Special feature - Building our culture
Building our cultureJuly 2008 Robert Livingston looks at new spaces, big and small, for culture in the Highlands and Islands. |
|
||
It all started in June 2007 in Lerwick, with the grand Royal opening of the new Shetland Museum and Archive: the beginning of an astonishing year for new buildings for arts and heritage in the Highlands and Islands. Just the very next month the completely rebuilt and enlarged Pier Arts Centre reopened in Stromness on Orkney, and went on to win the RIAS’s Andrew Doolan award for the Best Building in Scotland 2007. Later, the Shetland Museum would just miss winning the UK’s biggest award for museums, the Art Fund Award. With November came the long-awaited (and somewhat delayed) reopening of the Eden Court Theatre in Inverness. With its new studio theatre, two cinemas, two drama studios, and numerous meeting rooms, as well as new dressing rooms and backstage facilities to support these and the existing auditorium, the Eden Court became at a stroke the largest single arts centre in Scotland. And the Awards kept coming—in this case, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors’ Community Benefit Award for 2008. |
|
||
|
Eden Court was one of three major capital projects to benefit from additional Government funding for the Year of Highland Culture 2007. In the end, the other two didn’t open till 2008, but proved well worth waiting for. The new Visitor Centre at the Culloden Battlefield opened officially in April, and was by then already nominated for a fistful of awards, and has since attracted record numbers of visitors. Finally, also in April, the new Creative Industries centre Fàs at the Gaelic College, Sabhal Mor Ostaig, was opened by the First Minister and adds another glittering building to that extraordinary campus in South Skye. But all of these superb buildings have already, rightly, received widespread coverage. I want to celebrate instead some recent developments which may have been less high profile, but are no less remarkable in their way. The last twelve months have seen a truly extraordinary flowering of new facilities across the Highlands and Islands, proving that a process of growth that began back in the early 90s, even before the advent of National Lottery funding, with the opening of Taigh Chearsabhagh in Lochmaddy, is far from running out of steam. In Moray, two personal visions were realised in very different ways. At Findhorn, New York-born artist Randy Klinger finally saw the completion of a ten year-old vision with the opening of the Moray Arts Centre, a very beautiful and eco-friendly building which aims to provide a stimulating environment for visual arts appreciation and education. The light and airy teaching studios were opened last year, but the exhibition space—the only one in Moray to meet the security and environmental conditions for loans from national collections—opened at the start of June 2008 with a highly praised retrospective of the work of writer and painter John Byrne. At just the same time, a few miles further east in Elgin, the Red Shoes Theatre was celebrating its first anniversary. The Red Shoes is different from all the other facilities described in this article, because it is being run as a private business by the two founders Henri Edwards and Tish Tindall—indeed, ‘family business’ would be a better description given the way that running the building has taken over the lives of spouses and offspring. Offering a home for an enormous range of classes and voluntary groups, and acting as a venue for visiting professional theatre and music companies, the Red Shoes is welcoming upwards of 400 people a week. This unusual example of a commercial business serving a community purpose may, in these times of reduced public funding, offer a model for the future! |
|
||
Just west of Moray, the people of Nairn are benefiting from a handsome new community centre. The Centre opened to the public back in October 2007, but its first real test as an arts venue came with the greatly expanded 2008 Nairn Book and Arts Festival in June, and it passed with flying colours, its fine and spacious auditorium accommodating an enormous range and scale of events over a packed week-long programme. Not surprisingly, it will also provide the key venue for the long-running Nairn Jazz Festival this month, finally resolving long-running problems which that event has faced in finding suitable venues. Even Inverness itself has seen substantial developments in the past twelve months, on top of the excitement around the re-opening of Eden Court. The Spectrum Centre—a much used community facility in the very heart of the city—installed an adaptable new set of retractable bleacher seating, just in time for the first DNA Theatre Festival in October. Across the River Ness, the Merkinch Centre also proved to be a very suitable venue for the new festival, having converted its former sports hall into a fine studio theatre, the McCreadie Suite, which now hosts a broad range of amateur and professional events, from DVD screenings for senior citizens through to contemporary dance performances. |
|
||
Up in East Sutherland, in Helmsdale, the long-established heritage centre Timespan reopened in April with completely new museum displays, a story-telling room, and new exhibition spaces. Like its counterpart on the opposite side of the Highlands and Islands, Taigh Chearsabhagh on North Uist, Timespan has become central to the life and economy of its immediate community, and this major redevelopment was critical to ensure that the Centre could offer a suitably fresh and broad range of opportunities to local and tourist visitors alike. Nor is that the end of the story. In Ullapool, the group working under the banner ‘an talla solais’ have colonised a former medical centre in the heart of the village, and in June launched their first group exhibition in that building, an ambitious show appropriately entitled ‘Response’ in which each artist made work based on poems by the great Australian writer Les Murray, who gave a reading in Ullapool on the night of the opening. The present arrangements are interim—the group have long term ambitions to create a centre as ambitious and flexible as that in Findhorn. Meanwhile, over in Tobermory, work is under way for the new Production Centre for the renowned Mull Theatre, a tremendous leap in scale and ambition from the tiny, 44-seat Little Theatre which had been the company’s home for forty years, and a suitable new home for a company which has made its mark on the national circuit. |
|
||
This is not an exhaustive account of either the new developments which have taken place, or of those which are still at the planning stage. But of course, buildings, no matter how splendid, are of little use without exciting programming to fill them. All of these new and improved spaces rely on a number of key individuals, supported by an enormous commitment of voluntary time, whether sitting on a board of management, or taking the tickets at a performance. As the world of arts funding moves towards a very different future, with the plans for Creative Scotland, the challenge will be to ensure that this tremendous network of cultural facilities can continue to be exploited to the full, for the wider benefit of the people of the Highlands and Islands. Robert Livingston |
|||
