Performance
Burns & Beyond’s Culture Trail
Various venues, Edinburgh
Neil Cooper
Four stars
In the shadow of Luke Jerram’s installation, Museum of the Moon, which hangs over the interior of St Giles’ Cathedral, a fanfare is sounded from behind a screen. An overhead projector beams out a series of miniature cut-out models as a four-part chorale sings of ancient things. This is Disarming Reverberations, a one-night-only experience that formed part of the Burns and Beyond mini festival’s Culture Trail, which hosted events across eight city centre venues over four hours on Saturday night.
Curated by Lau’s Martin Green and featuring Alba Brass and the group Landless, Disarming Reverberations evoked a spirit of after-dark mystery which fed through the other venues. While across town Lost Map Records founder The Pictish Trail recreated the label’s Howlin’ Fling nights in the Freemason’s Hall, and the Gilded Balloon presented bite-size comedy sets at the Rose Theatre, at Greyfriars Kirk, spoken-word night Neu! Reekie! co-founder Kevin Williamson’s performed his punky take on Tam O’Shanter. This was accompanied by dancers from the Kixx Collective and guitarist Craig Lithgow. Kathryn Joseph’s series of short sets proved equally spellbinding.
At Assembly Roxy, another member of Lau, Aidan O’Rourke reimagined Enlightenment era howf, Lucky Middlemass’s Tavern. Mrs Middlemass herself was brought to life with gallus brio by actress Nicola Roy, with potman Archie inhabited by Matthew Zajac. O’Rourke and piper Brighde Chaimbeul played short sets inbetween songs by Deacon Blue singer Ricky Ross, Alasdair Roberts, who premiered a new piece called Europe, and poems by Nadine Aisha Jassat. Ross was joined by O’Rourke on Green Grow The Rushes, while Zajac kept things contemporary with a couple of Tom Leonard poems.
Over at the Caves, The Red Rose Club’s programmed a superb-sounding showcase of female DJs. Sets by Nightwave, Sofay and Ribeka, plus three-woman hip-hop troupe The Honey Farm may have been more appropriate for late-night revels, but they nevertheless gave a pointer to a poetic future that can be about music as much as words.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here