Open Windows & Deeper Wells is a workshop focused on empathy, otherness and character building in writing, led by local writer John Bolland.
Bolland writes across a range of forms including poetry and short fiction in Scots and English, focusing on identity, resilience and inter-generational responsibility. His collection Fallen Stock was published by Red Squirrel in March 2019
Event is free to attend but places are limited so booking essential. Book your place online via our new Events Booking System on our Library Catalogue or call 01224 652500.
This Saturday, 11 a.m. at Orb’s Bookshop, the Square, Huntly, we’ll be reading from Pibroch, a poetry collection exploring parallels between the Climate Emergency and the Piper Alpha Disaster.
Come down to the Farmers’ Market and, while you’re there, enjoy this free event.
Poetry starts off in my mouth. Whatever the meaning or the metaphor, it is only on the tongue that it passes the test. I say the words…they seem to work…meaning, rhythm, order, meaning…a seasoning of assonance or rhyme. A recursive loop of articulation and meditation, the typed or scrawled text only a short-hand map to keep on track.
Pibroch was a very deliberate collection: a project based on a need to root the abstractions of climate politics in the experience of loss or recovery. To bring the traumatic suffering already endured on the frontiers of climate damage and poverty back home to the North, to my lived reality and living history. To find analogies and, I hoped, foster empathy. Kindness is my greatest hope in the coming decades.
And the performed poem – spoken word – is a vagabond. Escaped from its ‘book’ it shows up on any stage that it can find – bookshops,bars and coffee-shops, sometimes theatres, occasionally churches. It turns up and sings for its supper. Hoping to engage and entertain. Hoping to connect.
So the poems in the collection are very much about space and time: places and events and processes, recorded or forecast, global and local.
But, a show? A show is a very different thing. We called it a multi-media performance but it was a show. A show not a tell. A dialogue in the form of monologue that happens in its own space in the company of others immersed in an entanglement of music, light, sound, space.
I had always conceived of Pibroch ‘the show’ as a touring piece – a roving conversation migrating to whatever locality would listen and some that might not. I had a notion that this end would be best served by developing the show in a general-purpose social space: a community centre or church hall or, where I live, a village hall.
Glenbuchat Hall, Aberdeenshire
I had good personal reasons for settling on Glenbuchat. It is a magical place with a strong sense of community and a thriving music and arts scene based around local promoters and organisations like Glenbuchat Music, Eclectic Events and Art in the Buchat. Like all ‘remote’ locations it is the centre of its own universe with a particular can-do attitude and a generous soul.
But, for some of my professional theatre colleagues it must have seemed a perverse choice. No wifi, no public transport, allegedly no mobile phone signal (an unhelpful rumour). “Does it have running water”, one asked. Of course it does: fresh from the spring!
It did not have a flexible arrangement for rigging lights, a lot of electric power, a very big stage. And we had to accommodate COVID-19 restrictions when thinking about audience numbers, team accommodation and the arrangement of walkways.
The first time Simon Gane, Pibroch’s designer and production manager, looked at it, it was both exciting and daunting.
Glenbuchat Hall Interior
Challenge: how to create a special Pibroch world inside this space – a world that encompassed offshore oil platforms, hurricanes, rain forests, oceans and, indeed, the world itself.
We knew the show would depend heavily on projected imagery which complimented and added depth to the experience. We knew we would use sound effects and have the benefit of Fraser Fifield’s magnificent music to create and counter-point mood. But we had very little stage space and and every lighting-stand, stage-extension or set dressing ate into already limited audience capacity.
Simon, Brodie, Mark and Graeme went through many iterations negotiating a set design, lighting inventory and projection solution that satisfied as many of our aesthetic ambitions as possible. As a direct-address performance – poetry not theatre – Mark was insistent that Fraser and I (the poet-performer) be lit. But lighting needed not to wash-out the projected backdrop which must also be legible from the back of the hall. And it would be good not to trip the circuitry.
Pibroch Stage Design – Simon Gane
Simon’s eventual design was an elegant multi-variable optimisation and, for me, it was a huge satisfaction to be working on a stage with a sense of the scale of screen, my degrees of freedom and the location of the (well-managed) trip hazards. I realised I had not worked like this, in theatre, for over 35 years…whilst Mark reiterated that I was not an actor and we were NOT doing theatre.
Pibroch – Trusses and Oil Barrel
It was at this point that various ‘random’ pieces of truss which seemed superfluous to the overall structure turned up. I had mentioned that I was keen to echo the sense of trusses on the fixed steel jackets of 1970s offshore oil platforms and especially the distinctive triangular bracing on Piper Alpha’s two remaining flare-booms. I didn’t realise, in the first few days of rehearsal, how effective these elements of Simon’s design would be. I was also sent to Banff to retrieve an oil drum…a stand-in for the eminence grease behind the production.
By Wednesday night, the show had a repertoire of gestures, moves, musical punctuation. A feel. Fraser and I did a complete run-through then left to allow Brodie and Martin Aitken, stepping in at the last minute, to rig the lighting and dress the set.
It was only as we worked through the tech, laboriously and meticulously setting levels and states, exploring transitions and balancing elements that I, at least, came to realise the richness of what we had created here. We had created a time and a space – a particular Pibroch-space in the specific real space of Glenbuchat Hall.
Hindcast – Photo by Graeme Roger
All that remained was to welcome an audience into that space and we did, ushering each into specific seating one metre apart. The first notes of Padraig Mor MacCrimmon’s Lament for the Children on Fraser’s pipes conjured a world.
The Pibroch Collection, published by Red Squirrel Press, will be launched at SPL on Saturday 26th February. Copies available from this website, Red Squirrel Press or on the night. Looking forward to a great day reading with the fabulous Helen Boden launching her collection, A Landscape to Figure In, and Stirling Makar, Laura Fyfe.
The Pibroch Collection, published by Red Squirrel Press, will be launched into this big wide world at Avant Garde on Monday 21st. Copies available from this website, Red Squirrel Press or on the night. Looking forward to a great night reading with Stirling Makar, Laura Fyfe launching her pamphlet The Truth Lies and Helen Boden launching her collection A Landscape to Figure In. And playing sax into the bargain.
As I write, Simon Gane and Brodie Murray are moving the truss for the staging up to the venue at Glenbuchat. This afternoon is the get in. The prequel to a week of rehearsal and, eventual, performance.
Over the last week I’ve been very conscious of the shift in effort and attention to detail involved in putting on a performance of this type.
Yes: I am used to the finnicky detail of editing poems – the notorious shifting and re-shifting of commas and nuancing of words – and the even greater scrutiny involved in proofing, typesetting and design. I have been blessed with a great publishing team in Sheila Wakefield, Elizabeth Rimmer and Gerry Cambridge at Red Squirrel Press who share a passion for perfection and vast amounts of patience.
And I am familiar with the excruciating attention involved in printing and painting – especially in portraiture – where a millimetre displacement or an increment of hue can make or break a piece.
But, as a writer and visual artist, I’ve never had to worry much about COVID risk assessment, feeding the crew, the availability of First Aiders: let alone whether anyone can actually see or hear me!
Glenbuchat Hall, a real space
And yet here Pibroch is, in a real space – Glenbuchat Hall in West Aberdeenshire – at a real time – a Saturday night in January in the second year of a global pandemic – working with real people – performing to real people – with musical accompaniment by Fraser Fifield and visuals developed in collaboration with Graeme Roger – in a setting created by Simon Gane.
And we are ready and it has come together through the skills and effort of all of the team, not least the directorial inputs of Mark Thomson, the support of Martin Aitken, marketing nous of Lucy Stroud and mentoring of Lesley-Anne Rose of Open Road Ltd.
The journey from idea to text to a visual concept has been long but these last weeks have been intense. How do we make these ideas and elements play, in an exciting and engaging manner, within the real space? Where do I stand? How do I avoid getting in the way of projection? Am I lit – visible – audible – ‘appropriate’?
I began with naïf assumptions about the space – especially the stage – the options for lighting and projection (and exit routes and social distancing) but, day by day, the team has solved and resolved each issue – proposing, critiquing, collaborating, reworking.
Vertical Projection in Growth
A key design decision was to use a vertical rather horizontally aligned projection mode (think portrait rather than landscape). This played off of the available stage area and the projector throw necessary to achieve appropriate height to width ratios.
And the stage footprint – and no-go zones defined by the projection beams – constrained the lighting opportunities and, as I am sure will emerge, where I can actually ‘be’ on the stage at any moment in the performance.
Our decision not to use a stage mic frees me from the stand – and the simplifying constraint of a single narrow footprint as in cabaret performance. But now I am interacting with the lights, the projection beam and the challenge of not falling off the stage whilst speaking the text in a relaxed, powerful and (ideally!) coherent and audible manner. Hmm. I’m not sure I’m in Kansas anymore.
I have previous theatrical experience – I know how to find a light and follow notes – project and present. But, after almost a decade of working and performing as a poet and spoken word performer, it feels like this new project has taken my experience and practice to a new level of discipline and sophistication. All of which I owe to the Pibroch team who have acted not only as enablers to the work but patient mentors in each aspect of the craft. They have my eternal gratitude.
It was an idea and now it’s possible…and that is the art. A week from now we will be striking the set in that space and looking for future programming opportunities for Pibroch through 2022.
I have been working on this project since Autumn 2019 and I can honestly say – I am excited!
Watch this space for more updates as the week progresses.
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.
Mark Thomson
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
Fraser Fifield
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.
John Bolland
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
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
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 Roger
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.
Karen Tennent
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).
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.
Credit : NASA
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.
Credit : Survivalcondo.com
And, of course, the available images of Piper Alpha before, during and after the night of the disaster on 6th 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.
Credit : Simon Gane
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.
Infranodus Text Modelling
From calving icebergs to drowned children, remote sensing imagery of daily CO2 emissions 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.
Credit : Peter Glenn
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 15th 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.
Piper Alpha 7th July 1988
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.
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.
Join us at 3 pm on Saturday 19th February for a performance of Pibroch in my home town of Paisley as part of the 2022 Paisley Book Festival. Booking now open at the PBF website.
Credit : Paisley FM
Really proud to have a place in this programme. And in such fine company! Louise Welsh, Vahni Capildeo, Jenny Fagan, James Robertson, Graeme Macrae Burnet, Denise Mina & Kathleen Jamie! And yes…I’ve left a lot out. This is going to be a sizzling week of events in the heart of Radical Renfrew.
