A week after our second flight of Herald Angels in 2013 were being hurried from the Festival Theatre to make room for the dancers of Scottish Ballet, who had taken ownership of the whole building for the weekend, three representatives of the company were back to collect this week's Archangel for the mini-festival they had staged.
The company's response to the challenge of filling the time and the venue with a vast repertoire of chamber pieces is the latest success in a rewarding association with the Festival in recent years.
New artistic director Christopher Hampson and dancers Sophie Martin and Christopher Harrison were presented with the second and final of this year's awards for sustained contribution to the Edinburgh Festivals by Blythe Duff, whose performance in David Harrower's Ciara at the Traverse was an Angel-winner in week one, and has since been announced as a major part of the theatre's autumn season.
The Traverse programme picked up another Angel on Saturday for the late-night show that opened last week, Kate Tempest's Brand New Ancients, an epic, musically-accompanied performance poetry show that was developed by Battersea Arts Centre and has been winning standing ovations. It's identification of modern myths and gods in contemporary south London is encapsulated in the lines: "Millions of characters, each with their own epic narratives, singing: It's hard to be an angel until you've been a demon."
Our Little Devil award went to The Wrong Crowd, whose Fringe success Hag did not miss a show although key performer and puppeteer Theone Rashleigh broke her wrist in a bicycle accident before the run began, and other members of producer Bonnie Mitchell's company had to swiftly learn new skills to cover her injury, while a sling was made to match her costume. There was a link to previous Angel-winner Pina Bausch in the award to Gandini Juggling, whose Assembly Hall show, Smashed, making apples do things that Newton never foresaw, explictly references the world of the late choreographer.
This year's new British Vocal Jazz Festival at Le Monde in George Street was recognised by an Angel for singer Christine Tobin, making her Fringe debut, with guitarist Phil Robson and bassist Dave Whitford, and her show of the songs of Leonard Cohen, A Thousand Kisses Deep.
Music has been part of the Creative Scotland-supported Made In Scotland showcase on the Fringe for the first time this year. Lauren MacColl and Jenna Reid of female fiddle quartet RANT, who performed at the Acoustic Music Centre, were presented with an Angel by Blythe Duff, and then presented the actor with a copy of the group's debut CD which was launched at the gig, before playing some of the music from it for all of our guests.
They did not include the week's most unusual winner, the very valuable 18th-century Goermans/Taskin harpsichord from Edinburgh University's Russell Collection, which had to be expensively insured to make the journey to the Queen's Hall for Christophe Rousset's recital of the music of Francois Couperin. The Angel to this most prized of instruments was collected on its behalf by the man who looks after it, John Raymond, and the curator of the collection, Darryl Martin.
www.herald-events.com/heraldangels
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