By Jane Bradley
The Scotsman
I’ve been away for a few days on a much-needed post-festivals holiday, only to find that there are even more festivals happening now I’m back.
It was the launch of the Scottish Storytelling Centre’s festival programme on Tuesday, when it announced its programme for this year’s event, under the theme “Bird and Beast”.
The programme does, however, include many themed events, including Tony Bonning’s The Year of the Horse, where he will recount his epic adventure travelling across Scotland with his horse, Chief, collecting Kelpie tales – as well as Riikka Palonen, who will tell stories from the cow sheds of Finland. Meanwhile, Satu Lankinen will teach a Nordic cow-call known as “kulning” and explore traditional herding songs and Ailsa Dixon will share fascinating historical tales of feral, seaweed-eating sheep on the Isle of North Ronaldsay who live within a 13 km area hemmed in by a dry stone dyke.
The marketing pictures sent out with the press release for the launch showed storytellers Ruth Kirkpatrick and David Hughes, with festival director Daniel Abercrombie, all reading the programme to promote the event.
Freelance photographer Neil Hanna, formerly of this parish, ran with the theme and got a bit creative, apparently taking the storytelling crew to a local farm to create a portfolio of images which saw them posing cheerfully with donkeys and sheep – and my favourite, with an inquisitive goat standing behind them, reading over their shoulders. He looked very engrossed – maybe he should be given a slot at next year’s festival.
Robert Fergusson music revival
Back in 1981, Billy Kay’s Fergusson’s Auld Reekie was an acclaimed show and album that helped revive interest in the work of Edinburgh’s gifted but tragic 18th-century poet Robert Fergusson, who is now commemorated with a statue on Edinburgh’s Canongate.
Sadly the musicians who originally accompanied Kay – Tony Cuffe, Derek Hoy, a driving force behind the Jock Tamson’s Bairns, Norman Chalmers and Rod Paterson – have all passed away since.
Now, late fiddler Hoy’s daughter, Sarah, also a great fiddle player, is involved in reviving the show for, at present, a one-off performance with Kay and other musicians in Portobello Town Hall, on Sunday.
Others set to perform include Gary West, a piper inducted in the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame, Steve Byrne, winner of Scots Singer of the Year in 2019 and Jim Malcolm, winner of Songwriter of the Year in 2004.
Small world
In a story of another famous daughter – and another festival – next month will bring Edinburgh’s Spanish Film Festival, which features a total of 16 films from Spain and Latin America.
The opening film of the event, at the Omni Centre’s Vue cinema, is Galician work, Rondallas, known as Band Together in English, by acclaimed Spanish director Daniel Sanchex Arevalo.
The film stars Spanish actor Judith Fernandez, who, like Sanchez Arevalo, is travelling to Scotland for the festival – however, this is not Judith’s first time in Edinburgh. She was brought up in Leith as a young child, as her father was footballer David Fernandez, who played for Livingston and Celtic. Small world.
