The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
TUNES ON THE MOON
Ahead of his new show with Horsecross Arts, pianist and storyteller Will Pickvance tells Jennifer Mclaren why allowing yourself the chance to mess about can sometimes be the key to creativity
E ver since he can remember, Edinburgh-based Will Pickvance has had a strange affinity with the piano.
“For me, because it was something I could do relatively easily, I thought that I must have somehow got there by mistake and I was going to get found out,” he recalls.
“As a kid, it seemed wherever I went there were jobsworths trying to stop me from playing – there would be a piano in school that you’re not allowed to play.”
Will, 43, who describes himself as “half-man, half-piano”, is preparing to present his new family show, First Piano On
The Moon, live online with Horsecross Arts next week.
It tells the story of a boy who daydreams of playing in front of a large, live audience. When his dream comes true, he should be excited, but instead worries the world will discover the truth: He can’t really play the piano – he can only mess around and make people laugh.
“It definitely has an autobiographical theme,” explains Will. “When we are working on it and talking about the character, I semi-imagine the character as someone who isn’t me – but it largely is me.
“My starting place with this were things like imposter syndrome, I suppose. I always felt whenever I had any success with the piano, I was asked to do things and was put on a pedestal within the realms of my local school.
“The teachers used to be mildly surprised when they discovered I could actually play as they wondered when I would ever have had the time to co-ordinate my two hands!”
A self-confessed “improvising pianist by make-up”, Will says he can’t recall not being able to play the piano and draws inspiration from all kinds of music, from Bach to Fats Waller, Gilbert and Sullivan, and The Beatles.
He normally performs his one-man shows at Edinburgh’s Festival Fringe in August before heading off on tour to destinations such as Australia, America and China. First Piano On The Moon premiered at the Fringe in 2019.
Instead of his usual 2020 touring schedule, Will and his partner welcomed a baby brother
for their toddler son last year and – just to add to the chaos – also moved house.
Despite the flux, he has been able to work on a new version of the show with Perth Theatre’s artistic director Lu Kemp, to be presented live via Zoom.
Will believes online theatre is now a whole new genre in its own right, and it’s just getting started.
“From a performance point of view, sometimes online live gets pitted against live theatre, and I don’t think they should be seen as direct competitors, because the online stuff gives us options that we don’t have in live theatre,” he says.
“We can be much more intimate and we have to be much tighter with the framing of shots. We can also use different cameras to achieve different emotions – for example a confessional camera.
“I think we may in fact come to recognise this period as an important moment in changing art practices.”
Lu Kemp says Horsecross was buoyed by the success of its festive pantomime, Oh Yes We Are! A Quest For Long Lost Light And Laughter, which was also presented live online after Tier 3 restrictions scuppered plans for socially-distanced performances.
Families tuned in from 25 countries across the world during its run, meaning it reached people who wouldn’t normally have been able to see the shows.
“It was hard to convince people to join us in it as an audience before, whereas now there’s a growing wave of understanding of what’s possible, and the ease of it,” explains Lu.
“That liveness and that relationship between Will and the audience is really important to the piece. It’s not interactive, but that Will can talk to his audience is really important.
“We hope that we are making a show that can be repeated, and that we can partner with other theatres and do it again and again, because we can reach people wherever they are.”
First Piano On The Moon will have two live broadcasts from Will’s studio at Summerhall arts centre in Edinburgh, on Saturday March 13, and there will be a short Q&A with him afterwards. There will also be online performances for schools next week, ahead of the public performances.
The 50-minute show combines storytelling and music, mingling Mozart with an unlikely birthday invitation, a frantic chase through Salzburg, and the appearance of the maestro himself. It’s aimed at children aged seven and up.
Lu adds: “I think what this show is about is trying to demystify talent – something that appears to be enormously complex to something that is reachable through messing around and learning to craft that material.”
Will agrees that messing around can lead to creativity – but, equally, laziness can lead to complacency.
He reveals: “Because I could play the piano, it always seemed to be quite out of kilter with my school reports, which used to be pretty unflattering. They didn’t tend to say I was stupid – but usually scatty, disorganised, messy.
“As I was starting to write this, I began to think these are the kind of ingredients you would want if you’re going to be making anything because these are ingredients of creativity and imagination.
“Daydreaming is something I did a lot of as a kid – and procrastination. Daydreaming as procrastination, really.
“Another aspect, I guess, was chickening out of things – sometimes you need to push yourself to go through a barrier and I used to chicken out of things that probably would have been useful to break through.
“If you have an innate talent it’s harder to work at it because you don’t have to work at it so hard to get results. I suppose the hard work is the difference between coasting and excelling.”
Setting can also play a huge roll in live theatre and, in the case of this semi-autobiographical show, he performs from his studio.
“There’s an authenticity to that you couldn’t achieve on a stage, as you’re actually firsthand in the space – you’re in the mess that you are describing. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s a play,” he says.
Over the years, Will has performed his one-man shows at the Fringe, including Anatomy of the Piano (2015) and Pianohood (2017).
“The Fringe is a great place for launching shows because of the people you meet there and the opportunities that come about,” he says.
Will admits that pre-pandemic, he had secretly wished he could press pause on life for a little while.
“It’s not that I want to die, but when you’re getting offers of work, you can’t say no. God intervened and pressed pause on the whole world.
“Weirdly, I think this last year of being able to work with Lu and make these videos and be ‘local’ has been amazing, from a personal point of view.”
After lockdown struck, Will says he became something of an online hit in China.
“It’s quite funny being an internet sensation in China – then I put the video on Youtube here and it will have 500 views.”
After opening First Piano On The Moon in 2019, he was in China performing another until Christmas.
“I did a lot playing in the autumn and I was even in Wuhan,” he adds.
The original plan had been to return to China in the spring of 2020 with First Piano on the Moon – but the world had other ideas.
With the China locked down in January, the Shanghai-based company that normally arranges Will’s shows had a new request.
“They were calling me to ask if I could make some little videos to entertain the kids in lockdown with piano.
“I quite enjoyed that. They bought me some theatre lights and equipment so I could do that. So I got into the habit of making those – and then we went into a lockdown ourselves.
“I carried on for a bit then I moved all the theatre equipment into my house and continued to do videos from home. I tried to make my sitting room look like my studio – I don’t recommend it.
“What happened was domestic mess became merged with professional mess. So suddenly I was tripping over light stands as well as children’s toys!”
I THINK WE MAY COME TO RECOGNISE THIS PERIOD AS AN IMPORTANT MOMENT IN CHANGING ART PRACTICES
First Piano on the Moon will broadcast live on Saturday March 13 at 11am and 2.30pm. For more information, visit horsecross.co.uk
G rowing up in Angus and Fife where her Black Isleraised father worked as a dairyman, Perth-born Sheila Gaul has always had an interest in the infamous witch hunts which took place in Scotland in the 16th and 17th centuries. On trips to Dornoch as a child, she learned about Janet Horne – the last person to be executed legally for “witchcraft” in the British Isles, in 1727.
Having gone to school in Anstruther and later settled in Crail, where she’s now lived for 25 years, she also knew about some of the local tales – including that of Janet Cornfoot, who was accused of witchcraft and murdered by a lynch mob in Pittenweem in 1705.
However, it wasn’t until 2019, after ill health forced her to give up her employment in social work, that the former nurse appreciated the true scale of the witch trials, which saw around 4,000 people in Scotland accused of witchcraft between 1563 and 1736.
The revelation for Sheila came when she attended an International Women’s Day event organised by local studies officer Sara Kelly and Fife councillor Kate Stewart.
Kate, having an interest in Lilias Adie – the accused revenant witch of Torryburn – and Sara, having a general interest in witch trials, came together for a lecture Sara had organised in Dunfermline.
After discussions and a conference, a group called Fife Witches Remembered was created.
Ideas taken forward were to raise awareness of the accused witches of Scotland; to create and maintain a national monument to all the accused; to gain a full legal pardon for those found guilty of witchcraft in Scotland; and to get an apology from the Scottish churches.
Sara and Kate have since put together the Accused Witches’ Trail that was launched in Culross. They invited Claire Mitchell QC, with her newly formed Witches of Scotland campaign, to open the trail.
Now, Fife Witches Remembered has changed its name to Remembering the Accused Witches of Scotland (RAWS), and is in the process of applying to become a registered charity. Sheila, who is the first chairperson of RAWS, says a lot of work still has to be done.
A start, she says, would be recognition from the powers-that-be – government and church – that this period of history was “shocking and awful”. However, she emphasises it’s not about pointing the finger of blame.
“Because we are grassroots and voluntary, we are hoping to be a charity and to get some funds,” she says.
“We are looking for a piece of land for a memorial on the coast – ideally in Fife due to Lilias Adie and the other well-known witches.
“We have approached the Scottish Government about the need for this.
“When it comes to an apology from the church and state, however, we’re looking for more of a recognition that a historic wrong was done.
“We can’t change the past. This was obviously a huge period of time when the state and church worked together to terrorise the population.
“We need some recognition of their part in it and their support going forward.
“We certainly don’t want to assign blame because that would serve no purpose.
“But an acknowledgement that witch hunting was misplaced needs to be recognised and atoned for in some kind of way.
“We can’t even say it was Protestants or Catholics. Actually nobody came out of it well – the state, the crown, the Catholic or Protestant church.”
Sheila says being involved with this project has “been a joy” due to her interest in Scottish history and indeed the history of women.
The group, she says, are also working on a VR project with masters students at Abertay
University. The idea is to make an augmented reality project that would place memorial markers in locations identified according to Edinburgh University’s survey of Scottish witchcraft database.
But she finds herself particularly fascinated and “disturbed” by the role of King James VI of Scotland and I of England.
“King James was such a good propagandist – he legitimised the witch trials and the belief that the devil was his greatest enemy, and he himself the godliest king and a mighty warrior against ‘the devil and his witches’,” she says.
“If you put him into context, though, his dad was murdered by his mother allegedly, his mum ran off with someone else, then was captured by the Queen (Elizabeth I), he was fed propaganda from the Protestant end of it. John Knox was his tutor. He was probably, to all intents and purposes, paranoid, and this fed down through society.”
Of the 4,000 or so people accused of being witches in Scotland between 1563 and 1736, about 85% were women and 15% were men; about two-thirds of them being executed.
Reasons to have the finger pointed at you included simply being a quarrelsome person, being a troublemaker, not attending church, not having a husband, being old, or being perceived as “odd”.
King James took a personal interest in witch trials due to his betrothed Ann of Demark being unable to sail to Scotland because of stormy seas.
James also suffered difficult and stormy seas when he went to Denmark to collect Ann.
When he reached Denmark, he found the views were that witches had attempted to prevent the marriage; that with James being so godly, the devil had it in for him, and therefore he believed that Danish and Scottish witches were out to get him.
“Being accused put you in terrible peril,” says Sheila.
“You could be let off, as Lilias Adie had been, and then years later be accused again and this time not so lucky. You might have become outcast in the community for the suspicion of being a witch. Horrific tortures included ‘walking and waking’ when you would be kept awake for days and have a couple of men making you walk round and round until your feet bled.
“The minister (would be) shouting at you that you were a servant of the devil and your immortal soul was at risk.
“This was the most common form of torture to get a witch to confess and name other witches.
“Sleep deprivation has been outlawed by the Geneva Convention but many of the other forms of torture that were used during this time are still used in parts of the world today.”
Three centuries have passed since witch hunts were outlawed.
However, for Sheila, they don’t feel like they are that long ago in history.
She believes a lot of the circumstances and social changes that took place then have parallels with what is happening in the world today – it’s just a “different enemy”.
“Look at Donald Trump,” she says. “The way he whipped up people into a frenzy where they descended on Congress.
“Comparisons could be made with the way in which people in Pittenweem were whipped up by the church to lynch and murder Janet Cornfoot in 1705. The rhetoric is very similar. A divided society. The circumstances that make people react in a way that they probably wouldn’t normally react.
“Right now we’ve got the perfect storm for unrest. We are going through a pandemic which is making people’s lives insecure, and when people are feeling insecure and uncertain of the future, they are easily panicked into doing things they wouldn’t normally do.
“Here, we’ve got huge social changes like Brexit. The possibility of an independent Scotland is a huge social change.
“One of the things about the times of the witch trials is that there were plagues, crop failures, change, Covenanters, John Knox wandering around telling everyone they are ‘going to hell’. He himself was a bit of a misogynist – he felt women were second-class citizens. There was stuff boiling away.
“We have a similar situation now – we have a ‘plague’, we’ve got political unrest, we’ve got lots of social change going on. There’s an uncertain future. Conservatives trying to vilify immigrants. ‘It’s all their fault’ without people understanding what’s behind that. When people are panicked and scared they do stupid things.”
Sheila believes the Scottish people and nation are strong enough to come to terms with our past and what our ancestors did no matter how awful it has been.
“We must reckon with this past,” she adds, “but we need to be careful not to impose modern day standards to the past. The power imbalance during the time of the witch trials has to be recognised, and those brave innocent people caught up in all the hysteria need to be remembered and given back their dignity, remembering they were victims of an injustice.”
REASONS TO HAVE THE FINGER POINTED AT YOU INCLUDED BEING OLD, OR BEING PERCEIVED AS ‘ODD’