In the end, it was wind that saw French street artists Carabosse have a section of their fire sculptures doused on the Royal Mile lest the flames be blown into the crowd. It was a minor disturbance, though, for what turned out to be the most focused and quietly subversive take on the calendar’s biggest civic festival since the capital started seeing in the New Year in a more formalised manner than the city-centre rammies of old.
What was left of Carabosse’s set of installations were impressive enough, with super-sized circular constructions weighed down with branches on which sat arrays of torches flickering in the breeze.
Meanwhile, across the way in St Giles’ Cathedral, Fragile Pitches was a new electronically generated soundscape composed and performed by Michael Begg and Colin Potter, both stalwarts of the UK’s underground avant-garde. As the Winter Light strand of the Light Night programme, Fragile Pitches allowed the sizeable audience to breath deep on its frosty atmosphere. By far the most radical event to grace this year’s celebrations, Fragile Pitches was as much a visual spectacle as an aural one, with the room lit by an array of lanterns which seemed to be draped in an assortment of vests.
With Begg and Potter surrounded by an array of laptops and other machinery at the centre of the church, over two 45-minute sets they generated a range of brooding thunderclaps, rumbling frequencies and organic sounds twisted out of shape to sound in turns eerie, contemplative and majestically other-worldly. It was probably treated bird noises, but at one point it sounded like The Clangers had beamed down to bless us all.
New Year’s Day itself was enlivened by the gargantuan presence of New Man Walking, Puppet Lab’s reconfiguring of their Big Man Walking project, which has already notched up considerable cross-country mileage when the 8m-high construction made a spectacle of himself in Bute, Inverclyde and Invergordon. This time, the Big Man was cocooned in an inflatable pod beside Holyrood Palace, where various junk-shop clock sculptures wound down to a grand unveiling. When it came, this most playfully realised of figurines looked for all the world like a He-Man Christmas toy writ large.
Warming up with a spot of moon-walking, The Big Man was wonderfully light on his feet. With a mobile crane propping him up at the back, a police escort in front of him and a car accompanying him with a Celtic-tinged ambient score played through loudspeakers, it was quite a convoy. It took some 90 minutes to promenade from Holyrood to The Tron, but in that time it became clear that this was something far more significant than patronising notions of circuses and civic pride. As the friendly giant steered past the parliament building, it was clearly the biggest thing to happen in Holyrood in the last decade.
Moving like the Pied Piper past the outdoor drinkers beside Jenny Ha’s, beyond the open-windowed tenements towards The People’s Story museum, pausing only outside John Knox’s House to commune with the man himself, this special first-footing became invested with a symbolism that was prepared to shake off all of Scotland’s historical baggage even as it acknowledged its importance.
By the time the Big Man reached The Tron, the by now fully ignited flames of Carabosse’s fire sculptures offered a strangely calming moment for reflection in the sudden silence. It was a wonderfully meditative end to this most concentrated of Edinburgh Hogmanays, which reimagined the city in a way that fused epic mythology in a magnificently realised sleight-of-hand that put the avant-garde into a populist arena without ever labouring the point. Here, then, was a real festival for the people. Which, by definition, constitutes something resembling revolution in its most creative form. As enlightenment goes, that’s not such a bad way to start the year.
Star rating: ****
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