January 2015
What a year 2014 was! I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work on many wonderful projects this year, starting with another fantastic circus skills, storytelling & drama workshops tour of Highlands schools. These workshops were toured again to almost every primary school on Skye during the brilliant Blas Festival in September and received consistently excellent feedback. Then it was straight into a very busy Fèis schedule, working with the fantastic children & young people of Fèis an Earraich to produce some really great quality Grafitti artwork for a massive Fèis banner, which you have a look at here. More work for the John Muir Award Scheme & Comunn na Gàidhlig came up, featuring Wicker-Based Lantern-Making, working with teenagers in six areas acround Scotland.
Then came June, and a Bilingual Circus Skills & Drama residency at Edinbarnet Primary, working with all classes from P4 up, developing bilingual circus-skill based sketches, as well as after-club lantern-making workshops. The feedback was so positive and encouraging, I've included it here. Then, straight into the first of my 2 Commonwealth Games Cultural Festival Gaelic Street Theatre projects, working with Jillibalu Barns-Riley, a native speaker of Australian Aborginal language, Djabugai and 2nd year BA student at the prestigious National Institute of Circus Arts, Australia, on the Corroborree Festival for the Royal Botanic Gardens. We toured three of their venues around Scotland and you can read a bit more about the project here. Straight after that, it was the long-awaited Great Gaelic Ferries project for Glasgow Festival 2014, leading two teams of young Gaelic-speaking performers and touring over ten days at various Queen's Baton Relay, Glasgow Green & Merchant City venues. It was a massive project and you can read about it further down this News page in July. Funnily enough, my mother also lives on the Gold Coast, venue of the next Commonwealth Games in 2018. Although a meeting wasn't possible over the Crhristmas period, it's something I'll definitely be working on...
I thought August might be a bit quieter, but it turned out to steadily get busier, leading up to the Blas schools tour and getting ready for the Royal National Mòd. A chance meeting at a random stilt gig led to me meeting one of Scotland's most experienced street theatre performers, Calum Beaton - with both of his parents being native Gaelic-speakers from North Skye, we hit it off immediately and forged a fantastic working relationship through our series of street theatre and spectacle engagements at the Mòd. Calum is a fantastic performer and you can see some images of us working together at the Pop Up Gaelic Café at the 2014 National Mòd here. Speaking of the Mòd, a Paisley Mòd Legacy Halloween Parade project came straight after, working with the energetic teenagers of PACE Youth Theatre. The way they engaged with the stiltwalking, costume-making and makeup training was one of my highlights of the year, only topped by how spectacularly well they did with their collaboratively-devised Gaelic work for the parade. They had an absolute ball as well and you can read more about the benefits of stiltwalking training for young people here. This parade, and the Christmas parade later in the year in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland, also featured lantern-making workshops, and it was great to get working on some pre-parade community participative content development, with the kids, teachers and parents being delighted with the results.
Finally, the real standout project for the year turned out to be the Inter-Gaelic Rap Development Project, produced as a result of a once-off short collaboration set up two years ago with Pocket Circus. Working with two of Ireland's leading Irish-language Rappers, Bubba Shakespeare and GMC, as well as the seriously talented Ruairidh Greumach of Gaelic electronic outfit, Niteworks, it was a bit of a life-changing moment. You can hear two of the tracks produced here and have a look at the performance at the National Gaelic Awards that followed shortly thereafter. Since it was a Bòrd na Gàidhlig and Colmcille-funded project, I was only too happy to be asked to perform the bilingual track 'Set Yourself Free', but... it was my very first performance of that kind on a stage in front of a massive hall of about two hundred or more people. I survived the experience and well.. I've been able to watch the recording at least once without wanting to hide... I'm looking to get some more performance experience over the coming year and hoping to bring Bubba and GMC over to Scotland to develop some more work together... so watch this space!