The decline of the blackhouse

I'm back home now after my second recent trip to the Outer Hebrides. My work on the Angus show will slow right down now, as I have to turn my attention to other projects. But work on 'Angus' at Horse + Bamboo is far from stopping. Esther will be putting together the tour for 2012, and Helen will be spending a lot of her time in raising the funds that will enable the tour to take place. 

Individual artists will continue the work too. Joanne B Kaar will be making more of the woven grass work that replicates the pieces made by Angus MacPhee, and which will be such an important part of the final production. I'm also going to be planning the animated film sections with Daniella Orsini, and I hope Daniella will be able to make a start on these pieces of film, many of which will use the still and filmed footage that I've been taking on my recent trips. 

On our last full day on the islands we visited a ruined tigh dubh, a blackhouse, not dissimilar to the one Angus and his sisters would have been brought up in. Inside were the remains of the stove, the furniture, all the items the family living there would have used in their lives:

A sad sight, and not an unusual one on the islands. I wondered if Angus's home in Iochdar would have had its walls clad in wood as with this one or simply plastered. Of course his old family home is now slowly deteriorating as I've noted in previous blogs. The adjoining houses to the one in these photographs had gone a stage further, with the roof beams having collapsed, and the marram grass thatching had fallen with them into the inside of the house walls.

A foreign land...

Organising a theatre tour of Scotland is for us, in many ways, the same as organising a tour of a foreign country. The organisations we deal with are often very different to those in England, both those agencies that might help us with the touring logistics and those that could help us with any funding. The Scottish Arts Council has also very recently been superceded by Creative Scotland, so there's a very new organisation to deal with.

Esther and Helen have began looking at all of this. I also wrote to an old friend, Jenny Wilson, who for many years was Director of Dumfries and Galloway Arts Association, and before that Director of the Crawford Arts Centre in St. Andrews. Jenny wrote back with a long list of suggestions, and that helped begin the process. Since then Esther has visited Fife to talk with Joyce Laing, and there's the plan to (very soon) travel to Inverness to meet the people involved with theatre touring in Scotland and, in particular, of the Highlands and Islands. 

The photographs here are a few more from the recent trip I made with Alison to the Uists, and show the ruined house that Angus was brought up in. The blackhouse is actually perched just above the beach, and literally five steps (and a jump down) will bring you to the high-water line. The close up (above) hints at the textures and woven components that exist even within the fabric of that home; textures that clearly meant so much  to Angus himself. Below is a shot of what's left of the interior.