Heart-stopping and soul-stirring: Our critics’ arts highlights of 2018

VISUAL ART 14-18 Now Keith Bruce

IT was a programme that set 21st-century standards for the commissioning of artwork and everyone in the UK came within the reach of the 14-18 Now commemoration of the centenary of the First World War.

Among the final-year highlights were Anna Meredith and 59 Productions’ Five Telegrams, opening both the Edinburgh International Festival and the BBC Proms, and 306: Dusk, the final part of the music-theatre trilogy by Oliver Emmanuel and Gareth Williams in Perth.

The culmination, though, was Danny Boyle’s Pages of the Sea, remembering individual sacrifices in a participative project of sand sculpture and communal reading of a specially commissioned poem from Carol Ann Duffy on the centennial Remembrance Day itself.

Of the half-dozen possible locations in Scotland, including St Andrews,

I was at Ayr South Beach and was moved beyond words. In a year when false memories of the 20th century’s global conflicts were invoked by insular racist bigots, Pages of the Sea spoke truth unto power.

Picks of 2018 continue on next page