Coffee-Table Notes

Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw were in an old army barracks in New York when they first heard the phrase that would give them the title for their new show for Split Britches, the avant-garde queer feminist theatre company the pair co-founded in 1980. “The base had been used in the Cold War, but was now mainly used as an art space,” explains Weaver, “and I went for a walk around the space, but before I went I was told to be careful where I stepped, because there were unexploded ordnances there. I’d never heard that term before and asked what it meant, and was told it was unexploded bombs. Because we’d been working with elders, and because both Peggy and I are elders, the phrase was the perfect metaphor for us. We all have our unexploded bombs and things we’ve always wanted to do but have never done.” The incident planted the seed for what would become Unexploded Ordnances (UXO), which is currently on the London leg of a British and Irish tour which stops off in Glasgow next week as

When Take Me Somewhere infiltrated Glasgow’s arts venues last year, the pilot edition of this new festival of experimental theatre and performance took with it the spirit of the Arches. This new entity was founded by Jackie Wylie, the former artistic director of the labyrinthine arts lab and club space which, situated beside and beneath Central Station, was underground in every way. When the Arches closed in 2015 after Glasgow Licensing Board turned down the venue’s application for a late license following advice from Police Scotland, its absence left a damaging hole in the city’s artistic infrastructure. Arriving on the scene two years later, Take Me Somewhere was a reclaiming of the energy which had driven the Arches, and made it one of the most significant arts spaces in Europe. It was also a form of closure, as many of the tireless team of individuals and pioneers who had developed their skills at the Arches reunited to tie up loose ends in a way that was effectively getting t

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars If you believe the elaborate fable told from a storybook between acts during this greatest hits compendium from Edinburgh’s live art cabaret extravaganza, the night’s roots stem from the early 1980s. In their boundary-pushing diversity, some of the acts actually do recall what used to be called alternative cabaret during that era. Either way, the eight bite-size performances culled from the last five years of speak-easy one-nighters revealed Anatomy as key players in the city’s ever fertile artistic underground. Hosted by Anatomy founders Harry Josephine Giles and Ali Maloney, the show opened Rosa Postlethwaite’s tellingly named Without Whom We Would Not Be Here Tonight. Lewis Sherlock followed with The Undercog, in which Sherlock shadow boxed with funding bodies. In Sanitise, Jordan & Skinner choreographed the domestic excesses of cleaning a toilet with wordless wit, while in Uranus, Moreno Solinas sang arias to illustrate sexual n