Kirkcudbright is another place for festival-going this month. Mark Fisher describes the attractions
IT WAS the English detective-story writer, Dorothy L Sayers, who said Kirkcudbright was a place in which ''one either fishes or paints''. If she'd have hung around another 60-odd years, she could have added another pastime. From this month, the South-west Scotland town will be a place for fishing, painting, and festival-going.
Beginning August 25, the first Kirkcudbright Arts Festival will present a week-long international programme of theatre, dance, music, poetry, and visual art of a standard far in excess of what could be expected of a small Galloway town. The drama programme includes visits from Herald Angel award-winning Hungarian choreographer Yvette Bozsik, Bulgaria's Theatre Credo, and Poland's Jacek Zawadzki, plus a premiere from Scotland's John Bett. In the visual arts, there are exhibitions by Stuart Beaty, John Halliday, Lys Hansen, Meg Walker, and Ray Masters, as well as a seminar/debate featuring America's Edward Meneeley and England's Sir Terry Frost. Music lovers can choose between operatic lieders and arias, traditional Scots folk, and duets from the American musicals. There are workshops, street performances, a book bus, and poetry readings.
Attentive readers will have observed that the festival
coincides with a rather large knees-up they have at this time of year in Edinburgh. The timing is deliberate. What Kirkcudbright might lose in terms of publicity, swamped by the media overkill of the Edinburgh Festival, it hopes to gain in tourists stopping by on their way home from the capital. And, in future years, it plans to persuade a few more Edinburgh performers (such as Angela Pleasance bringing The Last Obit this year) to schedule a restful date in Kirkcudbright as they wind down from the mania of the Fringe.
It's all good in theory, but how has it happened in practice? Small towns don't have big festivals, because there isn't the population, or the cash, to support the shows. Why should Kirkcudbright be any different? There are two reasons. One is the town's peculiar history as a haven for artists. Since the 1880s, it has proved a magnet for artists and craftsworkers, playing a key role in the story of the Scottish Colourists, and figures such as the designer and illustrator Jessie M King, and ''Glasgow Boy'' E A Hornel. The town's artistic heyday in the early decades of the century might have passed, but even today it boasts a disproportionately large community of artists.
The second reason, as is so often the case, is simply that someone took the initiative to get the thing going. The event is the brainchild of four local residents: Anne Darling, John Hudson, Alex Flett, and Eunice Flett. They began hatching their plan last November, inspired by a visit from the Polish actor Jacek Zawadzki, who gave a performance in Alex Flett's studio. They agreed that if they didn't move swiftly they'd lose their momentum, and set about calling up their contacts in the arts world, and sweet-talking the council and local businesses into providing sponsorship. There have been some hairy moments when it seemed the budget wasn't going to stretch but, in the end, it has all come together, and looks very impressive.
''There are more people here who are concerned with contemporary art issues than there would be in towns of similar size,'' says venues manager Alex Flett, a painter by profession, who has lived in the town for three-and-a-half years. ''It's one of the few places in the world where you can wander into a pub, and you can talk to a complete stranger who happens to live in the area, and they'll say, 'What do you do for a living?' and when you say you're an artist, they don't look at you as if you've got two heads! People have lived with the idea of artists working in the town for a long time. It's normal to have somebody making art around the place.''
The team is proud of the town's artistic legacy, but it wants that legacy to be part of a living tradition, not just something tourists look at in museums. Jessie M. King died in 1949 - half a century on, Kirkcudbright can't take its place on the artistic map for granted. ''Local people are very pleased and happy to see something happening in the town,'' says Flett, who has a small festival exhibition himself, and will be exhibiting in Brussels, Bruges, and the US next year. ''For a long time it's had a reputation as an artists' colony. I don't think the town has got complacent, but it's got a bit puzzled about how you make it work. Where do you go from that? How do you get it to continue to work for the town? When these people were alive, it was live; now they've gone, how do you keep the ball rolling? I think the festival will do an awful lot.''
particularly encouraging about the festival line-up is its artistic good judgment. I can personally vouch for the high quality of Theatre Credo's The Coat, Yvette Bozsik's The Countess, and Jacek Zawadski's Moscow-Petushki, even if none of them will be household names around the breakfast tables of Kirkcudbright. ''It's about getting noticed,'' says Flett, who worked as Richard Demarco's right-hand-man in the Edinburgh Fringe of 1994.
He says: ''You have to attract high-level professionals into the system to be able to attract others. That helps those who are struggling locally to make themselves known about. These high-level professionals in theatre and art are lending their name to the fact that you exist. We bring in the Lys Hansens and the Ray Masters
and they are lending weight to Kirkcudbright. And whereas audiences may not have gone all the way to Richard Demarco's venue in Edinburgh to see these shows, the fact they're in their own back yard will make them want to see what all the noise and shouting's about. And what they're going to see are stunning performers.''
n The Kirkcudbright Arts Festival runs August 25-September 2. Details on 01557 332301.
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