When Sonica Surge takes over Tramway and The Hidden Garden in Glasgow for forty-eight hours this month, the intense feast of sound and vision this mini festival presents will be an all too fitting way to celebrate the thirtieth birthday of Cryptic, the company behind it. Since it was founded by artistic director Cathie Boyd while still a student in Glasgow, Cryptic has become an ever-evolving artistic shape shifter that has moved from its roots as a leftfield music theatre company into the delirious melange of sonic art it has become today.
The company’s early focus was on staging literary classics, including Francoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1994) and Molly Bloom’s rapturous soliloquy from James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, in Parallel Lines (1996), and Virginia Woolf’s gender bending novel, Orlando (2010). From the start, Cryptic’s mission has been to ‘ravish the senses’, with internationalism at its heart. This has seen Cryptic present more than 2,000 artists to over 1.2 million people in thirty-two countries.
In 2009, the company founded Cryptic Nights, a platform designed to support emerging artists working in sonic art. This was followed this in 2012 by Sonica, an annual festival of world-class sonic arts. Throughout, Cryptic has continued to commission major international work.
Sonica Surge is a bite-size compendium highlighting the likes of Japanese artist Tatsuru Arai’s other worldly sounds in Re-Solarization, Ahmed El Shaer’s radical re-imaging of twenty-first century Islamic art, and charming robot techno from Moritz Simon Geis’s Hard Times – Rough Sounds. Also appearing will be Kyiv-based artist George Potopalsky, who presents TER.RAIN, a comment on surveillance technology.
Closer to home, Scotland based audio-visual duo muto major, aka Nigerian-Scottish sound artist Samm Anga and digital visual artist Veronica Petukhov. The duo present Waxen Figures, which uses sites of historical spiritual significance in Scotland to explore how the country’s folkloric past interacts with the present.
Sonica Surge opens with the UK premiere of CBM 8032 AV, pioneering artist and musician Robert Henke’s fusion of art and engineering. CBM 8032 AV uses five 1980s Commodore computers to reanimate once cutting edge visuals to create a retro-future construct that brings together analogue and digital in a mind-expanding audiovisual display.
These and the rest of a packed line up make up the first in a year of special Cryptic events that looks to the future as much as it reflects on the company’s past.
“I’m absolutely thrilled we’re working with the artists we are at Sonica Surge,” says a still irrepressible Boyd over an ironically shaky Zoom call. “Rather than deliver an eleven day festival across eleven venues, the idea is we have little bursts of energy in one venue. It’s also about showcasing more Scottish talent than we’ve done before.”
This mix of global and local has been with Cryptic since the very start.
“That's because of Glasgow’s City of Culture year,” says Boyd. “I arrived in Glasgow from Belfast in 1990, originally to study at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and I didn't even know what the City of Culture was. Then I discovered Tramway, and all the international work that came there, like the Maly theatre of Leningrad and Robert Lepage, and all that just changed my whole vision as a director.
“I knew I didn't want to do text based drama, so seeing all those amazing works and incredible companies from all over the world working with a visual language rather than a text based one, that's what kick started me to create Cryptic. At that time, nobody was making the work I wanted to see, so I decided I wanted to do only one show a year, I wanted it to be with another country, I wanted it to work across art forms, and I wanted it to tour internationally. I was more interested in Europe than it was in London.”
Glasgow’s European outlook was also significant.
“I feel really, really loyal to Scotland for the support its given Cryptic over the years. We’ve had lots of different ideas, from deciding we didn’t just want to be a theatre company, but wanted to be a production company, and we were supported with a lot of those ideas, and have been allowed to evolve and try out different things.”
Cryptic Nights remains a crucial part of that evolution.
“Cryptic Nights was started during the first financial meltdown in 2009,” Boyd remembers, “so to see all these amazing artists like Rachel Maclean and Oliver Coates who we showcased at Cryptic Nights go on to do such great work is really nice. Supporting a younger generation of artists is really important. My big passion now is not just younger artists at home and in Europe, but helping artists from further away places who have less opportunity.”
Boyd cites collaborations with artists from Egypt and South Korea in this respect, with Cryptic set to ravish the senses into the next decade and beyond.
“I want to stay responsive,” she says, “and see where my travels take me. I hope I can discover more artists who we can collaborate with and learn from. We also need to look at where technology is going. Areas of AI are very interesting, and we need to explore how we use that wisely. But where Cryptic goes beyond that, let’s see. The important thing is to stay curious.”
Sonica Surge runs at Tramway and The Hidden Garden, Glasgow, 29th-30th September.
The List, September 2023
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