Findhorn Bay Festival
A Mile In My Shoes/Swarm Sculptures/Extremely Pedestrian Chorales
The streets of Forres and Kinloss Church
Keith Bruce
five stars
SATURDAY was choreography day at the Findhorn Bay Festival and the first steps in mine were taken by me, baseball boots swapped for Holly Gray’s gothy black leather heeled numbers.
Fifteen-year-old Holly had left her footwear, along with a recording of her thoughts about her young life, in a container that is the headquarters of the first chapter in the National Theatre of Scotland’s Futureproof project. Empathy Museum has brought its work, A Mile in my Shoes, inspired by a text credited to Harper Lee, Elvis Presley and Barack Obama, to Scotland, and collaborated with local young people. Participants leave the “shoe shop” for a stroll around their hometown, listening on headphones to a recording (Holly’s words were captured by Bernadette Swan) that occupies roughly a quarter of an hour. I learned of her family and ambitions, and heard her sing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah rather beautifully, as the audience at Belladrum had last year. She also spoke movingly about her first epileptic seizure and how she has learned to cope with her condition. It was the simplest and most perfect of one-to-one dramatic experiences.
A few streets away, choreographer Lucy Suggate’s Swarm Sculptures, made with Dance North, saw a cluster of performers roam through the craft and food stalls of the festival’s Saturday randomly choosing locations to bond to one another in a group hug. The point at which they huddled next to a basket of pre-loved soft toys was a moment to treasure.
In Kinloss and Findhorn’s Parish Church a little later, Karl Jay-Lewin’s latest choreography, entitled Extremely Pedestrian Chorales, was an elaborately annotated step-dance for a quartet taking the soprano, alto, tenor and bass lines of 36 of Bach’s Chorales as their instructions, the progression of the notes translated into forward, backward and otherwise motion. With hand percussion, kazoos, some laptop recordings and a few wigs thrown into the mix, Jay-Lewin, Neil Callaghan, Claire Godsmark and Janine Fletcher delivered a clever, funny, and thought-provoking 45 minutes. Even for those of us with two left feet, this year’s Findhorn Bay Festival has thrown all divisions between genres into the blender.
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