Thinking of that atmosphere, a couple of moments come to mind to me personally.

The packed audience in the Red Lecture Theatre, listening to Iain Sinclair give a specially-written talk on the psychogeographical triangulation between London, Edinburgh, and the Lake District. He talked passionately about Kurt Schwitters, and Chris Petit’s film Radio On (both of which were also featured on the programme), and a devoted audience left feeling informed and inspired.

Another memory is of Little Bulb’s Goose Party on the final Saturday night, as they played an encore in the Dissection Room bar. Dressed in hilarious fancy dress and leading a swinging party, when they slowed down for a cover of Old Crow Medicine Show’s Wagon Wheel (Mama Rock Me) it made for a particularly special few minutes.

Such moments as these did not go without recognition from outside quarters. Summerhall shows received an enormous proportion of glowing (nay, adulatory!) 5-star and 4-star reviews, not least for the spectacular all-night performance Hotel Medea.

We were also pleased to receive a number of awards and nominations, including Herald Angel awards for Hotel Medea, for the ‘These Silences’ writing conference, and, best of all, for the venue in general.

These successes are all due to the belief and abilities of the artists, the staff, and the organisations who worked with us to make Summerhall happen. We were thrilled that so many companies took a chance on this as-yet-unopened venue, many of whom are at the top of their professional game. The management team were incredibly positive and flexible, and the staff as a whole supremely friendly and capable.

The support and collaboration of Battersea Arts Centre was enormous, and great fun to work with, and the involvement of the Demarco European Art Foundation added unique depth and context to the contemporary aspects of the programme: both were essential to Summerhall’s presence.

Now is a time for reflection, but we are already working on plans for next year, and for year-round activities in due course. Keep an eye on the website and our social media platforms, and we will keep you updated as things progress. Exciting times!

Rupert Thomson, Festival Director

The play ‘Singapore’ begins with a volunteer from the audience taking centre stage with the sole director and actor (Mr Thomson himself).  Often an audience member is brought on a stage with the status of a pawn, yet here she was instantly bestowed with the highest rank and invited to read aloud from a manifesto and asked to convince Mr Thomson of the truth within it.

Questions and answers followed the reading and here began a profound experience.  The concept of the place ‘Singapore’ as an actual play unfolds with a gentle weaving of audience experience with the director’s own life-changing personal experience of the place Singapore.

The play meanders and shapes the human mind according to the participants, and just as in life, one never knows quite what will transpire.  However, as a place previously unknown to me, I was also furnished with many interesting facts about the pla(y)ce, most especially of its tranquility and generosity of spirit.

Singapore is theatre with the capacity to really connect people and I would highly recommend it, including for those who might otherwise avoid participative experiences, perhaps most especially so.

Singapore will be performed again on August 20 at 15:00. Tickets are £5 / £4 and available at http://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/theatre/singapore

The Culture Show has taken up residence at Summerhall for the second time this August, to bring viewers the best of this year’s Edinburgh Festivals.

David Sedaris, Grammy Award nominated American humorist, writer, comedian, bestselling author, and radio contributor and Sue Perkins discuss; plastination, auto-asphixiation, Joaquin Phoenix, masturbation, nudist camps for senior citizens, boring murder trials, Spanish zombie movies, catheters & condoms, Kate Middleton & She-wees. These are  just a few of the highlights………….

By David Pollock
Published: 6/8/2011

A visually striking new venue with a quirky, eclectic programme, Summerhall’s highlights include an all-night where bunk beds are provided for audience members to sleep in. David Pollock gets a guided tour

The former Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies is a building with history, and – for the duration of this year’s Edinburgh Festival at least – a bright and unexpected future. Tucked away on a corner of the Meadows, a few minutes’ walk from the new Fringe hub around Bristo Square, the rechristened Summerhall will serve as a venue with a difference for the next three weeks, staging an eclectic variety of theatre, spoken word, music and film events.

On a guided tour of the building a few days before opening, these two eras of its life collide with one another in often striking fashion. The venue’s late-night bar is an L-shaped room at the heart of the building, with large, open windows on either side and a balcony framed by an ornate metal and wood balustrade along the south wall. “It was the dissection room,” points out Summerhall’s director Rupert Thomson with relish. “When we moved in it was filled with all these metal tables…”

Opened in 1916 but appearing much older, the building combines the elegant and the institutional in that way Edinburgh’s academic spaces do so well. Thomson points out a grand ballroom-like space, a beautiful assembly hall which will serve as the main performance area, but which will count among its shows one performed to audiences sitting in lifeboats on the floor. Elsewhere, smaller lecture theatres will host one-off events, including this weekend’s Scottish Independent Record Fair, which will feature acoustic sets by artists from labels including Fence and Chemikal Underground.

In a corridor below the grand reception hall, Thomson pauses. “It gets quite spooky when it’s late,” he muses. “I was chased through here by a crazy naked guy carrying a knife the other night, for example.” Alongside him Jorge Lopes Ramos laughs: he’s the Brazilian co-director (alongside Persis-Jade Maraval) of one of the most ambitious shows at Summerhall, an all-night reinterpretation of Euripides’s Greek tragedy entitled Hotel Medea. The “crazy naked guy” was one of his charges in full dress rehearsal mode, as is the room fitted out with a semi-circle of bunk beds for audience members to sleep in, and a “campaign room” with interactive multi-media equipment.

“Everyone knows what happens in Medea,” says Ramos, “we just offer a few surprises in how it’s presented. The length of the show is nothing new, back in the 1960s and 1970s you had 20-hour long performances, seven-day performances. What we do have is a very strong idea, an idea we commit to which comes with a lot of discipline and precision. Anyone who hears about it, they either say, ‘Never!’ or else they share the vision with us. They want that show to exist. They want the possibility of going to an overnight show from midnight to dawn where people take care of you and then share breakfast with you. They hear of it and they don’t want to miss it.”

The three-word mantra Hotel Medea is informed by is “immersion, participation, interaction” – so much so that an audience-responsive event entitled Audience As Document has its own place on Summerhall’s programme and a corridor in the building will be given over to a display from similar past events. One spinner stand, says Ramos, will be filled with past funding applications for the show, “successful on one side, unsuccessful on the other – you can guess which one will be most full.”

“We require long-term collaboration and shared vision from a venue,” he continues. “There needs to be an understanding of the principles of looking after audiences, and a dedication which goes beyond any normal schedule of work. We need to run the whole show for a week before it opens just to tech it, for example. The actors need to get into their night-time sleeping patterns. The show has to be adapted to each new venue. We even have to consider when the sun will come up.” The finale is precisely synchronised with the dawn, the time of which will change by 30 minutes between the start and the end of this run.

Ramos and Thomson, both 29, met each other at a cultural leadership programme at Battersea Arts Centre (a producing partner and sponsor of Summerhall alongside the DeMarco Archive Trust), and they seem to enjoy a shared rapport when it comes to work that’s envelope-pushing, if not outright experimental. “Having seen it, you’ll remember Hotel Medea for the rest of your life,” says Thomson, the former editor of Edinburgh arts magazine The Skinny and the programmer of last Fringe’s Roxy Art House events. “It reminds me of those really big nights out when you were younger, where you would stay up all night and it would be worth it. As you get older those nights would blur into one, whereas this is a similar shared experience that has the same genetic penetration of committing that much of your physical effort to it. You won’t forget it.”

Hotel Medea is just one of many events which Thomson has programmed because they “interrogate their form of choice”, for example readings by authors like Stewart Home, Iain Sinclair and Tom McCarthy, and a series of “cineconcerts” – bands playing over film. “I like the way that challenges your sense of what music’s for,” says Thomson, “and what film’s for, and it’s a very strong overlap. You see the band as well as the film, and you can’t forget they’re there.”

It’s the kind of mouth-watering programme that suggests Summerhall could be a cult hit of this year’s Festival, although the “sold” sign on the billboard outside is a longer term portent. Thomson is entirely unsure if it might return in 2012, but at this point his only responsibility is to lay down a marker.

Thomson says: “Right now, all I want Summerhall to do is inspire people as much as it has the potential to. Our job is to put on a really exciting festival that people talk about and that’s ready to happen again in future, and to work with the building in doing that. It gives a lot, and to try and homogenise that space would be quite wrong.”

• Hotel Medea is at Summerhall until 27 August, Fridays and Saturdays only (plus Thursday 25 August); today at 11:45pm. The Scottish Independent Record Fair is at the venue tomorrow from 1pm. For full details of Summerhall’s Fringe programme, visit www.summerhall.co.uk.

Preview: These Silences

By Stuart Kelly
Published in The Scotsman: 11/8/2011

Seen by Dorothy Max Prior on 06/8/2011 @ Summerhall, Edinburgh | Edinburgh Festival Fringe

What is your heart’s desire? What do you dream of doing? What is the strangest thing you’ve ever done? Is your heart a stone or a feather?

From the very start, Hotel Medea (a collaboration between Brazilian company Zecora Ura and UK artist Jade Persis Maravala) asks its audience to do more than watch and listen. As we are whirled into a madcap marketplace of dancing giant umbrellas bedecked with multicoloured ribbons, with a cacophony of musical rhythms erupting from cassette machines taped to performers’ bodies, we start our shared journey – an enquiry into concerns that are at the heart of human interest: What is it to be a stranger in a strange land? How do different cultures relate: assimilate and appropriate each other’s differences, or conquer and divide? What is it to be a man, to be a woman? How far will a man go in his quest for political domination? What is it to be a woman in a man’s world, fighting for your autonomy? What lengths would a woman go to to get revenge on the man who has ditched her for a younger rival? What is the nature of love: erotic, filial, maternal, sacrificial?

All of this plays out in an exhilarating promenade performance that takes place between midnight and dawn – less a theatre show than a ritual journey of theatrical treasures that we are seduced into discovering with seamless ease; a rollercoaster of sounds, images, songs, dances, and games that takes us from the revelry of midnight sensuality and abandonment, through the soul-searching reflectiveness of the early hours, into the darkest hour of the night, and finally into the spiritual awakening of dawn. Along the way there’s a football match, a wedding, a rave, a lonely-hearts club, a deadly game of hide-and-seek, and finally a funeral – biers heaped with flowers, candles and teddies.

I’m not giving anything away when I say that the children get it: that’s the whole point with Greek tragedies; you know the outcome, you can do nothing to stop it – it is the terrible unfolding that is so thrilling. The delicious twist in Hotel Medea is that we, the audience, are collectively the children: eavesdropping on the adult conversations as we are tucked into bed by our nurses, popped into pyjamas, placated with hot chocolate, soothed and stroked when the household erupts into mayhem, spirited away to avoid danger, and finally – well, you can imagine.

But then again, we are also Medea’s confidantes: the women of the harem, sipping gin (mother’s ruin!), sharing confidences on heartbreak and betrayal, witnessing Medea’s frustration and fury erupt into murderous madness.

And now we are something else altogether: the ‘focus group’ engaged in moulding the political campaign of Medea’s husband, Jason – wheeled out for photo call opportunities, or observing action from elsewhere relayed on a bank of monitors.

It all works so beautifully because of the care and attention that has gone into the placing of each character in relation to the audience: the protagonists, Medea (Persis Jade Maravala) and Jason (James Turpin), interact with us, but often at a distance – placed on a plinth, table, stage, or staircase. Urias De Oliveira plays Medea’s murdered brother, yet also represents the archetypal Sinistra – a figure of foreignness, savagery, magic, a catalyst to action, a wild card, but not one in direct interaction with us. Juxtaposed with him is Medea’s nurse and protector (Thelma Sharma): the voice of reason, the worrier, the harbinger of doom.

This inner circle is supported and developed by a clever play on the Greek chorus: a team of women play both warrior Argonauts and the children’s nurses; a team of men play both Medea’s entourage and Jason’s campaign team.

Then, there is another circle of engagement: Zecora Ura’s company director Jorge Ramos Lopes and a team of helpers are our guides on the journey, helping us make it through the night.

Midnight to dawn – a little over five hours at this time of the year – might seem like a long haul, but we are taken every inch of the way: cosseted, nurtured, guided, loved, and supported – like the innocent children that we all are.

Come shelter from the Edinburgh rain @ Summerhall’s Courtyard Bar and Delicatessen, provided by Edinburgh’s own Victor Hugo.

‘We are passionate about food and drink and believe in trying to offer quality and choice.  A product’s origin influences its quality and taste and I will source and sell the best food available locally and internationally and where possible direct from the supplier in order to maintain quality and competitive pricing. We can also reveal that we are stocking many products supplied to us by producers attending the Edinburgh Farmers Market. If that’s not enough we also (intake of breath) have fresh coffee beans, we can grind in store, have a fantastic selection of Polish and other Eastern European products, have a fantastic ice-cream and sorbet range and new products are arriving weekly.’

Alan Thomson, Victor Hugo