Festival diary: Pickle crisps and anatomically correct 3D models, the madness of Meet the Media
Meet the Media was an intense experience with dozens of performers pitching their shows
This weekend saw the opening of the Edinburgh International Festival with an eight hour (yes, you read that right) concert. The piece, by composer John Taverner, which featured 250 singers from four choirs, has only been performed in its entirety once before.
I had expected the feeling by seven hours in to be akin to that of the end of a long haul flight: when everyone is stale, pasty, haggard and in a mental state of desperate resignation. But it wasn’t.
The audience was rapt. Almost all seats remained full, including the beanbags which replaced the stalls. When the concert reached its finale, just short of eight hours after it began, the place erupted, breaking into an enthusiastic standing ovation.
An absolute triumph.
Totes delulu for Meet the Media
At the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society’s Meet the Media event at the weekend, The Scotsman’s team of myself and Roisin McMullan, our Fringe Young Writer’s Award recipient, who is reviewing festivals shows for us in a partnership with the Fringe Society, met literally dozens of performers, pitching their shows.
It was my first Meet the Media event as arts correspondent and while I’d been warned that it would be not only busy, but hugely intense, nothing prepared me for the sheer volume - and incredible diversity - of shows on offer.
Some performers came armed with merchandise and props to promote their performances, ranging from the more usual tote bags and pin badges to a cling-on koala, a sample packet of pickle flavoured crisps, created for food manufacturer Serious Pig by comedian and crisp connoisseur Adam Evans - and an apparently anatomically correct 3D rubber model of the clitoris. We got to keep the crisps, but thankfully, performers from Church of the Clitori did not leave us the clitoris.
In an interview I conducted this week with Underbelly directors Charlie Wood and Ed Bartlam, the pair argued that a truly international festival like the Fringe needs a truly international audience, warning that the festival’s attendees are becoming increasingly Scottish, due to the rising cost of staying in Edinburgh.
What was fascinating was that out of around 60 or so shows pitched to us, only three were from UK-based performers, just two of whom were Scottish. The rest came from as far afield as the US, Switzerland, China, Romania and Lithuania.
If Meet the Media was anything to go by, they were right: the Fringe is truly international, but perhaps the audience is not.
One American pair, promoting show Horny for the End of the World, talked only in Gen Z speak, telling us that it the performance was “totes girly pops” and the character was “delulu” about her relationship with her ex-boyfriend. Luckily, I have a thirteen year old at home who has taught me a degree of fluency, or I might have needed to call in a translator to hear the show’s tale of woe in an entanglement with the Fringe Society who asked them to take down their giant floating balloons - spelling out the first word of their show title - from where they had been strung up across the Royal Mile.
“Sis, the Fringe sent us such mixed signals. For months they’ve been blowing up our inbox like: ‘bring your most creative street promos’. So we did!” wrote director Musa Gurnis in an email afterwards, adding they had been told the giant balloons, which they brought with them from the US were “not in the spirit of the Fringe”.
“We think we’re deep team spirit of the Fringe, actually,“ she added.
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