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25 WILS WILSON SHAKER MAKER
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Having given audiences goosebumps with Wind Resistance, her meditative collaboration with Karine Polwart, this indomitable director brought psychedelic madness to the Royal Lyceum adaptation of Twelfth Night, which felt more like trippy classic Performance. (LI)
24 ASHLEY STORRIE ADULT HUMOURIST
As daughter of one of the i ercest comedians on the Scottish circuit (see number 28), Storrie has always had a lot to live up to. But this year, she struck out fantastically with a Fringe hit, Adulting, in which she explored #MeToo, smear tests, and what it means to be a grown-up. (BD)
23 SARRA WILD CULTURED CLUBBER
Co-founder of club night and collective OH141, Sarra Wild has pushed the conversation around opening club spaces to people of colour, queer people and women. A brilliant DJ, she reduces crowds from Counterl ows to Romanticrash to a sweaty, joyous mess. (SS)
22 ORLA O’LOUGHLIN THEATRE PLAYER
Outgoing artistic director of the Traverse, O’Loughlin sealed a reputation as an intuitive director of plays, and her recent programme of Fringe shows were timely and challenging, taking on class, race and gender. Her collaboration with Cora Bissett, What Girls Are Made Of, was a moving riposte to pressures on women. (LI)
21 FREE LOVE LUXURY LOUNGE
Suzi Rodden and Lewis Cook’s psych-pop juggernaut, formerly known as Happy Meals,
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rolls on. This year they made an EP for Lost Map’s Visitations series (centred on the theme of alien abduction) and a string of banging singles (‘Synchronicity’ and ‘Pushing Too Hard’) gathered in the aptly titled collection Luxury Hits. (CA)
20 SHONA MCCARTHY FRINGE FORCE
The Fringe continues to go from strength to strength thanks in great part to the Fringe Society’s chief executive. This year Shona McCarthy launched a i ve-year manifesto featuring ambitious and far-ranging goals, as the world’s largest arts festival rails against the politics of division. (MR)
19 ECLAIR FIFI HEY DJ
Bookings in Australia, India, North America and across Europe (including Edinburgh’s Terminal V event and Denis Sulta’s Sulta Selects show in Manchester) continued to reinforce Clair Stirling’s already solid reputation as one of Scotland’s i nest DJs. Plus she delivered a Scotland-centric soundtrack to the lightshow which opened Dundee’s V&A. (DP)
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BEYOND THE BLAZE David Pollock rel ects on the tragic night when the Mackintosh Building was destroyed by a second i re in four years. He i nds that above the debris, some optimism i lls the air
The only thing everyone knows for certain about Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh Building is that most of us don’t know very much at all. Beginning with what actually happened on the night of June 15, when the almost- complete building caught i re again four years after a previous, severely damaging blaze, and left the old stone walls a crumbling shell. Once more, dramatic images of the i re were streamed live across the world, and the devastation caused by the time it had burned out was near-total.
In another dismally contemporary twist on proceedings, where lack of knowledge exists online, so too do professional opinions treated as incontrovertible fact and understandable anger translated into conspiratorial guesses.
As bad as the last i re was, this
time the effect was far greater, with Sauchiehall Street’s historic ABC music venue also destroyed, local residents locked out of their homes for an extended period of time, and local businesses (including the Centre for Contemporary Arts and arts organisations based there) forced to close or relocate indei nitely. At time of writing, the CCA has just
reopened but we don’t know when, how or even if the Mack building itself will be rebuilt once again. The GSA board, through its chairperson Muriel Gray, has made an emphatic declaration that it will return in something like its original form, and that insurance money and private donations will ensure that no public money needs be spent in the process. Hopefully that will be the case. Where
the tragedy of the 2014 i re brought a broad, Dunkirk Spirit consensus that this horrible tragedy be put right immediately, the much wider impact of 2018 and the sense of bubbling frustration at how lightning could have been allowed to strike twice has left a far messier public conversation about the value of art in a time of austerity. Yet Glasgow’s reputation across the arts has been built upon people doing great things with not very much, and such ingenuity must surely be given every opportunity to win out again.
1 Nov 2018–31 Jan 2019 THE LIST 35