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WHAT'S ON 17
Play a part in the Easter Play A restaurant, Easter Road football stadium, The Scottish Parliament, a nightclub and a police box are among the venues to be used for an ambitious citywide retelling of the Easter story this year. People of all faiths and none from across the city will join together to tell the story of the trial, death and resurrection of Jesus in a large-scale community passion play. The director is now looking for community groups and individuals who would like to take part this April. Contact the team by email hello@edinburghpassion.com The weekend-long event, which is being produced by Cutting Edge Theatre, will start on Thursday 9th April with the Last Supper, telling the story hour-by-hour in real time, and conclude on Easter Sunday (12 April 2020) at Easter Road stadium. As part of the weekend, a new version of the traditional Easter
Play will be staged in Princes Street Gardens on Saturday 11 April 2020. Meanwhile, The Edinburgh Passion will take the story out into the city, into restaurants, nightclubs, churches, parks and the homeless community. The story will be split into hour long segments and brought to life in theatre, music and dance by groups from all over the city. Director Suzanne Lofthus, a leading director in community theatre in Scotland, was inspired by The Passion, a 72-hour production staged in 2011 in Port Talbot by National Theatre Wales and Michael Sheen, involving over 1,000 people from the town as cast and crew. She said: “We’ve staged the Easter Play in Princes Street Gardens for 15 years. This year, we want the whole city to tell the story. “The events of Easter are almost continuous — the trial of Jesus happens through the night — so
that gave us the idea of telling the story in real time in different parts of the city and involving different local groups of all kinds. “The people in the Easter story were just ordinary men and women to whom something extraordinary happened. "We are surrounded by similar stories in our everyday lives, we just don’t always see them. “A lot of my work is with those who find themselves more on the sidelines, whether that’s adults with additional support needs or people in prisons. I’m aware of how often we box people in and create barriers. “This project is about tearing down those barriers, celebrating our humanity and seeing how powerful and inspiring it is when we leave those differences behind and work together. "Someone described the project as a tapestry — it may look messy behind the scenes but when you weave it together, it creates something beautiful.”
Mount Strange and the Temple of Fame This is the new art exhibition at Summerhall which runs until 15 March 2020. The fact that it will be in place over International Women’s Day is a big clue that all of the artists are female. These are four women with very different backgrounds and styles. Their aim is to uncover some forgotten histories and only dimly imagined pasts for this multi-room staging curated by Edinburgh based contemporary visual arts specialist Wendy Law. It presents work showing how women have either been written out of or have simply just never appeared in history when written down. There are six galleries inviting you to wonder what is real
and what is not. We met three of the four artists along with Wendy and had a chat with them to try and bring you a flavour of what you will see when you visit Summerhall in our podcast which you can access on Anchor.FM by scanning the QR code below. And with work as diverse as this there is bound to be something that tempts and interests everyone, men and women. Victoria Clare Bernie is a visual artist concerned with the tension between natural entropy and human design, exploring wildness through human minutiae. Her film Mount Strange and the Temple of Fame gives the exhibition its title. She is presenting two other films, including Daedalus - exploring the mysterious true story of Hitler’s Deputy’s fateful flight to Scotland in search, perhaps, of a peace treaty - and Office of Woods. In Queridas Viejas (Old Mistresses), Maria Gimeno stages a gendered intervention on the ‘bible’ of art history; E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art. Using a sharp tipped kitchen knife and an academically rigorous approach, Gimeno carefully inserts the artists Gombrich ‘forgot’ - the women - and invites us to examine our own relationship with art
Actor Sam Rowe (who plays Christ) is pictured with his “disciples” and followers in “Dine” restaurant in Edinburgh’s Lothian Road area - one of the featured venues. PHOTO Colin Hattersley history, and the primarily white, male collections of our major art institutions. On 8th March, Marie Gimeno will perform Queridas Viejas for the first time in the UK to celebrate International Women’s Day in the Anatomy Lecture Theatre. Glasgow-based, Iranian-British artist and facilitator Mina HeydariWaite’s work is concerned with hierarchical dynamics in cultural history and cultural participation. Her work (Hamsafar / Companion Traveller) investigates the role diasporic identity plays by weaving together semi-imagined histories of the Iranian diaspora created after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Alix Villanueva is a multi-media Edinburgh-based artist and cosmoecologist, interested in the use of the strange and the folkloric within ecological thought and in investigating where domesticity and the wild entangle. She is presenting items worn during her happenings, including ‘Landscape
Skirt’ - a healing ritual. MOUNT STRANGE AND THE TEMPLE OF FAME Victoria Clare Bernie, Maria Gimeno, Mina Heydari-Waite and Alix Villanueva Fri 24 Jan 2020 - Sun 15 Mar 2020 11am - 6pm daily (closed Mondays & Tuesdays) Summerhall. Sciennes, Corner and Meadows Galleries Admission: FREE
SCAN HERE!
Festival of Ireland 2020
This year’s Edinburgh Festival of Ireland runs from Friday 13 March to Saturday 21 March 2020 with a Grand Finale Concert on Saturday 28 March. The Festival will include music, song, dance, comedy, storytelling, film, a ceilidh and an Irish themed family day out and pageant on Portobello promenade. Festival Committee Chair Willie Haines said “Edinburgh’s unique Festival of Ireland continues to grow bigger and better. As with our very successful Festival in 2019 there will be something for everyone in our celebration of all things Irish. A warm welcome and a smile is assured and we expect visitors and guests not just from the Capital city but from across Scotland, other parts of the UK, Ireland and overseas”. www.edinburghsfestivalofireland.org
