Off to Muck

A few days to recover, mend the caisean-uchd, the van, and the horse masks, and tomorrow we're off to Mallaig ready for the ferry to Muck on Thursday morning, followed by a quick sprint down to another ferry, this time to Islay.

I've found time between jobs to read the Comments Book from Edinburgh, and it's full of glowing comments including:

"A story of beauty, sanity and one man's truth. Courageous, weaving through life itself. Stunning production in its vast sway of talents."

[From Liz Lochhead]:

"The most beautiful, moving, magical & amazing show about Art & extraordinary, ordinary life."

"Second time and it's even more profound"

"Beautiful singing"

....and so on!

Soon we'll be back in Glasgow - at Partick Gaelic School on Wednesday 4th September, and then on Thursday 5th there's a special event at Perth Museum & Art Gallery relating to their exhibition 'Weaver of Grass' about Angus MacPhee, which obviously relates to our show there on the 6th and 7th September, and finally to say that our  old friend Joanne B Kaar is running a special grass weaving workshop at Perth a month later - on the 7th October.

Worth saying that tickets for the Glasgow Partick Gaelic School performance can be bought directly from our website shop - click here.

Auditioning the singers

Yesterday was spent at Sgoil Ghaidhlig Ghlaschu, the Glasgow Gaelic School, auditioning four young women Gaelic singers - originally it was planned to see five, but one dropped out the day before.

In all honesty I had been worrying about this. Partly because I knew Mairi Morrison would be a very hard act to follow, but also because the people we had to select from (i.e. the singers who had applied for the work) were quite small in number, and once I had dismissed non-Gaelic speakers and a couple of Irish Gaelic singers from the list, I was barely left with enough people to fill a day of auditioning. 

So Loz Kaye (our Music Director), Mairi Morrison (who developed this role last year), and myself arrived at the Gaelic School at 9 in the morning ready to set up. The first surprise was the school itself. In my mind it was going to be a small 'alternative' kind of place with perhaps 4 classrooms. How wrong could I be! It was a bustling, three-story, college-like building with a nursery right through to a senior school. Groups of smart-looking teenagers stood in groups chatting away in Gaelic and, once through the security and signed-in, we were shown to the top floor where we were given a drama studio for the day - along a corridor of other drama and theatre studios, with harps, keyboards, guitars, fiddles and accordions lined up ready for use.

Then the auditions. From the first I realised my worries were unfounded - and again, like the auditions at CCA last year - I was immediately impressed by the quality, integrity and spirit  of the young singers in Gaelic in Scotland. It's truly humbling to see how this incredible heritage is being successfully passed on and being renewed by young people.  

We require a fine singer, but also someone who can communicate well through their story-telling and physical performing, which plays a very important part in the show. Finally we need to have someone totally at ease in Gaelic. All of the young women we auditioned had two of these attributes, often to a very high standard, but we need all three. So at the end of the day when the auditions were over it was an interesting discussion. Eventually a choice was made and we finished for the day - exhilarated and pleased by the way things had unfolded. 

So thank you Melissa, Elspeth, Debbie and Catherine. You all gave really well of yourselves - we were seriously impressed. But a decision had to be made - we would have loved to have had all of you - and so by now the emails have gone out to you. Mòran taing.