Saturday at the Arts Festival was busy but enjoyable. I loved filling the church with WaveForm improvisations on Saturday morning, although there were few people in to view the pictures. One rather intense young lady made up for it buy viewing all the pictures with curiosity and comments, even the children’s ones. In the afternoon I took part in the Ju Jutsu display for a small but interested audience, getting well flung around by my teacher. From there, on to the display by Central Scotland Ballet, with whom Pestilence dances, for a well attended and slickly performed hour of dance. In the evening a performance by Tommy MacKay, Impossible Songs and the Innocents, all in my opinion playing at their very best. I had even more fun in the Innocents spot than at the Speigeltent, as Lynsey and Mary hammed it up and Nelson thundered away on djemble behind me. We only did stuff we knew well so we could relax and just have fun. The audience was mostly the bands themselves, friends and relatives, including for the first time in a couple of years, Madame.
On Sunday I went to a writing workshop while Plague and Peril (his girlfriend, not her real name) went to batik. The writing workshop took place in the office of Gary, the overall organiser of the Festival. As the other three participants and I introduced ourselves, Gary’s wife put her head round the door looking for him. Alighting on me, she said loudly ‘Thanks for last night – you were absolutely fantastic!’ and disappeared, which caused howls round the table and certainly broke the ice. Now I knew she was talking about the Innocents show but they thought I was some kind of lurve machine.
The workshop was good, getting us over the initial trepidation of ‘how can I write something and read it out to others, it’ll be rubbish’ by starting with lists, moving to writing about the same thing from different viewpoints and only after that to a finished poem or piece of prose.
On Sunday evening I saw Gary and Phil’s film about Queensferry, which used three of my WaveForms pieces in the soundtrack. It’s a great observation of the community, starting with the strangeness of the Burry Man walk and ending on the grandeur of the bridges, much of the footage shot high up in the rail bridge.
I’ll publish my poem from the workshop here soon but in the meantime here’s a good poem.