Meet the Team

December 30, 2021 Johnbolland Leave a comment

Pibroch Productions

It has been a long and fascinating journey bringing Pibroch to the stage and to publication with the generous help and support of fellow writers, musicians and, of course, my publisher. So, deep gratitude to Imogen Stirling, Hamish Napier, Elizabeth Rimmer, Mark Thomson, Sheila Wakefield & Gerry Cambridge of RedSquirrel Press & Lesley Anne Rose of Open Road Ltd. And, of course, Creative Scotland and the National Lottery for funding to develop the show.

So privileged now to have a great creative team on board to carry on taking the project to fruition.

Mark Thomson – Co-Director

Mark was Artistic Director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company from until June 2016 during which time he directed over twenty-five productions including world premieres of Donna Franceschild’s Takin’ Over the Asylum, D C Jackson’s The Marriage of Figaro, Jo Clifford’s Every One and adaptation of Goethe’s Faust parts one and two, Six Black Candles by Des Dillon, John Byrne’s Uncle Varick as well as his own plays: A Madman Sings to the Moon, Pinocchio, his adaptation of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and, in 2011, Wondrous Flitting. In 2015 he directed The Caucasian Chalk Circle which won 4 CATS awards and earned him a nomination for Best Director at the UK Theatre Awards. His production of Waiting For Godot starring Brian Cox and Bill Paterson was nominated for several categories including Best Director and won Best Production at the CATS.

Prior to his time at the Royal Lyceum, Mark was Artistic Director of the Brunton Theatre Company, directing 21 shows and winning a Herald Angel Award for his play A Madman Sings to the Moon, and a Scotsman Fringe First and a Herald Angel Award for his play Moving Objects.

He has also worked as Assistant Director at the Theatre Royal Stratford East and the Royal Shakespeare Company and Associate Director at Nottingham Playhouse.

He now works as a Freelance Director, directing several productions for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and leads the MFA in Directing and MFA Acting Course at Napier University.

As well as co-directing Pibroch in 2022, Mark directed the premiere of D C Jackson’s I’m dissolving my love in a bath of acid. for Play. Pie and a Pint with Shetland’s Alison O’Donnell.

When not fretting over theatre Mark plays in his band The Bail Sheriffs and cycles in all weathers.

Fraser Fifield – Composer & Musician

Brought up in West Aberdeenshire, Fraser started playing bagpipes at the age of 11, taking lessons from his GP in Aboyne, Aberdeenshire. Since then, he has made music with a wide range of artists covering folk, jazz and beyond. His instrumental choices – pipes, saxophone and low-whistle – partly accounting for his exploratory style which sits astride several genres. He has performed on low whistle, saxophone and bagpipes with many artists including Salsa Celtica, Old Blind Dogs, Afro Celt Sound System, Zakir Hussain, Ayanna Witter-Johnson, Capercaillie, Balkanopolis, Nedyalko Nedyalkov, BBC SSO, Gavin Marwick, Kathleen McInnes, Graeme Stephen, Rieda Morrison, Patsy Reid, Karine Polwart, Maeve McKinnon & Montenegro Eurovision 2015.

As well as performing in #PibrochthePlay , Fraser has been busy in 2022: touring with Graeme Stephen in Austria and Scotland, with Tom Bancroft’s ‘In Common’ in Egypt and performing at the Barbican, London, as part of the memorial concert for the late John Cummings. He also started a new 3 year role as Traditional Artist in Residence at University of Edinburgh.

Described by the Scotsman as ‘one of today’s outstanding talents’, his latest album, Piobaireachd, was released in 2021.

John Bolland – Writer, Co-Director & Performer

John Bolland managed parallel careers in writing and in the offshore oil & gas industry for almost 35 years. Scientifically trained but instinctively an artist, John writes novels, poetry and short fiction in Scots and English and is a graduate of the University of Glasgow’s Creative Writing Masters programme. Between 1982 and 2014, he held a number of project management and consultancy roles for clients including BP, Exxon-Mobil and Shell. During 2018-19 he was a Regional Organiser for Extinction Rebellion and is currently active in the North East Scotland Climate Action Network (NESCAN). His poetry and short fiction has been widely published and his first collection – Fallen Stock – was published by Red Squirrel Press in 2019. The companion collection to the Pibroch performance was published by Red Squirrel in 2021. He is a director of the Scottish Writers’ Centre, chair of Huntly Climate Action and a trustee of the Dee & Don Ceilidh Collective.

Work inspires work. As well as planning for the 2023 tour, John has been working on two new projects: Twilt and Improvement Notice. Both works were prompted by after show discussions following Pibroch‘s 2022 performance and a realisation that “we must reimagine our past in order to be able to radically reimagine our future.”

Simon Gane – Production Manager & Designer for Pibroch

Simon is a freelance Designer and Production Manager based in the North East of Scotland. He trained, in his hometown, at the Bristol Old Vic as a Technician a few more years ago than he now cares to remember. Simon worked as a venue-based Technical Manager for many years, notably at TIC TOC in Coventry and The Lemon Tree in Aberdeen. Gaining a wide experience of many genres and disciplines, he was resident Lighting Designer at the Lemon Tree in Aberdeen for a number of years before leaving the world of a secure salary to forge a more creative path. Since then, he has been managing productions and designing lighting & small sets, mainly for Scottish dance companies with occasional excursions back into theatre and music. His production management and design expertise has enabled him to realise productions inside & outside, site specific, nationally and internationally.

Like the rest of the team, Simon has been busy in 2022, generally making one end of the room brighter and a bit more organised than the other. Simon has provided lighting designs for NYDCS’ ’Sounds Like’,
Suzi Cunningham’s ‘Eidos’ & ‘Rules to Live by’, Y Dance Destinations and Project Y, Daniel Lorenzo’s ‘Red Land’ Katie Armstrong’s ‘ GLISK’ & ‘SKETCHES’ Sharon Took-Zozaya’s ‘ Finding Petunia Little Tree’,
Raw Material’s ‘Unicorn Christmas Party’, and SCO’s ‘Immersive’.
In parallel, Simon’s Production Manager hat has been well worn in support of James Ley’s ‘Ode to Joy’,
Dance Live Festival 2022, Sound Festival 2022, Pete Stolery’s ‘Aberdeen Sound Park’ for Wonderland and the Deeside Dance School Showcase 2023.

Martin Aitken – Producer

Martin Aitken is a multi-disciplinary arts practitioner based in the North-East of Scotland. Much of Martin’s work is rooted in the city of Aberdeen, telling local stories or working with local creative organisations and youth theatres. Initially trained in technical theatre, Martin is keen to use his knowledge in the industry to produce new work and support local artists to tell their stories. Recently Martin has also been exploring alternative outlets for his creativity, releasing two children’s books last year with a third due for release in early 2022.

Graeme Roger – Audio-Visual Design

Graeme Roger is a visual artist working across film, public art, performance, photography, installation & theatre. All his projects are collaborative in nature with other artists, musicians, directors and the wider community. His work has been shown nationally and internationally. He has created video designs for companies including The National Theatre of Scotland, Eden Court Theatre and C21 Theatre, often creating design for projections in public spaces and galleries.

Graeme is the Engagement Producer for Film & Visual Arts Projects at Eden Court Theatre in Inverness and leads the digi team on the Scottish Government’s ‘Cashback for Communities’ programme. http://www.wildbird.org.uk/

Karen Tennent – Set & Costume Design

Karen lives in Edinburgh Scotland and is a graduate of Edinburgh College of Art. Her work as a theatre designer has toured all over the UK and abroad from village halls to Sydney Opera House. She enjoys collaborating with other artists, exploring live performance in its many forms. Her design experience includes devising and designing physical theatre, theatre for young audiences, touring and in house productions as well as large scale site-specific and promenade performances.

Recent designs include;

Don Quixote (Dundee Rep/Perth heatre ) by Ben Lewis: director Lu Kemp

MusterStation (Gridiron/Edinburgh International Festival 2022 )

Field- something for the future now an outdoor dance performance by Curious Seed (Edinburgh International Festival 2021 and Festival Cultura Inglesa Sao Paolo, Brazil 2022 ).

Lots Not Lots (Made in Scotland/Summerhall 2022 ) by Greg Sinclair and Hannah Vent .

Rubble (Scottish Opera), a new opera by Johnny McKnight and Gareth Williams for Scottish Opera Young Company

The Children (Dundee Rep) by Lucy Kirkwood directed by Andrew Panton

And if not Now ..When an film installation by Philip Pinsky and Karen Lamond in the National Museum Edinburgh for COP 26.

Christmas Dinner (Lyceum Edinburgh) by Rob Evans directed by Gill Robertson

Karen co-directed Sonata for a Man and a Boy (Greg Sinclair) which won the CATS best Children’s Theatre. She also won CATS best design and was nominated for the New York Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Design for Hansel and Gretel (Catherine Wheels).

Images, Pibroch

Imagine

December 28, 2021 Johnbolland Leave a comment

Shakespeare takes the simple route in The Tempest. He has Miranda tell us that it’s ‘raining-out’.

If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.
The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch,
But that the sea, mounting to the welkin’s cheek,
Dashes the fire out.

But we already knew that by the predicament of the seafarers in Act 1, Scene 1. There were portents and premonitions.

In developing Pibroch, I was always conscious that this was a project that had to integrate many media and levels of discourse. Its title conceit is musical but it is, centrally, a text – yet to research and shape the piece I found myself examining images. Images of hurricanes and bleached coral. Images of drought and torrential rain. Graphs and infographics. News reports and mobile phone footage. Images from satellites and adverts for deluxe refuges in obsolete nuclear missile silos.

And, of course, the available images of Piper Alpha before, during and after the night of the disaster on 6^th July 1988 – of survivors, rescuers, family members, Occidental’s promotional footage, the pontifications of Tory ministers and Oil Industry executives.

But then a hurricane is not climate change. One cannot SEE climate change. It’s a process. Ida, Katrina or Tauktae are pixels in the pattern. To see the pattern we must learn to LOOK.

As I write, I can see the misty morning landscape beyond my window. I can see there is no sign of snow on this mild December day. If I chose to look, I could see news images of massive snowfalls in Northern California & Japan and floods in Malaysia. And always the droughts and the malnutrition, the violence and migration. To quote from Pump, part of the first movement of Pibroch:

Out there on the horizon.

Out there

later

not now

somewhere else.

Yet we are all collecting data. In a sense we are the data. Our experience and the way we jot things down – in selfies, snapshots, journal entries & witness statements, poems. We are the evidence of climate change. We (not I) integrate the ‘big picture’, join the dots, IMAGINE the process!

Don’t get me wrong. It is not that the process is imaginary. Climate Change is as real as we are. But it is only in the vast collage of data and imagery, experience and empathy that it can be seen. Even the many manifestations of Climate Denial or Delay are part of that process.

But how does this, seemingly kaleidoscopic, array of images become the landscape of a show, the setting of Pibroch? Make sense…or nonsense…of our current predicament? For it can only be OUR predicament…not yours or mine.

Of course, there are ‘practical’ issues in producing the show: copyright and intellectual property rights. Ethical issues of appropriation and exposure. The balance of impact versus authenticity, accessibility versus facticity. Not to mention the practicalities of bringing that visual language into the performance space with its real-world constraints of dimensions, lines of sight, lighting and power-sources.

But beyond these, I realised, there is a creative imperative to make the imagery FELT which demands LOOKING not just seeing.

And that, after all, is the primary discipline and virtue of graphic art – the necessity and wonder of looking. So, working closely with Graeme Roger of wildbird on the audio-visual design of Pibroch recently, I have been forced to look again and, maybe for the first time, to look deeply at the imagery that has shaped the work, imagery that has shocked or saddened me, outraged or appalled.

From calving icebergs to drowned children, remote sensing imagery of daily CO₂emissions to snaps of my parents’ wedding – how could we encapsulate, simplify and project these visual ideas into the performance space in ways that complement the words and music and the rapport between Arthur Coates and myself and the audience?

The visual design (so far) retains the text-mining maps I used to explore key texts like the Cullen Report or the various IPCC reports and includes public domain visualisations or satellite imagery of ‘global’ events.

But the specific, FELT imagery – the subjective data-points tied to the expression of a refugee child, floodwater streaming through an Scottish village, crops shrivelled in desiccated fields and, of course, the twisted steelwork of Piper Alpha – these images demanded to be looked at, felt, re-presented. In charcoal, mostly. The recreation of my sense of this unfolding disaster scratched out in carbon.

What will survive into the finished piece on the 15^th January will, of course, depend on a dense network of creative interactions and practical decisions over the course of the next few weeks, but the discipline, over the last few weeks, of sifting, simplifying and expressing these images has been immensely important.

The several ‘meditations’ on the Piper Alpha structure during and after the fatal explosions connect more viscerally to the burning and twisting, rupture and collapse – its angles and trajectories, the still seeping smoke, the amazement of flame as the riser ruptured.

And so too, the long meditation on children: how their faces might confront us in this adversity – in suspicion, rebuke, curiosity or shy laughter? The struggle for likeness but more so expression – the quicksilver flux of emotion (and therefore meaning) ‘behind’ the face and ‘behind’ the process.

Whilst the blizzard of ‘found’ (or force-fed) imagery leads to an overwhelm which is, ultimately, dispiriting – the creative distillation of individual images into a collective/still-subjective felt-sense allows us to work through the data to deeper levels of knowing. To levels which tap into kennings of love, grief, compassion, obligation. I’ve said elsewhere, Poetry is Activism in making the predicament (more) felt. So too then is image making and their reintegration into the work.

Pibroch

Proof

December 16, 2021 Johnbolland Leave a comment

After a long and difficult year, we’ve finally signed off on the printer’s proof of Pibroch. Beautiful cover design by Gerry Cambridge not to mention the stylish typesetting in Foundry Wilson (though I just have!)

A pleasure to have and to hold. Really pleased with the appearance of the graphics through-out – a book that trully respects my intent and the importance of the theme…for which I must thank Elizabeth Rimmer, my editor, and Sheila Wakefield of Red Squirrel Press, my indefatigable and generous publisher.

Copies available soon from Red Squirrel Press or (signed) from this website.

Pibroch

After Arwen

December 16, 2021 Johnbolland Leave a comment

Power went out on the night of Friday 27^th November, as Storm Arwen, the first major storm of this winter and, folk say, the worst since at least 1953, flattened forests and snapped power lines. The damage to power, communications and, for some, water infrastructure was so great that ‘power’ took over a week to be re-instated in some areas. My own electricity supply was reconnected late on Wednesday afternoon (30^th November).

There is a line in one of the Pibroch poems – In Time:

….electricity

was taken when available.

The line is/was intended to challenge the presumption, prevalent in Northern mainstream media, that power ‘on demand’ was a fundamental human right (clearly it isn’t) and to suggest that we must attune our appetite for power and instant gratification with the variability of available energy from renewable infrastructure – wind turbines, tidal, solar, hydro.

The failure of the local grid over the last few weeks has been a master-class in what my world looks like when electricity is NOT available. At this time of year, it’s cold, it’s dark, it’s quiet. At this latitude the sun is only above the horizon for 6 hours a day and the storm, in any case, brought snow in its wake.

Conscious of the need to shift away from use of fossil fuels, I had committed to renewable electricity as my sole source of light, heating and cooking. This temporary disconnection drove me to fallback on logs, candles and a camping stove (as well as five layers of clothing and a thick blanket). I sat (mostly in the dark) and waited whilst friends encouraged me to flee to somewhere else that ‘still had power’.

Of course, a winter storm is weather and a 3-day power outage is not Cyclone Idai, Hurricane Katrina or last month’s rains in Tamil Nadu. But here we sat, in the cold and the dark…waiting and reflecting on our ‘entanglement’ with the combustion – the simple one-step trick we’ve elaborated on for perhaps a million years – the instant gratification (if we have the fuel) that never quite disappoints.

My grandson, 2, was perplexed and amazed when light-switches did not deliver light, the remote declined to stream images and Alexa became totally unresponsive. The magic of modernity vanished over-night. Something fundamental in his world had failed and it was incomprehensible.

Meanwhile, decades old forests have been swept flat, old growth trees, not the slender matchstick Spruce of plantation. The pre-existing carbon sinks that pre-dated the dramatic rise in greenhouse gas emissions over the last 30 years, splintered, broken, destined to burn or rot. We forget that we need to ‘offset’ the impact on our forests through storms and forest fires BEFORE we offset our unnecessary jaunts to Mallorca or the US.

We cling to the possibility to build-back virtuously as well as better, shifting to renewables, planting trees – but the heat already stored in our environment, even now, compromises our fragile infrastructure and degrades the resources to support mitigation. As every month passes the mountain we must climb grows higher, the bills grow greater, our resilience erodes.

A View From the Long Grass

Monthly Archives: December 2021

Meet the Team

Imagine

Proof

After Arwen