2021: November and December

Snapshots of 2021: November and December

Two Months of Residencies

November started with the Magnetic North online residency: Space/Time.  It was a beautiful week.  I found that there was time to think about my art, and the artist I am.  I left that week with a much clearer sense of my own agency, and how I want to live, and to make work, moving forward.

In the latter part of November, through December and then on into January, I did residencies on the Isle of Mull and from my home base in Edinburgh, working on the These Are Our Neighbours project.

These Are Our Neighbours combines dance, music, words and light into dance theatre with humanity at its heart.  This show is a celebratory narrative of what it is to be ‘other’ in Scotland today, and tells the story of the Kenmure Street immigration protest, where people chanted, “These are our neighbours, let them go.”  

The research I have been doing consists of two strands: the first is the events of the Kemure Street protest, and the second in interviewing European Scots, as part of the story will be told through the eyes of European Scots that attended the protest. After Brexit, there is a knowledge that the system of dawn raids which put the two men from India in the van that day will inevitably eventually come for our European siblings. But the love acted out on Kenmure Street that day, includes them too.

So those weeks in November and December included that research, and working on a draft of the show.  The work-form-home Covid restriction meant that I didn’t travel over to Glasgow to spend time on Kenmure Street itself, but this worked out okay, for now.  Certainly, it was much easier move-online process for my residency and research than when we moved the Strangeways development online, under similar circumstances, at the start of the year.

And so, the year rolled into the winter holidays, with another quiet (Covid) Christmas, and A’s birthday on New Year’s Day, I was right in the middle of a project I loved, and was feeling grateful that, two years in to this Covid thing, my work life felt artistically satisfying, as well as solid and secure.