Space is very much the place at Hidden Door this year, as Edinburgh’s grassroots festival moves into the John Hardie Glover designed former Scottish Widows building on Dalkeith Road now rechristened as The Complex. Music acts may remain the festival’s high profile public face, but dig deeper, and there is a whole lot more going on with other art forms at ground level and beyond. The hive-like hexagonal shape of Glover’s construction, which opened in 1976, lends itself to all manner of underground interventions.
This should be clear from The Environments, a series of immersive voyages that invites audiences to move through hill, post-nuclear wasteland, garden and forest. This leads to the less familiar sounding terrain of aphotic archaeology – the aphotic zone being the portion of a lake with little or no sunlight - and Holocene, or current geological epoch.
Dance is to the fore in The Environments, with new works by choreographer Roisin O’Brien and composer Rowan McIlvride, Kai Tomioka and artist Zoe Gibson, Chinese folk dance by Yuxi Jiang and dance theatre by Tess Latham, with costumes by Cleo Rose McCabe. Elsewhere, opera singer Stephanie Lamprea collaborates with composer Tom W. Green, dance artist Penny Chivas and artist Oana Stanciu to explore themes of extinction.
Moving deeper into the building, audiences will find artist Alliyah Enyo’s Sea Bed environment before ending up in the depths of the earth care of electronic musician Exterior. With the shadow of real life volcano Arthur’s Seat looming over The Complex, this should preview an all too fitting excavation.
Beyond The Environments, Hidden Door will house expansive programmes of visual art, spoken word and poetry hiding in every nook, cranny and corner of The Complex. More than thirty visual artists will be showing their work, with more than twenty poets and spoken word artists programmed to perform.
Much of the visual work seems to fit with its surroundings, with artists focusing on notions of environment, psychogeography and space in its broadest sense. Ideas drawn from ecology, geology and obsolete fax machines point up relationships between ancient and modern in a carefully selected range of work that creates narratives and environments of its own.
Scotland’s ever fertile poetry and spoken word scenes, meanwhile, will show off a diverse array of artists breathing life into their words which brings the venue alive, reclaiming bricks and mortar in an artistic eruption that lays down the foundations for future happenings inspired by a seismic past.
Hidden Door, The Complex, Edinburgh, 31stMay-4thJune
ends
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