I live in Edinburgh, and every year as August is approaching I tell people, nah, I’m not really planning to do anything much in the festivals, not really, just a little something. And every year I end up with a diary full of strange and beautiful performances and things I’m delighted to be part of and so much to do that when September comes I want to be out of mobile phone and WiFi range for at least a week. This year, I’m curating a live art programme, performing in Forest Fringe, and doing poetry gigs in between:

What We Owe @ Forest Fringe, Out of the Blue

What We Owe
One-on-one performance
20 – 22 August, 11am-1pm & 4pm-5.20pm
23 August, 11am-1pm only
Out of the Blue Drill Hall, 30-38 Dalmeny St

Trapped in a maze of final demands from which you may never escape? Pestered by obligations to friends, family and the television? Cowering under the weight of your debts? What We Owe is the highly unqualified debt counselling service FOR YOU.

We’ll lead you through the journey of what you owe – not just financially, but also emotionally, socially, ecologically, and more. Together we’ll create an absurd (but often effective) Personal Debt Audit, covering everything from the meals you ought to cook your parents to the trees you need to plant, then begin the journey up your personal mountain of debt with a Debt Action Plan. In just 20 minutes, we promise to leave you lighter and happier – or at least with a colour-coded spreadsheet.

Vanquish your debt monsters! Burn your student loan statements! Ignore your friends! In an economy driven by huge financial debts, What We Owe is a tragicomic look at what we mean by debt, and how we might struggle to even begin to cope with it.

www.forestfringe.co.uk

Peep Anatomy @ George Square Gardens

ANATOMY is tickled pink, purple, blue, and every other rainbow colour to announce the line-up for our Edinburgh Fringe début, in collaboration with the extraordinary PEEP venue from Natural Shocks.

PEEP is a brave new space — a small box of wonders with a full programme of theatre, dance, cabaret, sound installation and live art. The audience are seated in private booths peeping on the unfolding show – but the artists can’t see them. It’s a peepshow, but definitely “not for the raincoat brigade” (The Guardian).

Through Keyholes of Flesh is an intimate and unique series of live art installations created bespoke for the PEEP venue. The strange, the wonderful, the grotesque and the eerie mundane. £2 a look – for as little or as long as you want.

Full programme at anatomynight.wordpress.com.

Poetry All Over the Place

ANTISLAM
Saturday 10th August, 7.30pm, Banshee Labyrinth

Worst poet wins! We don’t mean bad: we mean hilariously terrible, laugh-out-loud embarrassing, entertainingly cringe-worthy poetry so bad it transcends quality, becoming genius. Featuring top names from Fringe spoken word: with poets this good, being this bad, it’ll be awesome. Hosted by Paula Varjack and Dan Simpson.

http://edinburghfestival.list.co.uk/event/360643-the-anti-slam/

BBC Edinburgh Fringe Slam
Wednesay 14th August, 8pm, Potterow

For the third year in a row, we’ve invited 24 of the best performance poets in the UK, 12 women and 12 men, to compete for our Poetry Slam title. We have UK National Champions, Scottish National Champions, two former BBC Slam Champions and the Scottish Makar.  Hosted by former Scottish Slam Champion, Young Dawkins, the 2013 Slam takes place over five nights – four heats followed by a Grand Final.

https://www.facebook.com/events/472330412861636/

 

Being a freelance artist means sending a lot of applications off, and it means rarely being able to say no when they come up trumps. This sometimes leads to trying to do a stupid amount of stuff in a short space of time. I’m about to embark on the busiest month of performance of my life, doing six completely different shows during March, in four different cities, sometimes on the same day. It’d be nice to see you at one of them.

On March 5th I’m over in Glasgow for Arches Scratch with SAFEWORD, a series of theatrical experiments about consent I’m noodling about with. You can read about a previous experiment here; this one will be completely different, but will probably also involve a whip.

Later that week, on March 8th I’m doing a full set at StAnza, Scotland’s international poetry festival. I’m hugely delighted to be there: it’s a wonderful event, and a real honour to be performing there, especially with my frequent co-conspirator Rachel McCrum.

That night, I’m whizzing back to Edinburgh for Anatomy, a quarterly live art music hall event I co-curate at Summerhall. I’ll be hosting, all bleary-eyed and poetical; we’ve got a brilliant line-up of film-makers, dancers, pianists, boylesques, poets and allsorts.

The next week, from March 14th – 20th, I’ll be performing What We Owe at Rogue’s Galleries in Chester. This is lovely festival is taking over a series of empty shops in the town centre; I’ll be offering a version of the debt counselling service last seen at Arches LIVE, which you can see a video of here. As it’s a week-long showing, I’m looking forward to building ongoing documentation of the debts of the people of Chester and how we work out how to pay them back.

Immediately following, on March 21st, I’m bouncing down to London to perform Class Act at the Sprint Festival. I developed the show at the Ovalhouse last year, so it’s lovely to be back in London with it, especially in a festival with such a fantastic line-up, including Chris Goode, Coney, Dirty Market and more. I’m just sad I won’t get to see more of it!

Then for March 25th I’m bouncing back up the East Coast to Edinburgh for Whisper Down the Mountain. This is a tasty performance art exchange project, where artists from New York will be performing new pieces by artists from Edinburgh, and vice versa. I’ll be doing something feminist with duct tape at Inverleith House, while someone in New York is going to be running, to my delight, a version of my Tilting at Windbags Trump-baiting project.

Then I’m nearly done. I get a breather for a few days, and then it’s back to Glasgow on March 29th for the glorious Buzzcut Festival, where I’ll be doing another version of Class Act, alongside enjoying everything else that’s on offer. Like Sprint, it’s a fantastic and varied showcase, with big names alongside wee bletherskites like me.

I am not intending to do much in April. But you never know.