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Wow! Electrifying music and colour attracting a vibrant and appreciative crowd in Princes Street on Sunday afternoon.
Tinderbox Energy
Tag: Edinburgh Fringe Festival
Austentatious
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Awake at 6am in the heart of Edinburgh, the haar has settled on and around Arthur’s Seat and all is still quiet. In Hanover Street a single cyclist heads up the hill. In an hour or two there’ll be thousands thronging these streets, and multi-lingual reviews of last night’s Festival performances will be overheard in animated vignettes wherever you find yourself in the city.
August sunshine will burn off the morning mist and a quick scan of local news draws attention to some of the day’s starker realities, lately – and perhaps still – shrouded in fog: the bins, overcharged rent, overcrowded accommodation, a few drunkenly incapacitated on last night’s buses. ‘Magical’ as Edinburgh undoubtedly is, it still has its share of the less-than hoped for. Of course.
But the Edinburgh Festivals celebrate life – all-age, international, widely diverse and inclusive life. There’s an irrepressible, earthy, honest, hopeful, ranging, searching spirit at the heart of a huge body of dynamic art that takes many a long, hard look at the human condition and continues to insist that, ‘in spite of everything,’ being alive, being human – always has the makings of a new masterpiece within it. Improvisation on a massive scale.
Today I’m off to see Austentatious – enthusiastically reviewed for years and hugely popular here at the Edinburgh Fringe. Jane Austen novels entirely improvised upon a single suggestion from the audience: as Louis MacNeice has ‘whispered’ in my ear a thousand times by way of his ‘Mutations’ –
The Stranger in the wings is waiting for his cue,
The fuse is always laid to some annunciation.
Burn (on a hot day!)
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Just a few sights that caught my eye in and around a 3pm performance of Burn at the King’s Theatre. In the space of an hour I learned vastly more than I’d previously known about the complex life, times and poesie of Robert Burns. Certainly enough to want to revisit his work. And that of one man tour-de-force Alan Cummings …
Wonders to behold!
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I’m all out of superlatives to describe the wonders I’ve seen in Edinburgh today. But allow me to try!
Circus Abyssinia – Tulu (link) was a breathtaking display of super-human strength and athletic talent. The snippet of video above gives a sense of the show but it needs to be seen in person to be believed! Electrifying. And in the space of an hour I think I experienced a thousand powerfully moving emotions. A world class Ethiopian masterpiece.
In the relatively intimate space of The Edinburgh Playhouse, The Pulse (link) was the kind of encounter one had hitherto imagined being the province of deep-sleep dreaming. Acrobatic fluidity, highly disciplined choreography, charged energy, unimaginable human strength, courage and choral masterpiece – I didn’t want to wake up! For the second time today I think I experienced nearly the entire spectrum of human emotion.
In the past few days I’ve seen more high excellence, art and astonishingly brave endeavour than I would ever have imagined possible in such a short space of time. It’s like a lighthouse on a dark night. It is hope in a world too often feeling the absence of real community. My faith in the human capacity for deep connection has increased enormously in the last 24 hours. There is indeed ‘more of good in this world than we have yet dreamed of.’
Truly a quite amazing Edinburgh day – and in great company!