Born out of necessity but now the new normal

The Scotsman Sessions were born out of necessity. By the middle of March, with theatres and music venues about to go dark for the foreseea - ble, it was clear that the Scotsman’s a r t s t e a m wa s g o i n g to have to work in a different way; if there were no longer any live performances to write about, we decided, we would just have to commission video performances from some of the people we’d been planning to cover and write about those instead.

Our last reviews of live events appeared in The Scotsman on Monday 16 March. Then, on Friday 20 March, we released our first four S cotsman S ess i o n s v i d e o s o n s c o t s ma n . com, with introductions written by our critics.

Twenty-five weeks, 100 sessions and 220,000 video views later, what was supposed to be a temporar y fix has increasingly come to feel like the new normal.

Filmed on smar tphones in lo cati ons all over S c otland, a n d s p a n n i n g mus i c , t h e a - t r e , d a n c e a n d c o medy, t h e Sessions have been better than we could possibly have imagined.

At time of writing, there’s no way of knowing when S cotland’s arts venues will be able to open again, allowing us to get back to reviewing live performances, so it’s hard to say how long the S cotsman S essions will carry on.

A s we p u b l i s h o u r 10 0 t h S ession, though, we’d like to say huge thank you to all the amazing artists who have collaborated with us so far, and to all the Scotsman readers who have made for such a supportive and enthusiastic (albeit virtual) audience.

Here’s hoping things don’t have to be virtual for too much longer.