Kirstin Innes

Social Science at Glasgow Science Centre

Let’s get physics, y'all!

There are certain ‘childish’ ways of being that we’re encouraged to leave behind when we grow up. Throwing tantrums in the street, for example, or scratching yourself there in public. Unfortunately, just simply playing, and indulging a wide-eyed sense…

Glasgow Craft Mafia Handmade Haven

Girlie Glaswegian glory-hunting

Between indie craft markets, vintage magazine auction sales and full on fancy frock-swaps there are loads of ways to get your consumerist kicks in Glasgow without having to brave the high street this fortnight. The Glasgow Craft Mafia, long-time…

Interview with Sum author David Eagleman

Brian Eno composed a score for it. Stephen Fry sent sales rocketing when he mentioned it on Twitter and Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker and Miranda Richardson have been recorded reading from it. Kirstin Innes meets David Eagleman, author of Sum, one of 2009’s…

Around town hitlist

Fall of the Berlin Wall: 20 Years Ago A panel of experts and journalists who witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall talk about its repercussions. Alliance Française de Glasgow,Thu 5 Nov. Charity Couture Professionally-styled catwalk show…

Chris Packham - Wild thing

Chris Packham recently suggested that we should just let the giant panda die out. As he comes to Glasgow, Kirstin Innes talks to the controversial conservationist.

Charity Couture

While many charity shops take orders from centralised offices, meaning that all the clothes that come in have to be colour-coded or prescriptively arranged, Edinburgh’s five St Columba’s Hospices have always had a bit of individual spirit. ‘I work in…

Songs of Home

We find out about a festival and a screening looking at the darker sides of the Scottish Diaspora

Between the numerous gigs, gatherings and soap carving workshops (we kid you not) squeezing under its umbrella, ‘Homecoming’ itself has become a rather vague concept this year. It’s refreshing, then, that in their 20th anniversary year the Scottish…

The F Word: 100 Years Of Scottish Feminism

Celebrating the anniversay of one of the country's greatest Suffragette marches

One hundred years ago this fortnight thousands of women from all over Scotland descended on Princes Street in one of the biggest Suffragette marches the country would ever see. Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst were the keynote speakers and guests of…

Glasgay! - Steven Thomson interview

2009 will be both one of Glasgay!’s best and most troubled years. The programme is stronger than ever, but as Glasgay! has grown in its cultural importance it has attracted new levels of criticism and controversy that now threaten to undermine its…

The House of Bernarda Alba

Rona Munro's reimagining of Federico Garcia Lorca's all-female ensemble piece, blinging neon, dripping in credit, is the sort of glossy, hard-edged melodrama River City dreams of being After the gangland execution of her husband, Siobhan Redmond’s…

Down under - Glasgow's South Side

The West End might shout louder and jangle its designer bracelets more ostentatiously, but for its many residents, the gigantic, sprawling mass of the South Side is the true heart of Glasgow. As many local historians and geographers have observed…

The Glasgow festival experience

After Edinburgh it's time for Twestival, Trongate and the Merchant City Festival

It is a truth universally acknowledged that August is dead time in Glasgow. The rest of the year is a different story, of course, and September means the gloves are off, with so many massed gatherings of the city’s creatives that they’re in danger of…

The Beggar's Opera preview

The publicity images for Vanishing Point and the Royal Lyceum’s new adaptation of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera don’t look like your average promotional material for a classic work of 18th century satire. In fact, from a first glance, the backlit…

Third Breast

Hampered by ham-fisted direction

Hampered by ham-fisted direction where outbursts of ‘dramatic’ music punctuate any significant utterance, any poetry in the lines is garbled by actors who don’t understand either their characters or the meaning of the words. This magical realist…

Borges and I

Astonishingly accomplished young company

Stick with this lovely piece about the power of reading through the first scene and you’ll find an astonishingly accomplished young company, crafting an entire interactive set out of inscriptions carved into second hand books. There’s beautiful…

Sea Spray and Cuckoo Spit

Some very good performances

Decent production about a grief-shattered fishing family struggling to cope with the loss of a son to the sea that still sustains them. The story is nothing new, but some very good performances (particularly by bright-eyed Alex Marieka Hanly as the…

Gelabert Azzopardi Companyia de Dansa

Works of total theatre from Cesc Gelabert

Catalan choreographer, Cesc Gelabert is back at the Edinburgh International Festival after a five-year absence. He’s been missed, and the two new works he delivers in this double-bill show exactly why. These are works of total theatre, where music…

Everything Must Go (or the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles)

Dad, in drag, in memoriam

It says on the programme notes that this show is a labour of love, and it is. Kristin Fredricksson’s father Karl was a hurdler, a ballet dancer, a drag enthusiast, a comic, a creator of characters, and a hoarder. He died of cancer in June this year; and…

One Up One Down

Single consumerist satire, GSOH, seeks breathing space

Natasha Gilmore’s latest work continues her crusade to create accessible, comic-tinged dance-theatre that engages with contemporary issues. This is a satire on the pressures of consumer culture on women, with three impossibly lovely, pink-clad dancers…

Frank Gardner

A travel journalist like no other

Frank Gardner is not your average two-weeks-by-a-pool-in-Majorca kind of fella. Words like ‘wanderlust’ and ‘globetrotter’ don’t really do justice to a life spent doing what the BBC Security Correspondent describes as ‘epically hard travelling’.

Walden

In praise of life lived at a different pace

It’s the smell that hits you, as you shuffle to your seat in the sparse wooden seating bank that constitutes Walden’s only set. Fresh pine sap: an un-urban smell, from a world utterly at odds with the chattering mania of the Fringe. Magnetic North…

Plagiarismo

Pootles along without anything much happening

An hour in Richard DeDomenici’s affable company is always entertaining, but this short lecture on artistic plagiarism is among the weakest of his works. He gets easy laughs from clips pointing out various pop music thefts, but the show pootles along…

Zeitgeist

Breathtaking Butoh bento box

This is the first time Australian company, Zen Zen Zo has come to the Fringe, but they’re no blushing debutants. Zeitgeist is a retrospective of their shorter works inspired by the untamed Japanese art form of Butoh. But it’s also a pulse check, a look…

Circa

Bodies balancing, beautifully, breathtakingly

Circa is just about human bodies. About what they can do, how much they can take, how they can be funny and sensual and cruel. About their possibilities. The six-strong cast of charismatic young Australian performers need nothing more than their bodies…

RAW

Aerial spectacular that never quite takes off

Sometimes, aerial dance doesn’t need a narrative. Some pieces, like 2007’s Fuerzabruta, present unconnected images, building a sense of wonder in the audience that grabbing for narrative meaning would puncture. Although it’s on a smaller scale…