Play of Gray novel among projects given £1m of funding
A NEW stage adaptation of a novel by the artist and author Alasdair Gray is among the 37 projects to be backed by nearly £1 million in funds from the nation’s main arts funding body.
Creative Scotland has given £10,000 in its latest round of funding to support the writers Sara Shaarawi and Henry Bell to make Haneen, a new bilingual stage version Janine.
The play, to be developed in English and Arabic, will be reset in post-revolutionary Cairo, and will involve artists working together in both Egypt and Glasgow.
The production will be “a play about anxiety in a post-truth world, an exploration of fear and control as it exists sexually, politically, and morally in the mind of an Egyptian salesman and in the minds of Glaswegian and Cairene audiences.” of Gray’s novel 1982,
Creative Scotland awarded over £900,000 in National Lottery Funding through its Open Project Fund.
Awards of between £1,300 and £112,500 have been made to festivals, musicians, visual artists, dancers, writers, community arts and a mobile cinema.
The biggest award goes to UZ Arts for funding to “continue membership of the European network of producers/presenters of art in the public realm, Insitu”.
Details of the awards came on the same day that the arts funder said that despite a £100,000 cut in its grant in last week’s Scottish Budget, it will still be able to support 118 regularly funded organisations in 2017/18.
In visual arts, Edinburgh-based Talbot Rice Gallery has received nearly £100,000 to create a yearlong programme of exhibitions, residencies and public events relating to the moving image.
The Shetland Folk Festival in April, and the East Neuk Festival, in late June, also received awards.
The Glasgow School of Art Choir has received money for its Fifth Anniversary Gala Concert, to be held in Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum on May 27 next year.
The concert will contain music by Sir James MacMillan, the world premiere of Light Through Tall Windows, which was composed for the ensemble after the fire which damaged the Mackintosh Building in 2014.