Okay, some Vile Commentary on The Glasgow Effect.

An appropriate critical response to The Glasgow Effect might involve waiting until the artist has made or done something concrete, assessing its intentions and commenting on its strategies and success. 

Public discussion has, however, raced ahead. The Glasgow Effect conjured a storm of protest. While I dislike any abuse aimed at the personality of the artist, I remain a pretentious old bore who regards all interpretation as valid. I respect it as opinion that has a right to expression. I'd prefer to read commentary without heavy use of the word 'cunt', though. 

Never let it be said that I refuse to jump onto bandwagons, though. Here comes a selection of my usual obsessions, tangentially connected to The Glasgow Effect.

All art is bourgeois

Throughout history, art has been used by the dominant sections of society to establish its values and culture. In fifth century Athens, tragedies were performed during a state supported festival: the absolute monarchy of France before the revolution staged ballets, and the Soviet Union invested in the development of The Bolshoi and The Kirov. In Artificial Hells, Claire Bishop argues that the conflation of political and artistic language has encouraged a participatory art that supports the state's agenda. Even the gentrification of hip-hop, for all its gangster lean, echoes a very capitalist morality.

I've banged on about this before, but the structure of art funding, because it comes from the state (or philanthropic individuals), supports certain bourgeois values. I'd do further: modern ideas about the function of art, the nature of the artist or genius, having been defined by Diderot, represent bourgeois conceptions and were designed to be used as weapons against feudal understanding of society.

The idea of the bourgeoisie - which Marx regarded as the class who held the means of production - has been confused with a wider 'middle-class', denoting a certain set of financial and cultural interests. It's usually those people who stand to gain from various forms of capitalism. Both doctors and playwrights, who don't actually own the means of production, could be within this group.

The Glasgow Effect offers a flash-point for the resentment of those who feel excluded by the arts. It's not unique.

Community orientated art is bourgeois

The argument that the money would be better spent on social amenities or food-banks has been wheeled out in the recent past against any art that transgresses popular ideas about what art's supposed to do or be. I'm suspicious of it: The Rite of Spring caused a riot (allegedly) because it transgressed, yet has become an icon of contemporary composition and choreography. But I'm equally suspicious of socially useful art. To take an example - free music lessons for children.

I support free music lessons but, beneath any subsidy lies the assumption that 'music soothes the savage beast': performing art reveals a quality in the human that has more value than, say, frying chips. Community art is sometimes about introducing culture to a group, as if they are bereft without it.

To take an example: remember The Choir? When Gareth Malone rolled up in South Oxhey, the programme presented an area that was culturally deprived. Funnily enough, my mother has run a ballet school on the estate since the 1960s. They interviewed her for the show, but her vision of a South Oxhey that had plenty of culture - her school sent a student to The Bolshoi School, something rare and wonderful - did not follow the narrative of how the working classes didn't get art. So they cut it from broadcast.

Nothing exists in isolation

The Glasgow Effect, whether or not it turns out to be amazing or rubbish, is part of a wider issue. If Creative Scotland handed over fifteen grand to a project that everyone loved, the problem would still be: what are the assumptions upon which they decide? With a bit of research, it's probably easy to find half a dozen grants that seem pointless or trivial. Certain art forms - such as comic books - are mostly excluded from consideration.

Every system has faults. As Loki points out, one of the problems with the current art culture is the exclusion of certain voices. The debate around this one piece is unfair if it refuses to challenge the underlying values of funding, or engages with Creative Scotland as if it has no integrity or honour. 

Pointing out Flaws is a Form of Respect

I have been rude about my fellow critics and, most recently, The Scotsman. I don't do it because I hate them, but because my fantasy is a dialogue with them. I probably go too far. 

It's the same thing, I think, with this debate. All the opinions are valid, intriguing and deserve to be heard. The Glasgow Effect is a starting point, perhaps. 

Note: not all art is bourgeois, but I like to say this as a corrective to the idea that art is, in some way, leftist and radical.

The Glasgow Effect: Band-wagon Jumping with GKV

Oh my God! This is the first time ever that my Facebook feed has been dominated by a single topic. Nearly every post has got a picture of some chips and the message that Ellie Harrison is embarking on a project called The Glasgow Effect. 

And I don't know enough to have an opinion yet... but I do know that every Glasgow hard-man of art is having a crack at her. 

But I did an interview with Ellie before Christmas because the vile arts is always one step ahead. I am going to reprint her words here because, maybe, it will provide more information about who she is and what her work involves. 

The Radical Renewable Art + Activism Fund (RRAAF) is a new and autonomous alternative funding scheme initiated by artistEllie Harrison and supported by 157 backers of a successful Kickstarter campaign (now the "RRAAF Founders"):rraafund.org/kickstarter

Once set up, RRAAF will use a wind turbine to generate energy to fund a ‘no strings attached’ grant scheme for art-activist projects in the UK.

The RRAAF project concept will be launched in Glasgow during December 2015 with a series of publicity stunts featuring the "RRAAF Mascot" – on Thursday 3rd outside Mono Cafe Bar as part of The Only Way is Ethics and on Thursday 10th outside the CCA Glasgow for ArtCOP Scotland.
These will culminate in this Launch Event at the CCA on Thursday 17th December 2015, 18:30 – 20:00. The event is FREE and open to all and will feature presentations and discussion by Ellie Harrison, Georgy Davis from Community Energy Scotlandand some of the RRAAF Founders, as they outline the plan for making the RRAAF project a reality in the coming years.

That was the project she was talking about. Now some words from her. 

Since the start of the global financial crisis in 2008, my work has focussed on researching, exposing and challenging the workings of our economic system. This has led me to develop an expanded practice that now encompasses both art projects / performances (see Anti-Capitalist Aerobics and The Other Forecast), and direct political campaigning (see Bring Back British Rail, the campaign for the public ownership of our railways I have been running since 2009).

In 2013-4, I took part in Campaign Lab - a nine-month ‘economic justice’ campaigning course coordinated by the New Economics Foundation in London. Since then, and in the wake of continued cuts to public funding for the arts, I have become interested in developing a new model for an alternative funding system, which offers a real working alternative, as well as a critique of the status quo: highlighting how current funding sources for art (from commercial sponsorship to state investment) can influence its content, sometimes to the detriment.

And so the idea for the Radical Renewable Art + Activism Fund (RRAAF) was born! Once set up, RRAAF will use a wind turbine to generate renewable energy to fund a ‘no strings attached’ grant scheme for art-activist projects.

In summer 2015, I started developing the RRAAF project identity with Glasgow-based designer Neil McGuire with the support of Beaconsfield Londonand CCA Glasgow, launching the RRAAF concept and Kickstarter in autumn - winter 2015, through a series of publicity stunts and public events in London and Glasgow as part of ArtCOP21, The Only Way is Ethics and ArtCOP Scotland. 

These will culminate in the Launch Event at CCA Glasgow this 17 December 2015 (6:30pm), where I will present the outcomes of the scoping work funded through the Kickstarter together with Georgy Davis from Community Energy Scotland. 

Loki, I'll be expecting a comment in couplets, please. Then we can have a rap battle or something.

Blastin' from the Past...

The Arches' artist in residence, Al Seed, is poised between horror and humour: his successful Festival piece, The Factory, exploited spiteful anxiety and apocalyptic slap-stick. In Hunger, he abandons black humour for physical savagery, evoking famine-starved bodies, mad scientists and the damned's foodless feasts. His emaciated body- and exquisite control of muscles that most performers don't even have - becomes a symbol of ravening anguish. 

Despite the inevitable knowing sniggers, Hunger is profoundly bleak, trapping Seed in a situation that cannot be resolved or ignored: it concludes with a shrug of indifference. Perhaps the Arches itself encourages Seed's journey into misery - this was the perfect match of venue and artist.

Another Arches' production dealt with the same combination of food, intimacy and terror from an accessible perspective. Pit features a mother cooking the final meal for her condemned son, blending hygiene advice with malnutrition and America's southern underclass. Again, the venue heightens the claustrophobia - actors walk around the audience, who are seated for a formal meal - while Megan Barker's script spirals mundane set-pieces into drug abuse and murder with shocking inevitability. Hunger is taut and vicious; Pit is compassionate and loose - at times meandering into vague commentary on deprivation but delivering a chilling conclusion. 

Over at Tramway, Need Company were providing a perfect example of the expansive end of physical theatre. Jokingly introduced as musical comedy, Isabella's Room matched contemporary dance, dirty blues and a mesmerising central performance from Viviane De Muyack. The heroine, a blind geriatric, looks back at her sexual adventures (promiscuity, adultery and incest), her childhood and her academic anthropology (living in a room filled with African artefacts, she visits the country once and briefly). 

Understated and eloquent, morally neutral yet sympathetic, this astonishing show follows the impact of deceit on a single life. A cast of eccentrics, a stage cluttered with a collection that most museums would envy, and an overview of European politics in the twentieth century are merged into a satisfying, gentle narrative, slipping between dance and song, monologue and dialogue. Isabella's Room is a triumph, owning a fluidity and subtle grace that builds to a celebratory finale.

While the Christmas period is usually bereft of challenging art - carol singers and family shows fill the listings, and the misery of Winterval consumerism undermines the need for Al Seed's meditations on mortality - Tramway has the Breathing Space Programme at the start of the month. Gilmore Hill has Firebox and Blaze - a collaboration between local street dancers, contemporary choreographers and electronic musician Magic Daddy on 10th December.

Jo Strømgren and Victor Quijada @ Scottish Dance Theatre 2013

Over the past decade, Scottish Dance Theatre has become a national treasure. Under the direction of Janet Smith, it commissioned new works from emerging choreographers - including Hofesh Schechter, who has gone on to international acclaim - and through an annual appearance at Zoo Venues during Fringe helped to re-establish dance as a vital strand of Edinburgh's August overload.

The arrival of new artistic director Fleur Darkin has seen the company maintain the pace. Currently touring with two new commissions - and a work for children from Darkin herself - SDT take advantage of having a permanent company in a similar fashion to Scottish Ballet: they can afford an eclectic, broad programme. And the two commissions bring two of dance's more maverick minds to Scotland: Jo Strømgren and Victor Quijada. Their double bill is a sustained assault on notions of dance as dull or elitist, respectively tackling a well-worn subject with wit and irony and thoroughly deconstructing the expectation of what makes an evening's entertainment at the dance.

Strømgren's entry, Winter Again, is perhaps the most obviously

connected to classical modes of dance. It is evocative, performed immaculately and seriously by the company, using a stark set and a lilting classical score to evoke the coldest month. Flitting between the idea of winter as a metaphor for emotional darkness - the spoken interludes hint at all manner of savage antics - Strømgren even finds time for a brief object manipulation of a toy hare, old-fashioned hunting rifles and some awkwardly passionate pas de deux.

"One can do something new (which always means reinventing the wheel since everything has been done before somewhere) by theme and form and style et cetera," he says. "But I find it more interesting to always change my own way of working, as in always looking for new tools to tell a story or what can be associated into a story." Certainly, Winter bares scant relation to his most famous works which landed at the Fringe. While they invented new languages and often enjoyed a broad, physical humour, his choreography for SDT showcases the dancers' technique.

"The rehearsal period coincided with a knee injury of mine, and I thought why not – I’ll sit on a chair this time, and ask the dancers to provide shitloads of material," he recalls. "A refreshing flashback to earlier days for me, and hopefully a good process for them with a lot of personal investment. As for now, Winter Again is definitively a company piece, they have adapted my vision and made it their own."

Winter Again manages to be both emotionally tough and superficially stylish, with an undercurrent of pain and anguish never far from the surface. "But for the record," he insists. "No dancers were harmed in this production."

Victor Quijada, by contrast, comes not with a history of unclassifiable work but from the hip hop scene of Los Angeles. His piece has a great deal of fun playing with the audience - Quijada even insults himself early on, and his sense of humour allows the dancers to appear to be on the very edge of chaos. To even explain the central conceit is to give away the punchline, but when the crew throw down, they strut their stuff supremely.

"The work I make uses a movement vocabulary that is influenced by my past as a young b-boy and hip-hop freestyler, and very heavily informed by the contemporary ballet works I performed during my career," he says of his basic style. "I have developed a distinct style that (in my eyes) allows a dancer to be all things: explosive, acrobatic, sharp, fluid, gentle, introspective, honest." In addition to this, SDT have a great deal of fun as the piece cracks open expectations and slowly collapses in on apparent rivalries and ambitions within the company.

When asked about his style, Quijada is precise, if elusive. "I would probably describe it as a 'post-contemporary ballet-break dance-theatre' style," he replies: a description accurate but only comprehensible in the light of the performance. And while hip-hop dance can often be frustrating because of its insistence on authenticity and spectacle, Second Coming impresses through the way Quijada mocks pretension and arrogance. There is even a playful reveal - coming around half way through the performance - that challenges the choreographer's self-importance.

Both of these commissions are reminders of SDT's recent tradition of engaging with international trends in dance and playing with the audience's expectations. That the company so readily turn their skills to the demands of hip-hop and more classical styles suggest that Darkin's reign will capitalise on the advances made by Janet Smith.

Darkin herself is already presenting her debut choreography for SDT - Innocence - which was made for a younger audience. Pulled from her own back catalogue, it introduces the poetry of William Blake to children aged up to seven. mixing up the romantic mystic's words with the simple nursery rhymes that it sometimes imitates.

If the past decade has seen the two major Scottish dance companies, SDT and Scottish Ballet, develop their international reputation and presence, the appointment and arrival of new artistic directors insists that they are not ready to rest on their laurels. With Scottish Ballet offering an ambitious programme in the Edinburgh International Festival, SDT are competing with this triple offering. Darkin herself is a dynamic and original choreographer - although Innocence might keep the kids happy, she has more serious work for adults and her Disgo, which came to the Traverse a few years ago, is a bold breaking of the fourth wall that mashes up social and stage dance. And this double bill holds the promise of more imaginative work to follow.

Cooking up a new dish with old ingredients

In his comprehensive study of pop and rock's apparent obsession with the past Retromania, Simon Reynolds sketches the present of music that is obsessed with its heritage. Aside from the inevitable problems faced by a music that is based on youth and innovation as it matures, Reynolds identifies the internet as enabling a massive archiving of previous trends and encouraging the mix and mash approach of much contemporary music. 

Theatre and performance, however, has always had a less ambiguous relationship with the past - the idea of classic rock might be a problem, and an immensely tedious cataloguing of worthy white male music, but classic theatre is far more easily assimilated into the performance process. The prevalence of Shakespeare, even Greek tragedy, or Chekov in the listings reveals that theatre's past remains part of its vitality.

With the Traverse looking back on fifty years of "new writing" by

selecting fifty contemporary playwrights and Sell A Door touring an adaptation of Orwell's 1984, artists still use the past as a foundation for experimentation. The longer time scales of theatre's history allow a company like Rapture to revive The Sash - originally written in 1973 - and point to its continued relevance, and when David Greig wanted to explore that most pressing modern anxiety, Scottish national identity, he went back to Macbeth. Theatre itself may be seen as old fashioned - certainly, both cinema and television are more immediate - but this allows it to consider the present in a wider context. 

For director Michael Emans, The Sash is as important today as it was at the time of its premiere. The story of a father and son, torn apart by the values that once brought them together - and dealing with the still intense sectarian divide in Glasgow - The Sash is sometimes mistaken for a relic of an early age. "The issues are still key today," says Emans. He regrets that  "it has been sucked into the void that is inhabited by plays like Still a Bigot that take a more politically incorrect view of these things." For while many of the plays that focus on Glasgow's religious conflicts go for the laughs and are conservative in their reading of the city's culture, The Sash is far more personal.

"It is set in 1973 at the height of the troubles in Ireland," Emans admits.  "1972 had been one of the most violent periods in Ireland: when Hector MacMillan wrote it it was immediate and raw, and that power comes across. But it is also about a family, and the Orange Order is still prolific and a lot of people are part of it."

 "It has a lot of emotional and political clout: how the family unit can be destroyed by destroyed by belief," Emans explains. Insisting that it is "a neglected contemporary classic," he points out that "it could be about any father and son who are driven apart because of entrenched beliefs - whether they are religious beliefs or not."

Emans' case for The Sash implicitly invokes the power of theatre to tell both a specific story - this one revolves around a father's traditional faith in the Orange Order against his son's more progressive - and erotic - desires - and examine its underlying metaphysics. Emans is resisting the temptation to update the script.

"It is still very glasgow," he admits. "The action is still set in the early 1970s, before punk rock and rave exposed intergenerational conflict more clearly but he is delighted that the nature of the dramatic conflict is universal. "You can connect to the politics or the intellectual idea of the play. It's a real ride of a play and we are very excited about it."

"It questions how you reconcile a tradition with the aspirations of your children," he continues. "That obsession where people hold onto things because it gives them a sense of belief and consequently alienates other people. If you are stuck you can loose the thing that you want to nurture, that you are prepared to forego a relationship with your family. " While Reynolds ponders the problems of pop's increasing obsession with the past, bemoaning, amongst other things, how the museums of rock'n'roll give more space to the 1960s and 1970s than to what is happening now, Emans has recognised that the past isn't as distant or different as it might appear.

Meanwhile, Gob Squad are bringing a different reading of past glory to the stage: Kitchen restages Andy Warhol's film as a live performance. But this version is a very long way away from the kind of reverential musical that transforms Priscilla Queen of the Desert into a star vehicle for Jason Donovan. In the spirit of Warhol's movie, there's plenty of improvisation, waiting and questioning. 

Homing in on an earlier decade than The Sash, and a more radical location in New York, Kitchen does poke at some of the same questions, mostly around the theme of change. Undoubtedly, a revolution was happening in Warhol's Factory, but its nature is not yet clear. Gob Squad have a crack at discussing those issues that are still in ferment today (feminism is a major concern for the actors in 1965 and 2013). 

Unlike The Sash, however, it has the anxiety of being hip and trying to work out what it means to be ahead of the pack. 

Kitchen takes Warhol more as a foundation than a fundamental text, and plays hard and fast with the original film, even adding in elements from his other movies and boasting "modern haircuts." There's a clear acknowledgement that this is a reinterpretation. If the 1960s produced much of the most exciting music in pop, there are broader cultural changes of the same period which are still being felt today. The rise in hipster fashions reflect Warhol's influence on art culture, and the performed amorality of Warhol himself (he remained a devout Catholic benrath his apparently superficial persona) echoes in the dry superficiality of much contemporary art - which itself might be a game or front.

The contrast between the two pieces elegantly emphasises the complexity of theatre's history. Gob Squad are themselves an avant-garde company, in the sense of using a more informal process of creation than the script, yet they find themselves casting glances back to an earlier period for clues. Warhol's films are perhaps most dated by those things, like not learning lines, that made it so now in 1965. The Sash maintains its philosophical energy through the old school techniques of script and direction.

Both The Sash and Kitchen might come under the theatre banner, and has some overlap in themes, but they are as different in genre as The Velvet Underground and Wylie: if theatre is more comfortable with its own past than popular music, it has a similar diversity of style, which is sometimes obscured by the conformity of critical approaches. In the example of the Traverse's Fifty emerging playwrights, or the various performances that visit Summerhall (from zomble infestation immersive, scientific theatre to French clown tales of Russian writers), it's possible to imagine a variety of voices that specialise as much as the independent music charts. 

But for Emans there is something that connects all great theatre. "I am interested in plays that can transform people - that an audience come out of it thinking different things -  it's almost therapeutic," he says.  "The name of my company,  Rapture means a heightened state of awareness. Spectacle  is wonderful but if the substance can move people that is more wonderful." And above all, Kitchen and The Sash are connected by their willingness to provoke both questions and this intense experience.



The Sash On tour across Scotland until June 
Gob Squad's Kitchen The Arches 3 May, 7,30pm