🪩 Edinburgh Culture Minute: 5 July 2023

Welcome to the Culture Minute, a round up of local arts happenings in Edinburgh. 

This is the first proper edition, so please bear with me while I figure out the best way to format things. Generally, it’ll follow the footsteps of The Edinburgh Minute’s local, hyperlocal and occasionally global look at our city. But with added music, dance, books, ballet, festivals, funding, hospitality, theatre, jazz and joyful things that make Edinburgh such a cultural hub. 

🆓  All of the city’s events take a lot of work, so I’m also including networking, jobs & funding section that might be useful if you work or want to work in the creative and cultural sectors. To advertise roles, just reply to this email. Speaking of work, these newsletters are a wee bit of added work for me in the evenings after my dayjob, so it’s behind a £5-month paywall. However, if you are keen to subscribe but can’t afford it, please just email me with the subject ‘CULTURE MINUTE FREEBEE’ and I’ll wave a digital wand that makes sure you get the Culture Minute for free, no questions asked. Please just make sure to email from an account that is signed up to The Edinburgh Guardian’s free Substack mailing list, so I can find you in the system. Now, on with the show! 

🎭  The Fringe has a new sponsor this year: New York theatre magazine Playbill. Its President Philip Birsh is in town this week for meetings with festival bosses, the media and politicians, including Culture Minister Christina McKelvie. He kindly gave me an hour to chat yesterday about his firm’s plans: 

⛴  Bringing a ‘floatel’ called Fringeship to the Fringe in 2024, 
📲  Investing £60,000 to help Fringe launch an app (expected to launch on 11 July), 
✍️  Hopes to hire local writers to help his large editorial team cover the festival, 
🚊  How trams to Leith helped to seal the deal, 
🏠  And his views on Edinburgh’s Airbnb debate: “Local people need housing.”  

There’s a lot in this discussion. We met at the Dovecot cafe, so apologies for the background noise.