Events flow in for shores festival
● Programme unveiled for yearlong ‘Coasts and Waters’ campaign
A nationwide tour by a tenmetre tall mythical sea goddess puppet, a coastal opera featuring modern-day mermaids singing at sunset, a six-month rowing relay and a seaweed festival on an uninhabited island will part of the first tourism drive focusing on Scotland’s “unrivalled shores”.
Performances and events will pop on the banks of the Forth and Clyde Canal, a castle overlooking Loch Ness, an “urban beach” in Perthshire, and the “river town” where the ship Cutty Sark was built in 1869, Dumbarton.
The £1.14 million Year of Coasts and Waters 2020 programme will also see a Northern Lights Festival transform Wick Harbour, the staging of Scotland’s biggest open water rowing race on the Clyde, and a film and live music experience inspired by the RNLI’S lifeboat crews.
Open-air cinema screenings will be held at South Queensferry’s marina in the run-up to the Edinburgh International Film Festival, while the National Theatre of Scotland will stage specially-created plays on Calmac ferries.
Other events include a festival to herald the unveiling of a new marina in Stornoway, and a weekend “seaside festival” that will be staged at Irvine’s harbour against the backdrop of the Isle of Arran. The campaign will get under way at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections music festival in January, with the official unveiling of “Storm” – a puppet created by theatre company Visual Mechanics.
She will lead a parade from the Clyde to the Royal Concert Hall, which will host a daytime “Coastal Connections” event, where acts from coastal communities like Capercaillie, Skerryvore, Julie Fowlis and Daimh will perform.
The Nevis Ensemble, “Scotland’s street orchestra”, will work with communities on the Isle of Eigg, and in Aberdeen, Saltcoats, Stevenston and Dunbar, as well as composers from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow, to create new orchestral music inspired by their relationship with the sea.
Visitors to the Isle Martin Seaweed Festival will take a boat trip from Ardmair, near Ullapool, to the Summer Isles for art installations, live music, walks, workshops and spoken word events.
Signal at Dusk, an “operatic odyssey” created for Irvine’s beach by Glasgowbased company Cryptic, will see a group of modernday mermaids lure audiences as lights search the landscape. Around 1,000 participants from more than 60 different rowing clubs will pass a commemorative baton around Scotland’s coastline.