Coffee-Table Notes

Standing outside his studio in Glasgow city centre, beyond its noise and smoky breath, Toby Paterson can observe a metropolis in a state of architectural flux. It isn't difficult to spot this influence in the Glasgow-born Becks Future winning former skate-boarder's body of work over the last twenty years. This is reflected too in Paterson's solo GENERATION show, one of the first out of the traps which opens in Kirkcaldy before touring to Inverness, Peebles and Dumfries in a deliberate focus on smaller locales outwith the central belt. “One of the things about the show,” Paterson explains, “is that there's a lot going on in terms of texture and scale. That goes right back to my formative experiences skate-boarding, when you're focusing on a tiny detail of whichever location you're using, and you occasionally take a step back and think, 'Oh, this building is interesting'. You're discovering a way of looking at things.” Since graduating from Glasgow Sch

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars There was never anything innocent about J.M. Barrie, as this 1902 dissection of class consciousness testifies in an at times remarkably progressive if ultimately redundant fashion. Richard Baron's revival has Barrie himself introduce his creation by way of his elaborate stage directions to set the scene. These concern the liberal-minded Earl of Loam, who gathers his three spoilt daughters, Mary, Catherine and Agatha, his equally brattish nephew Ernest and an extended coterie of aristocrats for a day of meeting the servants on allegedly equal if toe-curlingly awkward terms before setting sail on a family expedition. With the eponymous butler Crichton and mouse-like maid Tweeny accompanying, by the second act they are shipwrecked and, aside from Crichton, without a clue about survival. After two years, the girls have gone the way of most posh back-packers on gap-year, with Mary in particular morphing into an androgynous lost girl in thrall of Cri

Friday If incoming Edinburgh International Festival director Fergus Linehan really wishes to refresh his music programme with something more contemporary than the current model as he hinted at during a recent press briefing, he could do worse than look at  this second edition of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's inspired three-day meeting of musical minds, which saw curators Ilan Volkov and Alasdair Campbell foster international alliances aplenty. While Volkov has been a mercurial figure, both with the BBC SSO and in Iceland, where a Reykjavic-based arm of Tectonics runs in tandem with the Glasgow event, much of the the groundwork over the last decade for something as sonically ambitious as Tectonics was done by the Instal and Le Weekend festivals, with Campbell in charge of the latter for much of its existence. The involvement of the BBC and the presence of Radio 3 in particular at Tectonics, however, suggests an official seal of approval that opens up an avenu

When Ed Robson took over as artistic director of Cumbernauld Theatre, to suggest he had something of an uphill struggle ahead of him is something of an understatement. Here was a theatre with a proud past both as a community and professional venue, but which had just had its Scottish Arts Council grant cut. With heavy debts mounting, the theatre's closure seemed inevitable. Rather than appoint some number-crunching bureaucrat to step in and manage the venue's demise, Cumbernauld Theatre's board of directors were convinced enough by Robson's enthusiasm that he could turn things around. Seven years on, and things look very different indeed. With Robson still in post, Cumbernauld Theatre is alive and well with a mixed programme of visiting shows and in-house work. With an annual Company-in-Residence partnership set up last year with the award-winning Tortoise in a Nutshell company, the Edinburgh-based Stoirm Og company will be the second recipients of an initiative which a

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Three stars This week's announcement by T in the Park that as of next year it will shift sites from Balado to Strathallan Castle may embed Scotland's liveliest music festival even firmer on Perthshire soil, but it is far from the first temporary tented village to plant roots there. This is made vividly clear in Anne Downie's dramatisation of Betsy Whyte's 1979 autobiography, which has barely been seen on Scotland's stages since it was first produced by the appropriately nomadic Winged Horse company in 1989. On the one hand, Downie has penned a richly evocative first-person rites of passage of Whyte's alter-ego, Bessie, the tobacco-guzzling brightest spark of the Townsley clan, a family of Travellers winding their way through 1930s rural Scotland. As Betsy, her father Sandy and her mother Maggie are forced to move from place to place, however, they run a gauntlet of class-room snobbery and institutionalised prejudice that looks frighte

Intro – Snapshots – Deaf School 1 In 1980, the same year as the Manchester band, Magazine, released a 7 inch single called A Song From Under The Floorboards – a three verse and chorus distillation of Dostoyevsky's novel, Notes From Underground – an art school scandal occurred. This scandal took place in Liverpool, and was based around a project called the Furbelows, although it became better known in the Liverpool Echo and other organs that reported it as the Woolly Nudes. The Furbelows, or Woolly Nudes, were a group of artists who had come out of Liverpool College of Art, who, dressed in grotesque woolly costumes which featured knitted approximations of male and female genitalia, made assorted public interventions around the city centre as kind of living sculptures acting out assorted narratives. The Furbelows project had been funded by what was then Merseyside Arts Association, and, after the participants were arrested and taken to court on obscenity charges

1 Good afternoon, and welcome to UPLAND, a unique site-specific group exhibition presented by staff and students from Edinburgh College of Art's Intermedia course here at Camp 21, the former Prisoner of War camp, Cultybraggan. My name is Neil Cooper, and I’m a writer and critic about theatre, music and art for various publications. Before I introduce the panel, I just want to go through the procedures of the afternoon and introduce a few ideas and connections about it that have been thrown up in my mind since I came on board. Once I’ve introduced the panel, each of them will talk for a few minutes, introducing their ideas about things relating to Upland, which may open things up for discussion later. I’ll then ask each of the panel some questions before we open things out to the floor. After that, who knows, but we’ll be aiming to finish  at about 5 O clock, but before we do I’ll ask each of the panel to try and sum up, and if anyone wants to we can continue the discuss