FIRST Fringe appeal of the 2009 year? ARTURART, the five-star festival show by Arthur Smith, is looking for a new home. For two years the "grumpy old comedian's art gallery" offered a surreal welcome in a majestic five-storey house on Queen Street. But now, after ten years on the market, the building has found a new tenant, an architects' firm.
Producer Simon Pearce is seeking to lock in city centre spaces for several acts – contact him at theinvisibledot@gmail.com. A shop, a disused pub, a house, even an office would do for ARTURART 2009. The House Of Windsor, the sketch group who star
in Channel 4's The Inbetweeners, are looking for a large-scale site, like a community centre, school or house. Meanwhile, Fringe favourite Daniel Kitson "may or may not need a space" for a show that "may or may not happen." You heard it here first.
Black eye in BeirutSO WHAT do they do the rest of the year? Arts producer Dana Macleod, who works with La Clique in the festival, was sporting a massive shiner this week, a black eye so vivid it was almost an artwork.
She got it in Beirut – where else – on a trip with John Simpson, co-producer with The World, the new venue that made waves in Edinburgh this summer with international acts from Tanzania, Cambodia, Brazil and Cuba.
The pair were filming a documentary for Al Jazeera about the Lebanese contemporary music scene. They were on their way to an interview with Michel Elefteriades, described as a music promoter, painter, former guerrilla leader and the Emperor of Nowhereistan, a virtual country of no frontiers with 50,000 citizens.
"I was all buzzed up on coffee and raring to go and ran through what looked like clear air but wasn't," she said. Instead it was a stylish, unmarked glass door and she hit it at full tilt.
"I was desperate to meet the Emperor of Nowhereistan, so I bought a massive pair of diamond-studded glasses." In image-conscious Lebanon, people assumed she just had an eye job or cool new make-up – and were begging to pose with her for photographs. By the end of the day her eye was screaming for attention and she spent the night in A&E.
Raising the handlebarMACLEOD was at Out of the Blue Drill Hall on Leith Walk, earlier this week where she works as a producer. The venue, hosting one of its first concerts, produced one of the most original, and effective, cultural offerings ever seen in Edinburgh.
In Cycles, Thomas Strønen, the Norwegian composer and percussionist, was performing new music based on bicycles with Mr McFall's Chamber. The work included Crouch Position, dedicated to Scottish cycling champion Graeme Obree.
Video projections by John McGeoch washed McFall's string players, and the wall behind with a mix of quirky cycling images and Rothko-esque colours. The concert also included a demonstration of a quick-change on a punctured tyre.
The full article contains 509 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
