Coffee-Table Notes

Dundee Contemporary Arts until August 26th 2012 4 stars With a title taken from David Foster Wallace’s footnote-friendly novel, going round in circles is the preserve of all three artists in DCA’s fun-packed summer special of a show. Where the videos of Brazilian interventionist Cinthia Marcelle subvert noisy city-scapes with meticulously orchestrated real-time arrangements, Rob Pruitt is all high-class paddling pools, monster-size cookies and down-time denim. London-born William Mackrell continues the party theme with birthday cake-sized illuminations that may burn fast, but which leave a lunar-etched after-glow to bask in. There’s fire from the off via Marcelle’s video piece,’ Confronto’, setting out its store on a monitor that wilfully obstructs the gallery entrance. Onscreen, a group of fire jugglers stop the traffic, increasing in number as their routine moves from red-light entertainment to green-light environmental alchemy. Marcelle’s similarly-inclined ‘Volta

Over the last eighteen months, Neu! Reekie!'s monthly Friday nights of what used to be called alternative entertainment has captured Edinburgh's off-piste underground in a way not seen since Rebel Inc lit-zine first broke cover in the early 1990s. Neu! Reekie!'s speak-easy pot-pourri of spoken-word performances seen in-between screenings of avant-garde animations with a live music finale also recalls the ghosts of live-art cabaret night Silencio!, which lit up Edinburgh a few years back, while its spirit dates back to the 1980s post-punk happenings of Richard Strange's recently revived Cabaret Futura nights. Now Neu! Reekie! Ringmasters Michael Pedersen and Rebel Inc founder Kevin Williamson bring us Neu! Reekie! Records, an aural experience that spreads the night's multi-media inclinations even further. Their first release is a double A-side 7” single, with Pedersen and Williamson overseeing a side apiece. While on one side, Williamson performs the title po

Various venues, Leith, June 28 th 2012 4 stars On a rare evening of summer sun, for one night only, Leith Walk itself became a little piece of live art promenade theatre it's sort of always been. From Whitespace and Superclub in Gayfield Square at the top to Henderson Halls in South Leith Parish Church at the left of the bottom, some nineteen largely bespoke venues from the Windsor Buffet to Oscar's Alterations, Leith Walk Barber's Salon and beyond played host to a cavalcade of live music and pop-up exhibitions that fused a civic and social experience with an artistic one to expand the aesthetics of community spirit in the best sense of that much overused phrase. Individual events were sometimes rough and not always ready, but in their willingness to experiment with form, content and circumstance, facilitated an explosion of noisy life that captured a sense of what's going on artistically in Leith – and indeed Edinburgh – away from the city's more a

There’s a window built into the roof of Perth Theatre’s brightly lit bar that won't open. This bothers Rachel O’Riordan, and has done so ever since the Irish-born creative director for theatre at Horsecross Arts first arrived in Perth to breathe fresh life into one of Scotland’s most important rep institutions a year ago. For all the energy that goes on in the building, it seems, that window retains its somewhat stifling presence. While there's little to be done about that window until the theatre's planned renovation takes place over the next three years, it hasn't prevented O'Riordan from turning the place as it currently exists upside down in an artistic sense at least. In her first season, O'Riordan's back to back productions of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Frank McGuinness' hostage drama, Someone Who'll Watch Over Me and Ron Hutchinson's Hollywood romp, Moonlight and Magnolias, stacked up to make an impressive calling card

4 stars The National Theatre of Scotland's third 5 Minute Theatre online extravaganza of bite-size plays performed largely live was focussed around the theme of youth. With some fifty-six separate performances beamed from hubs in Glenrothes, Glasgow and beyond in a myriad of classrooms, bars and living rooms, the event was run partly in parallel with this year's National Festival of Youth Theatre as well as the NTS' own young peoples' theatre programme, Exchange. The end result was a lively, non-stop five and a half-hour mix of rites of passage and a desire to be understood on the one hand, and a mourning for lost youth on the other. If technical gremlins hadn't prevented it, proceedings would have begun with Douglas Maxwell's 162 Bars Out, a lovelorn percussionist's interior monologue performed alongside Claire McKenzie's live orchestral score. Even on second, Maxwell's piece was a powerful dramatic lesson on the social and creative

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow 3 stars It takes a wrestling match to make Rosalind’s heart go all aflutter over Orlando in what’s possibly Shakespeare’s most long-winded comedy. That it’s taking part in the grunt and grapple game that similarly gets Orlando’s endorphins going speaks volumes about the excitement going on in these would-be lovers young lives. Especially as the mat Orlando throws himself about in Gordon Barr’s promenade production for this year’s Bard in the Botanics season is ever so slightly soggy due to the light drizzle that briefly delayed this weekend’s opening performance. Barr goes for broke while it stays dry, moving from the opening scene in Duke Frederick’s court set beside one of the garden’s hothouses, to the Forest of Arden sheltered under a tree, to a flame-lit finale beside a sheltered pagoda. The trouble is, to get through this extended rom-com awash with rustic cross-dressing, one needs to do it with a gallop that the longeurs between locati

When Craig Coulthard was growing up in Germany, he liked a kickabout as much as most other small boys. It gave the Edinburgh-based artist a sense of belonging, he reckons, helped him bond and integrate with the German kids. Rather than scrambling about in jumpers-for-goalposts childhood, however, Coulthard’s games took place in a forest, undercover of an all-encompassing blanket of trees that gave the games a more dramatic and mysterious edge. Coulthard revisited his old playground a couple of years ago while on a residency in Dusseldorf, only to find a razed and abandoned site. It was a similar story in Cathkin Park, the former home to the now defunct Third Lanark FC in Glasgow, where Coulthard played as a teenager, and where the overgrown trees lent the environment a moody air. Flying over the Borders en route home from Dusseldorf, Coulthard was similarly struck by the dense impenetrability of the tree-lined landscape below and what might just be at play beneath. Al