During the month of August, Edinburgh becomes one giant entertainment party. I was working, so only got to do a minor fraction of what I really wanted to. If I were to do it again, I'd save up my money, and take more time off to enjoy Festival.

"Festival" is really a generic term for "Edinburgh in August". There are really a lot of things going on at the same time. The Edinburgh International Festival was the original festival, and currently consists of what can best be described as "refined" arts - opera, plans, classical music, and the like. We didn't see any of these shows, simply because they were too expensive. The Fringe Festival is a festival that started as an alternative to the original festival, and is now simply enormous. (The program was over 130 pages long, and took probably the better part of a week to finish perusing.) The fringe shows range from acrobats to plays to art exhibits to music to the circus, to, oh, probably anything else you'd be interested in. There's also the Film Festival (in which we saw nearly every art-house film that we might've been interested in for the next six months when we returned to the US). There's the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, with the massed pipes and drums. There's the Jazz and Blues Festival, featuring a world wide collection of new orleans style jazz bands. And, of course, all of the street performers doing their street performing things.

The highlight of the festival was probably a piper out on a street corner playing the theme from Star Wars on the bagpipe. The song works curiously well on the instrument, and carries through the streets like nobody's business.

The Jazz festival was already described on the previous page, as you have probably read. A quick synopsis: Our favorite hilights of the jazz festival were La Vella Dixieland, from Barcelona, the Uraksky Jazzmen from Russia, and the 10th Avenue Jazz Band from San Jose, California. La Vella Dixieland had some of the hottest jazz I've ever heard, and their version of "it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing" was not to be missed. The Uralsky Jazzmen played both classical jazz works, as well as a variety of Russian songs set to jazz music. The blending of the classic Russian sounds and the jazz rhythms were splendid to behold. The 10th Avenue Jazz Band probably nearly got themselves beat up by acting like Americans ("where's the air conditioning?" "How come nobody's dancing?" etc.). Which did point out a very strange thing: apparently only Americans dance to Jazz music. Since the origin of the music was definitely about dancing, it just seemed very odd to see all of this fantastic music and only one or two couples dancing to it.

We're film buffs, so when the film festival started, we saw far too much stuff, and yet only about half of what we wanted to see! By the end, we saw "Trojan Eddie", a series of Aardman shorts, "The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls In Love", "Trees Lounge", "Ridicule", "Bastard out of Carolina", and "Un Divan a New York". Here are the mini-reviews I wrote at the time:

    •    Bastard out of Carolina is one of the most powerful movies I've seen. It's Anjelica Huston's directorial debut, and about child abuse. Extremely well done, but very disturbing.

    •    The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls In Love is one of the most romantic movies I've seen, certainly in the last year. (The only real competition last year was "Jeffrey".) It was a story about falling in love for the first time. The Q&A with the director after the show was good, even if she complained all the people asking questions had american accents.

    •    Ridicule was a good French costume drama, about the court of Louis XIV, and how it was taken over by quests for "wit". The story is about an engineer who wants to help fight against disease by draining a swamp, and the trials required to get to the king to ask for funding for the efforts. It was most effective at conveying the mood of the court -- making you feel it as much as see and hear it.

    •    The Aardman shorts were, of course, quite funny. I'd watch "Rex the Runt" if it were really on TV. I'd already seen two of the shorts, but still worth another viewing.

    •    Un Divan a New York was a romantic comedy with a new plot! The novelty! About a Parisian dancer and a New York psychiatrist who swap apartments without meeting, and becoming infused with each others lives. Juliette Binoche and William Hurt star. I thought it was good, but it didn't bowl me over.

    •    A Time To Kill was quite good, despite a couple severe hollywood twinges. It's about a man (played by Samuel Jackson) whose daughter gets raped by a couple rednecks, who he doesn't think will get brought to justice, so he kills them. The plot laid, the rest is a courtroom drama about trying to find racially blind justice in the deep south.

    •    Trojan Eddie, the lastest from Giles Mackinnon, was more or less about the interactions between the Irish traveling people and the "townies". Stephen Rea was most excellent as the title character, a small time huckster trying to break from the "boss" to go into business for himself.

    •    Trees Lounge is the diretorial debut of Steve Buscemi (and also starting him, big surprise). (Buscemi is a favorite actor of the Coen brothers and of Quentin Tarantino...) It's an Altman-esque let the story slowly unfold before you film. It's more of a slice of life than a cut and dried movie script. Similar in flavor to the Richard Linklater film Slacker.

 

Of course, this leaves the Fringe Festival. Again, we wanted to see lots, but were limited by time and money. Here's some of what we did see:

    •    The Bible, by the Reduced Shakespeare Company

    •    All of the books in both the New and Old testament, done to song and dance numbers, by the people who formerly brought you all of Shakespeare's works in 90 minutes.

    •    Hilight: a member of the audience is up on stage, given a fish-shaped oven mitt, and he makes some wisecrack about "May the Peace of Cod Go With You". The RSC actors stop (after they finish being stunned) and scold the man for being funnier than they were.

    •    Slava Polunin - Showshow

    •    Excellent.

    •    Slava Polunin is a cross between the old circus clown, a mime, and a dancer. The show is a collection of independent small acts, mostly with just Slava, though occasionally with anthoer clown. Each act can stand on its own, and some of them may have gone over better on their own.

    •    We realized that we might have seen Slava, or at least someone who was trained by Slava, the Alegria tour by Cirque du Soleil. Some of the routines done here had also been done there.

    •    The name of the show comes from the finale, where the entire theater is transformed into a massive snowstorm. The effect was nearly overwhelming.

    •    Mapapa Acrobats

    •    The Mapapa Acrobats are an acrobatic troupe from Kenya. Another wordless act, the act consists of a bunch of tumbling and a bit of dancing around when the tumblers were waiting for their turn.

    •    The music was good (even if not live), but certainly got your toes tapping. Watching a limbo done with the bar 12 inches off the ground is certainly impressive.

    •    They even got some kids up on stage to try and do some of their simpler tricks -- jumping rope and doing the limbo.

    •    The show didn't feel entirely cohesive, more like a collection of "hey look at what we can do!" tricks. There seemed to be no buildup or winddown around the tricks. It made me smile, but not entirely fulfilled.

    •    Chinese State Circus

    •    I went in expecting an ok performance, and I was just blown away. And I consider myself a tough audience for circus type things.

    •    The Chinese State Circus took all the usual tricks, and did them one step bigger, and one step further than you expected they could do them. The music (from a live band, of course), was quite good, and the costumes and general atmosphere were superlative.

    •    Complete with the prerequesite Chinese Dragons (which looked like big fuzzy dogs to me), the silly tricks made me smile, the tricky balancing acts made me nervous, despite the visible safety precautions, and so on. Every time a trick was done, they seemed to repeat it a bit harder than the last time.

    •    The highly touted 14-girls-on-a-bicycle was certainly impressive.

    •    It was just a great show. It made me smile a lot, and my hands ached afterwards from clapping too much.

 

And, of course, there are the street performers. Except for Fringe Sunday when there are a zillion things to see for free all over town, the street performers were excellent. (On fringe sunday, there was simply too much competition for audiences, so each performer only had a scarce audience.) Witness such important feats as unicycling in high heels while juggling flaming clubs! Like all street performers, the quality varied wildly, but if you didn't like one, the next was a mere stone's throw away.