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The Herald Scotland
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Fringe funding fear raised over 'level playing field' demand
Peter Buckley Hill wants to ensure there is a 'level playing field' for participants rather than the Fringe Society 'discriminate' in favour of a number of shows in its programme. Read more: Mr Buckley Hill is urging members of the society to ensure funding is distribute 'equally and equitably' to acts and performers in the programme, which features more than 3900 shows this month, the highest tally in the event's history. The Fringe Society, which has overseen the running of the festival since 1958, has been responsible for the distribution of more than £1m in Scottish and UK government funding for artists and companies appearing in this year's event. Ruxandra Cantir's show Pickled Republic is part of the Scottish Government-funded Made in Scotland showcase at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. (Image: Andy Catlin) Proposals to try to secure new investment for the next few years are expected to be put forward by Fringe Society chief executive Tony Lankester, who took over the role in the spring, before the end of the year. However the Fringe Society has warned it would be 'very unlikely' to secure investment from funders unless there is strict criteria in place. Singer-songwriter Karine Polwart's Fringe show Windblown was funded by the Scottish Government this month. (Image: MIHAELA BODLOVIC) It has insisted it has always been an 'arms-length administrator' of public funding and has put 'rigorous' measures in place to ensure the society is not making 'artistic or other subjective assessments' on funding applications, including bringing in independent assessors for review panels. The Fringe Society has suggested that Buckley Hill's proposals, which are expected to be voting on at the annual general meeting of the Fringe Society, would lead to 'greater inequality' the festival. It has told members of the society that affordability was 'widely agreed to be the biggest risk of Fringe's success and accessibility, and arguably the greatest issue facing artists and venues.' Buckley Hill is widely credited with coming up with the idea of the 'Free Fringe,' a strand of the festival which allows audience free access to shows but encourages them to make a donation to the performer on the way out the venue. The motion he has put forward for the Fringe Society AGM states that 'the principle of open access' remains at the heart of the Fringe' and argues that the charity has 'no power or mandate to 'distinguish between the artistic quality of shows, or the value of venues.' Posting on social media, Buckley Hill said the distribution of grants adjudicated by 'experts' brought in by the Fringe Society was a 'violation' of the open access principle. He added: 'The custom and rule of the Edinburgh Fringe was: if you can get a venue, you can perform at the Fringe. The Fringe Office had no role in the selection of who performed and who did not. That was the venue providers' job. 'The playing field was never level: money always talks. But the principle of a Fringe is to keep the field as level as possible. You can bring your show. Once you have a venue, you're equal. Only the public can judge you. 'The Fringe Office was not put in place to discriminate in favour of one show and against another. It doesn't have the mandate, and it doesn't have the expertise. 'We all, I hope, want to see the Fringe represent all groups and classes in Scotland, the UK and the world. And perhaps these grants might have been intended to help the poorest. But that's not how they're being used. How much better it would be to make it easier and cheaper for all, across the board.' In a response published ahead of the AGM, the Fringe Society states that disbursing funds for the wider benefit of the community was 'core' to its aims and objections. The Fringe Society added: 'The Fringe Society has, both historically and currently, found itself in a position where a funder or donor has made funds available for wider disbursement, and has attached certain conditions or criteria for such disbursement. Typically this is public sector investment. 'The Fringe Society acts, in all these instances, as an impartial, arms-length administrator of the available grants. In each case it puts in place rigorous principles, signed off by the relevant funder, to ensure that the society itself is not making artistic or other subjective assessments of requests for support. 'This objective process has enabled the society to pass significant support on to the broader Fringe community in a way that is, we believe, fair and defensible. 'The Fringe Society's aim is to ensure limited funding for culture is directed to the Fringe by any means possible, and for the Fringe Society to use it's fundraising skills and capacity to support all artists and venues who take part. 'Funders would be very unlikely to support investment without criteria, and if funding was secured directly by the venue or artist, those who have greater capacity and experience in securing public investment would likely benefit more, creating greater inequality. 'The Fringe Society recognises, however, that there is also more that can be done to ensure the artists and venues who make the Fringe happen are engaged and can inform the processes and criteria, and would welcome conversations and workshops on how we ensure any influence over funding or decision making is in the best interests of the widest range of artists.' The Herald has teamed up with to make the purchase of tickets for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe so much easier. To buy tickets, please click here.
Scotsman
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Scottish Government Made in Scotland funding 'not enough' to cover costs for showcase performers
Made in Scotland offers grants to a selection of Scottish work to be performed at the Fringe. Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... An Edinburgh Festival Fringe producer has warned the government's Made in Scotland showcase does not cover costs and could leave the event open only to performers who can afford it. Alice McGrath, producer of children's show Pekku, which is part of this year's showcase, said artists had to subsidise their work at the Fringe despite receiving government cash as the maximum grant "does not cover" expenses. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In a speech at a Made in Scotland reception in Edinburgh, she said shows needed to be 'financially and environmentally sustainable'. It is understood that the maximum grant offered to individual productions is around £25,000, however, the Scottish Government does not publish individual grants given out through the Made in Scotland showcase, only the total funding pot, which is this year £570,000. Ms McGrath said: '[The Made in Scotland fund] helps artists to present work and raise their profile, that's vital and must continue. But we have to talk about sustainability as part of that, financial as well as environmental. 'The cost of presenting work at the Fringe has risen sharply in the last five years. The maximum grant from Made in Scotland no longer covers all of the the expenses. It is subsidised by the artists. If we're not careful soon the showcase could only be open to those who can afford it and I don't know if that's the future that we want. It undermines their work and risks losing the creative process.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Made in Scotland is a curated programme funded through the Scottish Government's Expo fund that highlights high-quality Scottish performance art at the Fringe in a collaboration between the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, Federation of Scottish Theatre, Scottish Music Centre, and Creative Scotland. This year, a total of 16 shows are taking part in the Made in Scotland showcase. Established in 2009, the initiative has supported 299 shows to date, with the onward touring fund supporting over 130 productions to visit more than 50 countries over six continents. Culture secretary Angus Robertson. | Getty Images Speaking in a separate panel event at venue Shedinburgh on Wednesday, Gillian Garrity, co-founder of Scottish theatre production company Raw Material, also highlighted cuts to the size of grants awarded through the Made in Scotland programme, despite the total fund rising from £540,000 to £670,000 for the coming year. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'We have the Made in Scotland showcase which is the only fund we can access to bring shows to the Fringe,' Ms Garrity told industry delegates. She claimed the amount offered to individual companies had 'gone down and down'. 'You used to be able to get £100,000 to being a show to the Fringe, now it's £25,000,' she said. 'So you have to do everything else as box office.' Culture secretary Angus Robertson, who also spoke at the Mae in Scotland event on Wednesday morning, told The Scotsman: 'As culture secretary, I have listened with great interest from last year about funding challenges and I am always sympathetic to better understanding how the sector can be better supported.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad He added: 'We have just announced an increased level of funding for Made in Scotland for next year. We want to be as supportive as we can be to ensure the success of the Made in Scotland programme continues.' A Scottish Government spokesperson said: 'The Fringe is one of Scotland's signature events. Ministers are committed to working with the Fringe Society and all partners who deliver it to help safeguard the future of the Edinburgh Fringe as a world-leading cultural asset that is built on the principle of free access for all.
Scotsman
09-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Karine Polwart on her Fringe tribute to a beloved Edinburgh tree: ‘It had two centuries' worth of story to tell'
How did an acclaimed folk musician end up imagining the story of what was once the oldest tree in the Royal Botanic Gardens? Susan Mansfield hears from an artist getting back to her roots Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... 'FIZZLE' is how Karine Polwart describes it, the feeling she gets when she knows she's found a story she wants to tell. That's how she felt when she walked in to the Tropical Palm House in Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden and was introduced to its oldest, tallest occupant, the sabal palm. 'The Head of Living Collections, David Knott, just put his hand on the trunk of the tree and said: 'This is our old sabal, and it's for the axe',' she remembers. 'And I think I knew in that moment this might be the story.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Polwart and her collaborator, composer and sound designer Pippa Murphy, were invited in 2019 to make a work to mark the Garden's 350th anniversary. The Biome Project, which includes refurbishing and modernising the glasshouses, was already underway. Thousands of plants were being moved out but the 200-year-old sabal was too big and too unstable. 'There was this tremendous sadness among the garden staff about the loss of this heritage plant. One of the palm house horticulturalists, Simon Allen, talked about it as a quiet, sentient presence. He said it was like being in a room with an elephant. The palm mattered to the people there. That made me think it had two centuries' worth of story to tell.' That story became Windblown, which premieres this week at the Queen's Hall, part of the Made in Scotland showcase at the Fringe. Polwart describes it as 'half spoddy TED talk and memoir – that's me – and then the palm itself tells its own imagined story through music and spoken word'. She's thrilled to lead a creative team which includes designer Neil Haynes, Jamie Wardrop on video, Lizzie Powell on lighting and movement director Janice Parker. Karine Polwart with a sabal palm seedling at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh | Colin Hattersley Inspired by a 'living wake' which she and Murphy took part in in 2020 for a friend who was dying of cancer, they decided to stage one for the palm just before it was felled in September 2021, with songs, pipe tunes and a farewell address in the imagined voice of the tree. 'Both folk music and the piping tradition are bound up with lamentation and dignifying and grieving,' Polwart says. 'I've sung at countless funerals. Our music gets used to birth babies. I'm aware of the job that music does around those big life cycle events. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'By its nature this story is about dignity at the end of life, not necessarily human dignity, but I think it would be hard not to see the parallels. The loss of dignity during the pandemic was also part of it, the idea that people's lives ended and that couldn't be marked properly. I don't this piece could have been written before the Covid era.' The sabal palm began its life in the West Indies and was brought to Scotland as a botanical specimen. Until it was felled it was oldest plant in the garden. Having crossed the Atlantic in an era of colonialism, one which fetishised the collecting of exotic plants, it lived to see a very different time in which institutions like the Royal Botanic Gardens are contending with post-colonialism and climate change. 'It's an immigrant plant, and that has altered the course of its life and its journey,' Polwart says. 'The palms have evolved to withstand hurricanes, but if you're in a glass house in Edinburgh, you don't have to withstand anything, so you don't develop resilience. Although it was very tall, it was very weak.' As a self-confessed 'research geek', she relished the deep-dive into botany, ethno-botany and the history of the gardens. 'The thing that fuels everything that I do is curiosity. Learning stuff about how the world works is pivotal to everything. Understanding what that means emotionally is the work that I can bring to it as a musician and storyteller.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad She has said that everything she does now as an artist 'happens through the lens of climate change', and adds that the voice of the palm gave her a new perspective through which to address this theme. 'There's a kind of magic provocation about adopting a non-human voice that I really enjoy. You can say things you can't say as a human, you don't have to deliver a lecture.' In her 25 years as a professional musician, Polwart has won multiple awards, and has racked up a long and diverse list of interesting projects and collaborations from working with writer James Robertson on a Scots version of Joni Mitchell's album Hejira, to writing a science documentary for Radio 4 and making an album with Julie Fowlis and Mary Chapin Carpenter. Make sure you keep up to date with Arts and Culture news from across Scotland by signing up to our free newsletter here. It was playwright David Greig who encouraged her to make her first piece of work for theatre, Wind Resistance, a meditation on motherhood, nature, healthcare and a specific peat bog near her Midlothian home. It premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2016 to widespread acclaim. She says it felt like a 'natural evolution' of her work. 'I had always thought that theatre was about writing plays, and this was a kind of poetic essay with songs, but once I was given permission to make a thing that wasn't a play, it was great! I love the way it enables me to collaborate with a bigger team.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Looking back from a distance of 25 years to the day she quit her job to 'take a punt' on music, she's profoundly glad she trusted the hunch, the fizzle. 'It was a massive leap of faith. I sold my house and used the money to underwrite my musical career for the first five years. There were several moments when I could have jacked it in, and it didn't make any financial sense for a long time, but I had this strong sense of intuition that something positive might come of it.' Having marked the anniversary with two special gigs, she's planning a year away from gigging, a decision which happily coincided with her being named as the inaugural recipient of the year-long Dr Gavin Wallace Fellowship in association with Creative Scotland and the Fruitmarket Gallery. She will work on a project called Attached to Land, about place, land and ecology on a stretch of coastline from Grangemouth to Dunbar, which she hopes will become a book. 'I need to embrace my inner librarian and archivist, which is strong,' she says. 'This is the first time I've ever been recognised as a writer, which feels like a big deal. I'm aware that I'm a little bit greedy in terms of the number of art forms I work in. I mean, musician, composer, theatre-maker, storyteller, writer, come on, Karine, calm yourself! But, really, they feel like they're just expressions of the same thing.'
Korea Herald
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
Interview: ‘Concerned Others' sheds light on addiction's silent fallout
South Korea is no longer the drug-free society many believe it to be. In 2023, the number of drug-related offenses surpassed 27,000, the highest on record, with a staggering rise among teens and young adults. Korean National Police Agency data for 2018-2023 showed that over 1,400 teens were investigated for drug offenses — more than triple the number from the previous year. Additionally, a recent report from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety on Thursday showed that methamphetamine has been detected in wastewater from major sewage treatment plants in the country for four consecutive years. Addiction never affects just one person. The fallout ripples outward to friends, family and caregivers — to the concerned others. "Concerned Others" by Scotland-based Tortoise in a Nutshell blends delicate visuals and first-person testimony to explore the emotional toll of addiction, not just on those who use drugs, but their loved ones, too. The production, currently on show at The Quad in Seoul's Daehangno district until Sunday, premiered at the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe as part of the Made in Scotland showcase. The creative team said the work was first developed in 2022 in response to Scotland's own drug crisis. The country holds one of the highest drug-related death rates in the developed world, with 1,330 drug misuse deaths recorded in 2021. 'There is also regularly a feeling that the statistics have now become part of a yearly 'shocking news' cycle, a kind of way of the public engaging with the problem only once a year for 'as little time as possible,'' said Alex Bird, co-artistic director of the play, in an interview with The Korea Herald, on Wednesday. Wanting to do more than simply respond to headlines, the company spent six months gathering stories. They met with hundreds of people, conducting extended interviews with around 50 of them — from individuals in recovery to family members, medical professionals and outreach workers. Of the 20 hours of recorded conversations, only about 30 minutes make it into the final show, but each word carries weight. "A real priority for us in this story was simply to pass on the live testimony we captured from everyone who wanted to speak with us,' said Bird. In this intimate production, audiences peer into a delicate world built on a rotating table — a miniature landscape brought to life through a handheld camera, micro-projections, and an immersive soundscape. While the central focus is drug addiction, the play expands to consider alcoholism, a socially accepted but equally destructive form of dependency in many cultures. 'Highlighting other forms of addiction was therefore just to allow people the chance to think again about the moral structure that exists around how we understand addiction,' Bird noted. 'Similar to how Korea has been described to us whilst we're here, people still use alcohol as a way to socially treat stress. The potential for this to become a big problem is obviously high, but for some reason it's viewed as more acceptable.' Bird emphasized that 'Concerned Others' is not designed to offer solutions, but rather to create space for reflection, an emotional foothold from which to begin a conversation. 'Our one hope really is just that people have the time to consider the stories of the people whose voices you hear in the piece. We know addiction is a complicated and, for many people, deeply personal subject. But we really believe that by safely considering and imagining the topic together that we can support ourselves to find better outcomes for the millions of people who are affected.'
Edinburgh Reporter
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Edinburgh Reporter
Shetland performer comes to the Fringe with new show
Shetland Choreographer and Performer Kathryn Gordon has Assembly@DanceBase all a birl this Edinburgh Festival Fringe as she introduces her sublime new work A JOURNEY OF FLIGHT. This is an immersive fifty-minute dance performance created in Shetland and inspired by the migration of birds. The work includes Gordon's signature element of engaging environmental awareness, inviting audiences to reflect on the delicate balance between nature, movement and our emotional ties to place. Featuring mesmerising choreography and live music from Jenny Sturgeon alongside projected visuals, A JOURNEY OF FLIGHT creates a thought-provoking journey of arrivals, departures, the nostalgia of place and the notion of flight itself. Set against a backdrop of flowing white sheets, dancers Kathryn Gordon and Jorja Follina move through ever changing spaces, exploring new states of being and new homes. This visual piece is set to be one of the most striking and thought provoking physical theatre performances of the Fringe. Kathryn Gordon said:'We can't wait to bring the show to the Fringe, within our nationwide tour. It's such an honour to be part of the Made in Scotland showcase, alongside such great artists and performances. We are hoping to build connections at the Fringe to allow us to keep this work on its journey, exploring connections that can be made as it travels, by flight and by sea.' This show is supported by The Made in Scotland Showcase, Creative Scotland and Shetland Arts. Like this: Like Related
