in the way the materials comprise a made thing.

This fine winter exhibition is thus its own single tapestry, made out of individual tapestries.

© Ian Stephen, 2013

Links

• An Lanntair
• Fiona Hutchison
• Ian Stephen

FROM a snow covered Eden Court and with the night air sharp with frost, the intimate venue of the Bishop’s Palace provided a haven of warmth and a grandiose setting for an eclectic mix of ‘feel good’ musicality produced almost entirely from in and around the Highland capital, writes Ed Ley-Wilson.

THIS was a treat of Scottish and World ‘a cappella’, classical opera, jazz and blues, ‘swing’ string quartet, and sea shanties. How on earth would such a varied mix of music work together in one concert? Well the answer was, “Just perfectly” and was perhaps best summed up by one of the sell-out audience who enthused, “it all just makes me want to get out there and learn to sing.”

In Cahoots at the Perthshire Amber Festival

This is the first time that In Cahoots, directed by the formidable Margaret Rae, has brought together such a program and, judging by the quality of performance and the clear audience appreciation, it will not be the last.

The young tenor, Glen Cunningham, sang Handel, Schubert, Gluck and others with an emotional maturity way beyond his seventeen years. Clearly destined for great things, this Culloden Academy pupil ended his set with an emotional rendition of ‘Bring him home’ from Les Miserables…….hardly a dry eye in the house.

Laura Stewart travelled up from Fife and brought with her all the sophistication of two wonderful jazz blues numbers. She enhanced her sassy rendition of ‘Ain’t misbehavin’ with a clear touch of Marilyn Munro….booboobidoo’s to die for……..and, as the notes of ‘Cry me a river’ fell achingly about us, my eyes were drawn to a lonely couple strolling hand in hand in the snow under the lighted trees down by the river Ness. Perfect.

Animato String Quartet simply blew us away with an unbridled and highly ‘animated’ selection of jazz, blues and light classical. Their tango, fizzing with energy and passion, contrasted well with the softer classical arrangements for Saint Saens’ ‘The Swan’ and ‘The Elephant’ and then, after the interval, they ‘Put on the Ritz’ big time with three swinging numbers from Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Joe Garland. Bows and fingers flying over the strings, these four Highland lassies had the audience heads bobbing and feet tapping and, in the end, left us ‘In the Mood’ for more.

Another young team, Seumas, Donald and Peigi Barker, added a touch of Hollywood glamour to the evening. Springsteen’s ‘Hungry heart’ warmed us up, with Seamus on guitar and some lovely harmonies by Donald and Peigi. Then Peigi, only ten years old, sang the ‘lullaby’ she shared as a duet with Emma Thompson in the recently released Disney blockbuster ‘Brave’. A diminutive figure on stage, her voice belies her size and, for a few short minutes, time stood still. At the finish, we raised the roof.

In amongst all this carefully crafted talent, launched The Deep Cs. If anyone wanted some contrast to the proceedings then this was it! A more colourful, anarchic, enthusiastic and ‘manly’ bunch of singing mariners, one cannot imagine. Variously clad as seamen/pirates and dressed with all the paraphernalia of the sea, including a lobster pot, ropes, buoys, a bottle and some fish, they threw sea shanties out at the audience with gusto. A testosterone filled ‘Way, haul away’ and ‘The Drunken Sailor’ proved that these guys could sing and, with a humour and sense of fun that only a group of close friends who have been round the Horn together can create, their ‘Amsterdam Maid’ and ‘Doon by the Broomilaw’ had the audience rolling with laughter (or was it seasickness) and cheering to the not insubstantial rafters of the Bishop’s Palace itself.

And finally of course, the main act themselves, In Cahoots, an eleven strong group of Invernessian women, filled the intimate hall with four part harmonies and delivered a wonderful range of pieces from the traditional Scottish ‘Rousay Lullaby’, an exquisite ‘Amazing Grace’, through seasonal Christmas ‘partner’ songs, to the medieval ‘Gaudete’ (‘Rejoice’)…….and rejoice we did. Delicate harmonies executed with exquisite precision and a lightness of touch that perhaps only an all-ladies team can achieve. Their finale, ‘May your Cup Always Be Full’, sung on behalf of all the performers that night, wished us all health and peace and we left with our cups not only full but brimming over with the thrill of an evening well spent.

Unflappable piano accompaniment was provided by Aileen Fraser and interval champagne and canapés, flowers and stage graphics were all sponsored by Mackenzie Investment Strategies Ltd., Munro Nurseries and Dynam Graphics. This concert was clearly a collaboration of people who like to do things well.

Rarely these days, does this correspondent get gooey-eyed about Christmas and all that ‘good will’ stuff, but this sell-out night of musical “Christmas Cheer”, organised and directed by Margaret and her ‘In Cahoots’ team, has changed me for life. And as for ‘good will’, did I mention that the concert raised £2000 for the charity, ‘Dancing Eye Syndrome’, which provides support and information to the families of affected children as well as funding for research into treatment for this debilitating condition.

The Christmas spirit of ‘giving’ and good cheer is alive and well.

© Ed Ley-Wilson, 2012

AS ALL the commissions were advertised together and artists selected by the same panel, you might expect to see evidence of a policy. There are of course many different possible approaches to this often controversial field.

The artist might reasonably be expected to engage in a genuine investigation into cultural aspects of the locality. He or she might be seen as part of a team with the architects and indeed with the staff and pupils of the building. The pitfalls often are that the process of engagement has come too late in the project for the consultation to be meaningful. You can often see evidence of this in public artworks which do not result in a sense of ownership by the community they serve.

A view of Donald Urquhart's installation

I’ve recently had the great pleasure of being able to take a close look at a work which has been made in consultation with the architects of the Nicolson secondary project in Stornoway, but with a genuine input from the pupils of the school. I do have some ‘inside knowledge’ of the process and not because I was a pupil of that school. The artist, Donald Urquhart, is a mate. I can claim that this does not at all affect my ability to be objective because we have also been rivals in applying for commissions.

Let’s get the negative out of the way first because I can say right away that the Nicolson commission seems to me a completely successful work. But how can you judge that, with regard to art which is part of a public building rather than in an exhibition where you can take it or leave it? As always, only by comparison. I know of two other examples of public works made in the Western Isles as part of the umbrella scheme of commissions.

One is pretty much what you would have expected the artist to make. There is no contesting that this is an artist of great skills but often the idea of community involvement is ticked as a box with no real sense that it has significantly influenced the essentials of the work in question.

The installation

Another is a pre-formed idea, made to the budget and installed with no sense of the cultural implications of the representational icons mounted at the approach to the school. As a storyteller I was asked to justify one work by finding a relevant island story for it, after the rather sinister image was already produced. Now as a poet, I would have to question that such a retrospective process could meet the requirements of the words “consultation” or “dialogue”.

So why do I think that the Nicolson work works? Donald Urquhart is vastly experienced in this field and it shows. His installations in Stobhill hospital have been an integral part of the international regard the Reiach and Hall project is held in. Then there are the painted timbers installed at Dysart, an intervention on the shoreline which encourages an altered focus on the seascape but with allusion to the human heritage of the place.

A closer view

The cornfield wall and the painted towers at the redeveloped Eden Court Theatre in Inverness are quiet in one sense, but a large part of the aesthetic of the building visible to the outside world. In all of these, colour is the essential element. A draughtsman and painter by trade has carried his obsessions and skills into the multiple dimensions of the public works, interior and exterior.

As a mate and one with a head for heights, Donald asked if I’d give a hand touching up some minor post-installation damage to the paintwork of the abstract three dimensional work, newly installed in the Nicolson. This makes use of the high open hallway in the now occupied building. As one of the labouring team, following Donald’s instructions, to touch-up some minor scuffs to the paint finish, I gained an insight into both the final form of the work and the process which greatly influenced one aspect of it.

What do you see when you walk in? A closely hung grouping of painted three-dimensional shapes suspended from the roof structure to continue below the line of a mezzanine area, into the void space below. They are a bit like Toblerones, but a lot skinnier, in proportion. The bottom ends are not in line but slightly staggered, though not in a uniform way. Instead, you immediately get a sense of a connection with landscape, rather than with the more logical shapes of a designed building.

A longer view

The range of colours is on the point of being shocking and yet it is also harmonic. Donald had brought 120 plastic bottles, each carefully numbered to match a plan. Each ‘Toblerone’ has a different shade on each facet. There is some chance for the works to swing very slightly from a single-point suspension on a tensed wire. But this will be more like a very subtle shift of light in landscape than anything like a kaleidescope effect.

So where did the colours come from? If you’re familiar with Donald Urquhart’s work you’ll know there’s a reason for the choices. This is the link to the locality. The artist commissioned a former student of his, now living in the Western Isles, to conduct a series of workshops at the school. These generated great interest, due to enthusiastic participation of the head-teacher, the art-department and other staff. Thus a significant proportion of the school population went out on field trips to identify particular shades in the flora and fauna of the natural environment.

The artist acting as assistant but also with a passion for colour, worked with the pupils to produce a large panatone palette of observed shades which could be reproduced. These might come from the beak of a puffin or from a frond of the complex shading roughly summarized by the word “moor”.

These then gave Donald the basis for his eventual choices of which shade to paint on which face of which of the many suspended shapes. And yes, a measure of chance occured, as when lighting-tracks were not fixed exactly where the plans said they would be.

So the original idea of creating a flush lower line by exactly matching the lengths of suspension-wire to the pitch of the roof, could not be achieved. Donald then chose to go for a random grouping which of course is in sympathy with an inevitable random element in the colour selection. So the work suggests landscape and the asymmetry in much of the observed natural world.

To make it work, he had to consult with the architects to change their choice of colour-scheme for the surrounding area. Its present subtlety is calming and throws focus on the abstract work.

Another angle

I feel that the process has led to a sense of ownership in the work but don’t take my word for it. Ask the cleaners, the staff and the pupils. More than once, in the few hours when our squad was dabbing paint from the said range of bottles, someone came up to say how much they liked the piece and how it contributed something to the space though they couldn’t say quite what.

There we go. To make successful public art, I think the process of commissioning the artist has to allow a space for the factor which is very difficult to score. I’m reminded of a local crofter’s reaction to a temporary installation of painted marks in the landcape during Comhla, the first Triangle Trust artists’ workshop in Scotland. He couldn’t quite say why but somehow he didn’t mind that being there. He looked up again at a place he saw most days. Somehow his line of sight was temporarily altered, that little bit.

I do know that Donald Urquhart would welcome a further dialogue with the wider community which surrounds the school building. It would be a fine and fair thing if all the artists, involved in this series of commissions were invited to a public event where they could each present their work and the experience behind it’s finished form.

The work, COLOUR LINES, takes as its starting point the Hugh MacDiarmid poem, Scotland Small ? ( 1943 ). In this work MacDiarmid urges a way of seeing in the landscape which allows the appreciation of detail and colour. The pupils at the Nicolson Institute were asked to adopt that way of seeing in the development of the work.

Through a series of workshops conducted by the Stornoway based artist, Christine Morrison, a range of over 70 pupils, from across all the year groups, went on visits to the Castle Grounds to photograph and record colour in the landscape. Further computer-based workshops looked at extracting colour samples from digital images.

Each pupil was then asked to think about their favourite colour from a detail of the natural environment of Lewis and to suggest these for the work. The pupils sourced imagery from the photography archive of Scottish Natural Heritage to select individual images of their chosen subjects – from waxwings to puffins and ladybirds to sea campions. Individual pixels were then extracted from these images to form the final pallette for COLOUR LINES.

Urquhart discussed formal options with the pupils for how these colours could be introduced into the space in an appropriate form. The work is intended to form a cluster of colour within the atrium space and if of a scale appropriate to the height of the ceiling from which it is suspended. The triangular section of each element of the work is intended to allow the visible colours to change as the work is viewed from different angles. The forty elements were fabricated to Urquhart’s specification by Inscape Joinery

With forty individual triangular elements this allowed one hundred and twenty colours, selected by the pupils, to be used in the work. Each colour was mixed to match the pixels’ colours before Urquhart hand painted each face of each element. One hundred and twenty colours from the landscape of Lewis brought together by the pupils in one work at the heart of the Nicolson Institute.

© Ian Stephen, 2012

Links

• Nicolson Institute
• Ian Stephen

THE SCOTTISH Ensemble made a welcome return to Inverness Cathedral as a venue for their annual candlelit concert with a programme exploring the deceptively simple concept of variations.

WORKS by contemporary British composer Martin Suckling, Benjamin Britten and JS Bach resonated with each other beautifully in a programme that took the audience from unfamiliar territory to an experience of the sublime.

Jonathan Morton (photo Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)

Mr Jonathan Morton, His Ground-Postcard #2 draws inspiration from the aural ground of the oldest form of music making. The second in a series of Musical Postcards by Martin Suckling, created and receiving their world premieres during the Scottish Ensemble’s 2012/13 season, this work inspires curiosity in its treatment of form and in the relationships drawn between accompanying works in the programme. Suckling scores the traditional ground bass line for first violin as a circular structural element, underpinning a series of variations where silence, compressed and expanded fragments of musical time are utilised to deliver a four minute work of unexpected texture, economy and complexity.

There is a degree of playfulness with the element of time in this composition which inspires contemplation, in relation to the programme as a whole and with the idea of timeless musical form; Bach’s definitive variations inspiring subsequent generations of composers including Britten and Suckling himself. This work also feels very much about the “ground” of the soloist, the Ensemble’s Artistic Director Jonathan Morton; the spirit of exploration of musical form in the commissioning of new work, the dynamic juxtaposition of works from all periods of music as variations of human expression through time and each performance as an exciting and uniquely nuanced variation of the original composition.

In many ways it is Britten’s tribute to creative leadership expanded and an innovative exploration of the variation with long rests, allowing each musical statement imaginative pause in the mind of the listener. The experience of music as a wellspring for the composer, performing musicians and audience is beautifully articulated by this abstract work, obliquely referencing the musical canon whilst expanding our idea of musical variations. Mr Jonathan Morton, His Ground-Postcard #2 contrasts wonderfully with the beguiling lyricism and dissonant intensity of the composer’s first Musical Postcard, In Memorium EMS, performed as part of the Ensemble’s Illuminations concert tour in October, and I am sure I am not alone in eagerly anticipating his next correspondence. These newly commissioned works present a fascinating dialogue between composers past and present, selected works within each concert programme and the unique qualities of soloist and ensemble; reinterpreting and rejuvenating our live experience of historical and contemporary repertoire.

Written when Benjamin Britten was 24 and composed as a tribute to his teacher and “musical father”, Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937) expands beyond personal reference in its exploration of musical form and texture. Composing a series of 10 variations on an Introduction and Theme drawn from one of Bridge’s String Quartets, Britten reflects facets of his mentor’s personality whilst transforming the range and scope of his own music. There are times when the string ensemble feels like a full symphonic orchestra, a combination of Britten’s spirited writing and the Scottish Ensemble’s superbly unified playing.

This unity and poise brought each contrasting variation to life in all its richness, drama and delicacy; the lush sonorous layers of ‘Variation 8, Funeral March’, for example, followed by ‘Variation 9, Chant’, with its atmospheric, pizzicato tension in the strings and heightened variant pitch, released like sound above and below a waterline of consciousness. The journey through this work was all the more rewarding due to its juxtaposition with the Suckling’s musical postcard and Bach’s Goldberg Variations, with the influence of each consecutive work shedding light on the next, interestingly in a reverse historical timeline of performance.

Originally written for harpsichord and one of the most influential and best loved works in the history of Western music, JS Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1741, arr. Sitkovetsky 1992) brought heightened closure to the evening. Bach’s aria and 30 variations unfurl in infinite variety through bass line and harmonic progressions that instil a sense of grand design; an interior directive in musical form elevating the spirit. At the core of this performance and within the spiritual trajectory of the surrounding architecture, sound seemed to touch every stone and pane of glass, filling the entire space and the soul of the listener with ultimate serenity.

Jonathan Morton’s magnificent solo performance was full of grace and reverie, supported by the strength of the entire ensemble in a taut and dynamic performance of a work heard many times before but perhaps not understood until that live moment of musical time. The Neo-Gothic structure and its acoustics also contributed to the idea of variation in performance; in the depth of the lower strings resonating in the body of the church and of the listener and in the purity of the solo violin heard in the ‘Aria’ as the thematic alpha and omega of the composition. The most divine quality of art or music is arguably its capacity to alter our perception and the ability to present familiar work in such a way is an absolute gift.

The Scottish Ensemble’s exploration of variations encompassed not just repetition but transformation through patterns within music. The performance enabled the capacity audience to transcend the cold night and hard pews in an immediate and sublime live experience, the three contrasting works variations of timeless human expression entwined and expanded in the mind’s eye.

© Georgina Coburn, 2012

Links

• Scottish Ensemble

ON the first preview performance, the audience entered on an ordinary winter’s evening and left, so I’m told, to see the first snowfall of the season. We knew the Pitlochry technical team were good, but choreographing the weather is something else.

BY the time I get there on the press night, the snow is lying thick on the ground and it’s impossible to think of a seasonal show better pitched at the Pitlochry audience. For the theatre’s third ever Christmas production, artistic director John Durnin has capitalised on the recent success of his summer musicals and fielded a bright and breezy backstage romance that feels just right for the time of year, despite lacking even the merest hint of panto.

White Christmas - Simon Coulthard, Grant Neal and ensemble

By Durnin’s own admission, White Christmas is not the most sophisticated of stories. Based on the Bing Crosby/Danny Kaye movie of 1954, it is about the generation of American men who had to find their feet back home after serving in the second world war. While Vermont hotelier General Henry Waverly (James Smillie) struggles to adjust to civilian life without a battalion to command, his former army entertainers Bob Wallace and Phil Davis (Grant Neil and Simon Coulthard) respond in their contrasting ways to the sudden availability of adoring female fans.

The narrative requires only that Waverly comes to terms with his retirement, Davis settles down with a steady girl and Wallace finds true love after a misunderstanding. By the time the three strands come together, just before the curtain goes up on the closing concert, you get the impression even the writers have lost interest. All they ever needed was a framework to hang Irving Berlin’s fabulous songs on. The story is just an excuse.

And I doubt anyone’s complaining. From the moment Hilary Brooks’s ten-strong band strikes up, this is a big crowd-pleaser of a show. With no ambition to change the world, it’s an uncomplicated celebration of ensemble dance and pre-rock’n’roll popular song. And what songs! White Christmas . . . Sisters . . . How Deep Is the Ocean . . . they just keep on coming.

Some of the acting is less persuasive than the singing and, by going for a more generic West End-style cast, Durnin loses the quirky individuality that has distinguished some Pitlochry musicals. But Martine McMenemy and Grant Neal make adorable romantic leads, choreographer Chris Stuart-Wilson keeps the movement brisk and entertaining, and the whole show sends the audience home with a happy festive buzz.

© Mark Fisher, 2012

Links

• Pitlochry Festival Theatre
• Mark Fisher

OCTOBER 2012 saw the ninth annual Mariafest monologue festival at the Ivan Franko theatre in the Ukranian capital of Kiev.

MARIAFEST has been established as a significant event in Ukraine’s cultural calendar, honouring the country’s renowned actress Maria Zankovetska (1854-1934) and offering performances by some of the finest theatrical talent from Eastern Europe.

The festival is ably and energetically directed by Lara Kadyrova, laureate of the National Schevchenko Prize and People’s Artist of Ukraine. During the festival there is an international conference embracing and uniting the worlds of literature and theatre, presided over by Dmytro Drozdoyvski, deputy editor of Vsesvit magazine (‘The Universe’).

Larysa Kadyrova, director of Mariafest, and Dmytro Drozdovskyi (Hamish MacDonald)

Established in 1925, Vsesvit is Ukraine’s leading literary journal which through its features and translations over ten decades – across Soviet and post-Soviet eras – has maintained a vital connection between the country’s literature and that of the wider world.

Dogstar Theatre Company had already forged its own links with Ukraine in 2007 when the company first travelled to the Ternopil Theatre Festival and L’viv Youth Theatre to perform its production of Seven Ages. The company returned in 2010 with Matthew Zajac’s The Tailor of Inverness – a story embracing much of western Ukraine and eastern Poland’s troubled modern history – and was performed at the Golden Lion Theatre Festival in L’viv, at Lutsk, and at the Kyiv Mohyla University.

Matthew Zajac in The Tailor of Inverness

The Tailor of Inverness was subsequently translated into Ukranian to feature in Vsesvit magazine. The company was invited to Mariafest 2010 when I travelled to Kiev to attend the festival and to present a paper ‘The International Languange of Theatre’ to the international Mariafest conference – reflecting upon the universal appeal of theatre and upon Dogstar’s own experience as an international touring company.

When the opportunity arose to attend Mariafest 2012 I was only too happy to accept, and to be able to contribute to the conference by presenting a paper in celebration of the bicentenary of one the world’s foremost literary figures, Charles Dickens. Whether through literature, film or TV adaptation, the work of Dickens has been appreciated and loved by every generation since he first began serialising stories and novels for the popular press more than a hundred and seventy years ago. How’s that for literary longevity?

In this age of the banking crisis, global debt and the profound gap in personal wealth that has been widening at an alarming rate since 1980 (recently exemplified by BBC 4’s Park Avenue – Money, Power and the Dream), perhaps it is no surprise that Dickens’ stories, often embracing personal struggle, suffering and the acute social maliase caused by societal divides should read as powerfully today as they did in the nineteenth century.

Kiev (photo Kiev Travel)

Kiev is a truly beautiful city. It appears not as one city but two, the ancient historical heart on the rising hills, crowned by golden domed churches, its parks and terraces hanging high over the River Dnieper with its island hydro-parks and resorts. Beyond the green islands with their trailing willow trees, over on the flat side of the river a monolithic concrete outline reaches into the sky, houses, factories, offices, power stations, the functional proletarian communities of the Soviet days, appearing at first sight from the older city like some magnified Springburn or Wester Hailes, the two communities joined by strips of concrete that rise on pillars over water and land, by arched and cantilevered bridges.

The whole city is connected by the Metro, going out into the open air of the modern precincts and deep under the hills of the ancient. In the district of Darnytsya concrete underpasses are filled with the colour of flower-sellers, traditional accordion music goes out from the buskers, with its shops and retaurants and hotels it all seems somehow more integrated, less dysfunctional, not as threatening or bleak as many of the post-war schemelands of Scotland. But this of course is only one small part of the city and it may well be a different story elsewhere.

By night buskers promenade through the train carriages, in Khreschaty Park it is not unusual to see some religious procession going past, whispering in prayer with an ikon held to the fore, no doubt a common sight to the ordinary passer-by but appearing to the stranger as it emerges from under the shade of the trees as if out of some thickly oiled picture of Old Russia.

Mariafest offers two molologue perfromances per day in the smaller 200-seat auditorium at the Ivan Franko Theatre. The first performance I watched was the Moscow Armenian Theatre’s dynamic re-telling of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice, made universally famous by Ted Kotcheff’s 1966 film starring Ingrid Bergman, featuring only the actress in her appartment, the opening scene revealing some torn-up photographs and a telephone.

Moscow Armenian Theatre's The Voice

Moscow Armenian Theatre’s production was designed and directed by Slava Stepanyan. Actress Zita Badalyan’s journey of breakdown and despair was told with impassioned and reflective effect, moving between bouts of grief and rage to the safer haven of recollections of better times with her estranged lover, emblemized by a silent actor recalling her to memory through an upheld mirror. The foreground featured a male figure fashioned out of thin copper wire, a substanceless form remaining only in outline as the increasingly frenetic woman finds her life spiralling out of control – and answering to a dead telephone line.

Following this matinee a powerful evening performance was given by veteran Polish Actor Boguslaw Kierc of My Corpse, an epic dream of life, love and death viewed from behind the curtain of mortality, written and directed by Boguslaw Kierc from the lines of Poland’s greatest Romantic nationalist poet Adam Mickiewicz, with only a stark light, a walking stick and a glass of water between actor and audience. Standing mostly stalk-still for the duration of the performance, Kierc held the theatre spellbound with the sheer power of language and facial expression alone, climaxing in the shattering of the water-glass gripped between trembling hands.

The following day’s matinee found Belorussian actress Olena Dudych give a sensitive and heartfelt delivery of the story of Edith Piaf in The Sparrow Who Growls, followed that evening by Laryssa Kadyrova’s tribute to the woman in whose name the festival was founded, Maria Zankovetska. When Two Are Separated visits the famous Ukranian actresses’ life from the point of estrangement from her second husband, the actor Nikolai Sadovsky whom she met in an army barracks in the Principality of Moldavia during her first husband’s military service and who persuaded her to venture to a new life in the theatrical profession.

Maria Zanovetska Museum (www.worldwalk.info)

Maria Zankovetska became a renowned actress in Ukraine, in Russia and throughout Europe. Her story reads like something from the pages of an epic classical novel and Laryssa Kadyrova’s amazing and elegant performance resurrects not only the story but the spirit of a great Ukranian artist.

During Mariafest a day is given over to the aforementioned International Conference held in the Ivan Franko Theatre, which focused this year not only on Dickens but on Ukraine’s great dramatist of the modernist era, Les Kurbas, founder of the legendary Theatre Nights in Ternopil and the daring experimentalist who worked from his studio in Kiev and would go on to present his ground-breaking drama in the Berezil and Kharkiv theatres.

Despite having a background in socialist idealism and revolutionary Bolshevism, in the late 20’s Kurbas’s work came under the increasingly watchful scrutiny of Soviet authoritarianism, with his plays eventually reduced to charges of ‘subversive organisation’ and ‘bourgeoise nationalism’. Kurbas was pronounced unfit for developing Soviet art and utlimately arrested, his life ended by execution in Sandarmokh in 1937 when a number of Ukranian intellectuals were shot under Stalin’s orders in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the October Revolution.

The conference reflected upon the legacy of Kurbas’ work and its continuing importance, upon the life and work of Dickens in the novel and in cinema, and more broadly upon the social and political challenges faced by the performing arts in the age of globalised mass consumption and ever-changing media and audience needs.

Evridika featured a piece of physical theatre from Russia, performed by Yana Likhotina, moving from ground level to the upper air on perilously balanced step-ladders, between a theoretical heaven and hell. Remaining firmly in a dark place Anna Slubik’s performance of Zhan Rasin’s Fedra opened with unnerving discordance and foreboding. With the Polish actress appearing in deathly pale make-up the story of adulterous and incestuous betrayal was illustrated at times by the use of two hand-held effigies in a production that was unrelenting in its tearing open of the tortured soul of its protagonist.

The day was rounded off by a superb performance of Ticket to Heaven by Milka Zimkova from Bratislava, Slovakia. It can be something of a challenge to take in such a concentration of plays in any situation let alone in a range of Eastern European languages. When the spoken language is scarcely understood this requires another kind of engagement altogether, concentrating instead on rhythm, imagery and ultimately upon the connection between actor and audience.

Not to worry – although I’d loved to have got the jokes in Ticket To Heaven that had the audience roaring out loud at times, in every nuance and expression Milka Zimkova’s performance might as easily have been by some Scottish Everywumman, a Glasgow wifie or Torry quinie sitting down at the kitchen table, sharing innermost secrets and reflecting upon the faded love of extended matrimonial life. Judging by what was happening onstage and by the audience reaction this was clearly a fine piece of intimate theatre, full of warmth and observation and with the common touch that would have worked in any language.

Once again Mariafest invited us on an excursion to the beautiful sights of Kiev, to Lavra with its incredible reconstruction of monasteries and bell-towers that fell to the ravages of World War Two, dwarfed under the monstrous Soviet Victory monument on the adjacent hill, the hollow metallic statue holding up her sword and shield and affectionately known – or so I’ve been told – as ‘Old Tin Tits’.

To St. Michael’s gold-domed cathedral and the statue of Cossack warrior Bodhan Khmelnitsky ascending on his horse, his mace pointing in symbolic gesture back in the direction of Moscow. To the house of Maria Zankovetska who is the reason we are here, a careful reconstruction of the actresses’ home that had fallen victim to fire and then to demolition before being reopened in 1989, now a dedicated museum housing photographs, playbills and theatrical costumes that tell the story of her life.

The final performance I was to take in was Richard After Richard performed by Lidia Danylchuk, directed by Iryna Volystka, a cabaret style grotesquerie in which Richard III’s adversaries are played by – a sack of cabbages – each systematically given the chop in manic rhythmic fashion by a range of dangerous looking kitchen knives held magnetically in the form of a shining heraldic shield before their determinidely villainous purpose is revealed.

Lidia Danylchusk’s dissecting of the cabbages was truly unique – circling around the table, sending up a fountain-like spray of green as the knives drummed into the flesh of the vegetables, the floor now a seething organic mess of homicide and destruction.

You’ve probably twigged by now that Mariafest ventures to combine the traditional with the less conventional. So this was it for Mariafest 2012, the festival celebrates the theatrical form of the monologue and we hope to be able to respond to the invitation to return next year to the tenth anniversary of Mariafest with The Tailor of Inverness. Thank you once again to Laryssa, to Iryna and to Dmytro and to all those involved at Mariafest, to Vsesvit and the Maria Zankovetska House, and to the supporting institutions of Mariafest.

Mariafest is held with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Ukraine, the National Academic Theatre of Ivan Franko and the International (Ukraine) charitable foundation of the International Institute of Theatre. The conference is supported by the Taras Schevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Hamish’s travel to Ukraine was supported by Creative Scotland’s International and Conferences Investment Programme.

© Hamish MacDonald, 2012

Links

• Dogstar Theatre

THE FIRST weekend in December starts with mulled wine in a boat store and ends with curry and malt whisky in Resolis.

IN BETWEEN there are screenings of an eclectic selection of films, so eclectic it’s hard to pick out a common thread. Not so surprising when you see who’s chosen them – this year the guests are a human rights lawyer turned screenwriter (Paul Laverty), a comedian who’s also an author (Rhona Cameron), a fireman turned horologist and automata expert (Michael Start) and an armourer (Carl Summersgill).

Zeffirelli's La Traviata

The guest whose screenings sold out in a matter of minutes, however, is that national icon of tea-drinking, pipe-smoking and political integrity, hereditary peer turned Labour politician, Tony Benn. Or ‘God’, as director Don Coutts calls him.

He’s here to talk about the documentary film of his life story, currently in production, entitled Last Will and Testament, of which an extended trailer has been made exclusively for the Festival. It’s screened again the following morning, introduced by its producer, Sanjay Kumar; it’s already plain this is going to be an inspiring and, judging by the surreptitious deployment of handkerchiefs, moving account of someone once described as “the most dangerous man in Britain”. “I got a death threat the other day”, he confides cheerfully. “I hadn’t had one for ages – I was so chuffed’.

Benn’s words have a ringing clarity that is generally lacking in today’s carefully groomed and focus-grouped politicians. He walks through a room that symbolises his life and reminisces about discovering that ‘being in government is not about changing things but about running the system better’. Unforgettable.

Michael Start's Maraccas Monkey and a head from Hugo (Jennie Macfie)

But this film festival is as full of unforgettable moments as a Christmas pudding is full of dried fruit. The workshops by masters of their craft are enthralling glimpses behind the curtain – who could fail to be beguiled by Michael Start’s antique automata? The cat that shines boots, the maraccas monkey, the rabbit in the cabbage and the tiny feathered singing bird in a silver snuffbox outshine even his tales of working for Scorsese on Hugo .

This year for the first time the Screen Machine has rolled up to Cromarty as a venue. It’s a big lorry which expands, Tardis-lke, into a small but comfortable screening room and every year brings film to communities across the outer reaches of the Highlands and Islands, tens or hundreds of miles from the nearest cinema.

On Friday night it’s sold out for Benn and for his choice, Brassed Off‘, and nearly full for the late nighter, The Woman in Black. Beyond the queues outside waiting to buy their popcorn are the lights of oilrigs in the Cromarty Firth. Meanwhile, just around the corner, short films are screening on the curved tower of the Cromarty Lighthouse, their reflections flickering on the rain slicked street. You just don’t get this in Cannes, or Sundance…

Archive screenings at the Old Brewery (Jennie Macfie)

The other venues are even more atmospheric. The Festival Hub at the Old Brewery has a large-ish room upstairs where the projector is ingeniously and effectively slung from the roof beams in a supermarket shopping basket. It becomes a time machine as archive films reveal a time when heavy horses pulled milk carts through the cobbled streets of Edinburgh and the tones of Harry Enfield’s Mr Chumleigh-Warner were commonplace.

Scottish ‘couthy films’ are screened inside tiny local restaurant Sutor Creek, and the old Stables up the hill shows films as diverse as Zefffirelli’s luscious, extravagant La Traviata and the 2012 remake of Clash of the Titans (its armourer, Carl Summersgill, lets pre-film workshop attenders wield a real sword).

The grand finale in Resolis Hall sold out nearly as quickly as Tony Benn’s event. A screening of Ken Loach’s The Angel’s Share, partly set in the Balblair distillery, a long term supporter of the festival, is, after curry from Gabi’s in Avoch and a raffle drawn by Rhona Cameron, introduced by its writer, Paul Laverty. He closes with a salute to the Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi, banned and imprisoned purely because his work does not please his government; the audience raises a toast to Panahi in Balblair ’02. It’s a typically Cromarty Film Festival moment, a mashup of wildly contrasting cultures that works, because it all comes from the heart.

© Jennie Macfie, 2012

Links

• Cromarty Film Festival