🪩 Edinburgh Culture Minute: 26 July 2023
Jupiter Rising & Rose Theatre line-ups revealed, new chapter for Lavender Menace, an epic alt-Barbie bookshop window display, £7.8 million of contracts + who shapes the city’s cultural power?
Welcome to the fifth weekly edition of the Culture Minute, Edinburgh’s round up of local arts happenings. There’s so much happening in this city’s creative scenes and industries just now that I’m in no doubt it deserved its own weekly newsletter. Glad I started this. Thank you to the paying subscribers who make this happen. Explore group subscription discounts here.
🎻 Some of Scotland’s top folk and jazz acts have been announced for new pop-up music venue during the festival. The Rose Theatre (at the Charlotte Square end of Rose Street) will host more than 50 acts across 25 days in August. The event is organised by two local independent organisations: the Soundhouse live music charity and Edinburgh-based Bellfield Brewery. The line-up includes Roddy Woomble, Fergus McCreadie, Aidan O’Rourke, Su-a Lee, Shooglenifty, Mr McFall’s Chamber and Georgia Cecile. Douglas Robertson from Soundhouse said:
“We’ll present a showcase of the best of Scottish music at this year’s Fringe: we believe our series will be the best that the Fringe has seen in living memory. Events at the Rose Theatre will provide the excitement, spontaneity and creativity that has long been replaced by the crass commercialism of the London-owned mega-venues around Edinburgh University.”
🎭 If you need help picking your Fringe shows this year, local theatre writer Fergus Morgan has selected his recommendations in two batches of five, here and here.
💃 Tickets are on sale for the Edinburgh Art Festival launch party at The Biscuit Factory on 11 August. Gemma Cairney and Matthew Arthur Williams will be DJing. They’ve even put on a post-party bus back to Glasgow for west-coasters. How thoughtful is that? And how fun will that bus be? Only one way to find out… Tickets and more details are here.
🪐 If one Art Festival party wasn’t enough, here’s another a week later. The EAF is teaming up with Jupiter Rising: an artist-led art, music and performance festival championing queer and underrepresented communities hosted at Jupiter Artland. Together they’re planning to throw what they describe as ‘one of the biggest one-night only parties in Edinburgh’, curated by artist Lindsey Mendick and collective Bonjour, a queer workers’ coop based in Glasgow. - More details and £5 tickets are here.
⮑ Jupiter Rising's full programme is previewed in The List.