When a woman wearing a going-out dress knelt on an Edinburgh pavement on King Stables Road outside a former municipal lighting depot and put a large chunk of chalk in her mouth, it was the prelude to a five-hour trip that saw the woman crawl in a circle onto the neighbouring streets, before arriving back on King Stables Road. As the woman marked out her path with the chalk still in her mouth, the white line on the pavement resembled a snail trail.
This was Magdalene, Are You Satisfied with the Experiment? a durational ‘installaction’ by Polish performance artist Karolina Kubik. Presented in honour of seminal theatre director Tadeusz Kantor, the event opened the 2015 edition of Hidden Door, the multiple arts festival that burst onto the scene the year before when it transformed a row of abandoned vaults on Market Street into ad hoc art spaces.
As an opening statement of a festival resembling an arts village in some radical republic, Kubik’s appearance was the perfect pointer of things to come. Since then, Hidden Door’s residencies at Leith Theatre, Granton Gasworks and the Old Royal High School have galvanised Edinburgh’s grassroots artistic underground.
At Leith Theatre, Edinburgh band FOUND became the first act to appear there in more than twenty-five years. Other favourites include a live soundtrack to Fritz Lang’s 1927 dystopian film, Metropolis, tag-teamed by four electronic composers. Rules of the Moon was a collaboration between Glasgow poet Rebecca Sharp and Liverpool based sonic auteur Philip Jeck.
This year, Hidden Door moves into the former Southside insurance building now dubbed The Complex. Whatever emerges, Kubik’s fusion of avant-garde intervention and civic spectacle was the perfect foundation to build on, and remains a marker for Hidden Doors past, present and future.
Hidden Door runs at The Complex, Edinburgh, 31 May to 4 June.
The List, April 2023 - This piece formed part of a compendium of pieces by seven writers, with each giving an overview of their favourite festival.
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