Exciting things happen when you bring people with different expertise together…Stephen Blackmore

In the last episode in this series, Steve and Kimho discuss how the multi-disciplinary approach always produces the most exciting discoveries in both arts and science. To illustrate that we have chosen one of the extraordinary collaborative performances from midsummer’s event when dancer Anne-Marie Culhane wove magic through Susie Brown’s bamboo sculpture in the pouring rain. While elsewhere in the Garden musicians worked with dancers, drummers and tai chi performers…(you can see many more images on our specially enhanced podcast).

To listen to the podcast, click here (m4a).
To subscribe to the podcast, click here.

The Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo podcast series is produced by Inner Ear LTD

Change and tradition in Hong Kong

Travelling from Hong Kong to Edinburgh Kimho finds in unexpected places a rich source of Chinese cultural traditions which have all but disappeared from fast-developing cities of China. In this third Wind and Bamboo episode, Steve and Kimho question: what are the traditions of China now and why we need to find and keep the best pieces of a disappearing world.

To listen to the podcast, click here (m4a).
To subscribe to the podcast, click here.

The Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo podcast series is produced by Inner Ear LTD

I just wanted to warm you all up by saying WELL DONE…thanks. Lian, a spectator

The show is over. The robots have gone, leaving the Palm House to the resident robin, and there is hardly a trace of the 600 black bamboo poles now neatly stacked and waiting to be installed in the woodland garden of the proud new owner. But as we prepare our report for the Scottish Arts Council we are enjoying comments from audience and bloggers and thought you might like to see some of them too. And thanks to Lian Cassie for her lovely picture of Chang dancing in the rain.

Scottish weather eh! What a shame about the rain as it was such a brilliant idea for an event.
Fraser

How much I enjoyed Saturday night. It was shame about the weather but I was very impressed that so many people endured it – and I think the extreme wet (once I accepted it) lent something very special and memorable to the proceedings. The smells were incredible and I don’t think they would have been nearly as apparent in the bawdy Edinburgh evening sunshine! And the memory of the Chang Zhang dancing in costume in the lashing rain will remain with me for a long time. Very beautiful. Well done to everyone involved. We need more of these kinds of happenings….
Colin

My heart went out to the organisers and performers, they did so well “the show must go on” hope they went home to central heating and warm drink! thanks for a truly unique experience in many ways.
Maggie

Thank u, thank u, thank u. We had a v special time 2nite. I reckon I’ve got at least a few really good pics, and some of th@ bloke with the heart-stopping voice.
Nick

Last Saturday was fantastic even with the rain. It was a pity not to have the warm balminess of midsummer (ha ha!) but the noise of the rain actually enhanced the music.
Celia

Thanks for an impressive event. H20 element just didn’t want left out!
Kim

Hello I am just writing to you to thank everyone for the enormous effort in making the Mid Summer Evening as enjoyable as possible despite the rain. There was obviously a lot of effort went into the preperation of celebrating Mid Summers Evening with everyone concerned from the musicians, performers, and to the park rangers, everyone played thier part in good spirits even if they were more than a little damp I just wanted to warm you all up by saying WELL DONE Take Care, God Bless and Thank You all again Lian

Both of the installations have been really enjoyed by the public and were great pieces that really enhanced the spaces they were in – staff have also said how much they enjoyed dancing round in the palmhouse when no one was looking!! Rosie

And from the bloggers…

I think the traditional Chinese music gained something through being played in the storm. The hum of the rain was like a backing track, which bedded very well underneath the stringed notes.

Rob
www.robsharp.co.uk

The Intercultural Music & Arts Project (iMAP) staged a magnificent ground breaking event in the soft summer rain of Midsummer’s Eve in Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden.
Nick

www.leithandnorth.org.uk

Last weekend I went to the Royal Botanic Gardens. I was prompted to go there to see and hear a couple of installations, together called “Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo”. In the Palm House, I listened to the wind part of “Wind and Bamboo”: a gentle musical installation played on traditional Chinese instruments automatically, using programmed (the leaflet says “robotic”) machines to pluck strings and strike percussion. It was very peaceful, and rather lovely. There is a podcast of the pieces available.

Pictures of Edinburgh - http://community.livejournal.com/edinburgh_pics/

To listen to the podcast, click here (m4a).
To subscribe to the podcast, click here.

The Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo podcast series is produced by Inner Ear LTD

THREE PIECES sound installation from Ziggy Campbell on Vimeo.

“People just gather with their musical instruments to sing and dance by the lake. The first time I saw it I couldn’t believe it. We just don’t do something like that here.” Stephen Blackmore, talking about Kunming

Or, maybe we do. On Saturday night, despite truly awful Scottish weather, the audience in the Botanics caught a glimpse of that spontaneous Chinese culture which Stephen Blackmore sees when he visits Kunming.

On the Chinese Hillside, Chang danced in the rain while we filed past smiling beneath umbrellas. On the bridge above, Bob Lowey’s Taichi Action group turned with easy fluid movement and sounds of flute and cello floated up from the pond below. Of course it wasn’t completely spontaneous. Earlier in the day, performers practised here in sunshine under the direction of Kimho Ip but he left them free to improvise. “I wanted to create that image that Steve talks about,” he said, “This is the kind of thing you see in a Chinese park.”

Three days later, it is still hard to believe that Saturday’s event was such a wonderful experience for audience and performers alike. If the morning forecast was bad the evening weather was much worse. This was no midsummer magic. Yet people queued patiently in the downpour to get into the Temperate Palmhouse for the opening improvisation between FOUND, Shanghai Jazz and Korphai, and then out again (maybe a little reluctantly) to follow a watery trail to the Chinese Hillside.

When Kimho was not playing yang-chin in the shelter of the T’ing, he was holding an umbrella to give protection to Mei-Chi on the Chinese harp, and to Cheng-ying, who played a Chinese lute at the same time singing counter-tenor in what one member of the crowd called “a heart-stopping voice”.

Wet, and wetter still, the performers continued to dance, sing and play (among them Nigel Osborne, Edinburgh’s Reid Professor of Music though more about that later). The equally resilient audience stayed to watch, warming hands for a shivery interval by the T’ing where Fooklan Szeto served hot tea working quickly to fill cups before the rain did. Then Anne–Marie danced on as if she was not drenched to the skin. It was hard to count, but we reckon there were at least 200 with us for the promenade and most of them lasted until the end when Shanghai Jazz and FOUND brought more magic and steam to the Palm House.

Altogether an unforgettable night for all of us. “In a way the rain made it more special,” says Kimho, “If the weather had been good, like it was on Friday night, then we would have been concentrating on the quality of the performance. But because the weather was bad we found something else beneath the performance, the real emotional experience.”

Then he laughs because Wind and Bamboo has produced an unexpected intercultural discovery. “You know, all the performers agreed with me. If this had been happening in Taipei or Hong Kong as soon as it started to rain all the audience would have gone home and the musicians and dancers would have been moaning and complaining. But here, we all stayed and everyone did their best, including the audience, and we all had a wonderful experience.”

Many more pictures to come.

Here is the first Wind and Bamboo podcast, featuring extracts from a fascinating discussion between Stephen Blackmore, Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and Kimho Ip, composer and director of Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo.

In this first episode they explain why each of them sees the Garden as a performance space and why they both believe music can help make a visit to
Botanics a life-changing experience.

To listen to the podcast, click here (m4a).
To subscribe to the podcast, click here.

The Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo podcast series is produced by Inner Ear LTD.

Home from home for the Chinese community, aged one month (in the sunny corner) to 83 years

Cathay Court community lounge is full of friends and members of the Chinese Elderly Centre. Women (and some men) of all ages are chatting, laughing and eating. There is a murmur of Cantonese. A table is spread with food in colours and textures you probably won’t find in any Chinese restaurant in Scotland: bright green cakes, sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves, soft snow-white dumplings dusted in coconut and filled with crunchy peanut sauce. “Have some of everything,” says Fooklan Szeto loading our plates and pouring cups of green tea.

This is a community event organised by Kimho Ip with the help of funding from China Now in Scotland. But, like almost every other part of Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo, the practical function of bookbinding soon becomes a creative, sociable, intercultural get together.

Plates and tables cleared, Tommy briefly demonstrates a simplified Chinese bookbinding technique. He has hardly finished before hands reach out for needles, thread and paper and – without discussion – teams organise themselves into tasks. Folding, stamping, sewing. Folding, stamping, sewing and singing!

The Chinese harp in the corner comes to life as Mei-Chi Law begins to play. Jet-lagged but smiling Mei-Chi explains she has just arrived from Hong Kong for Saturday’s performance. “I feel fine, the sun is shining,” she says.

In just over two hours we have 228 beautifully bound booklets, more than enough for the audience in the Temperate Palm House. “Two, two eight is very simple in Chinese,” says Linda coaxing me to say it. I just about master it when we reach 230 which is not so easy to say. That’s it. We have run out of thread, all 90 metres of it.

We leave with a box full of programmes and a plate of sponge cakes. Kimho comes with us to the front door. “Now we are back in Edinburgh,” he says.

This is where it begins, in the Temperate Palm House, though it wasn’t framed by blossom back in February when Ziggy Campbell and Simon Kirby met Glasshouse Curator David Mitchell on a cold spring morning. A cheeky robin hops, head on one side, between plants as musician, academic and horticulturist peer beneath stone benches and behind tall palms exploring the best location for a sound installation which has yet to be invented.

Back in the workshop Ziggy and Simon experiment with a Chinese dulcimer (a yang-chin) borrowed from Kimho and played by robotic beaters. Because they want to create an acoustic sound that fits the environment of the Palm House they are trying something that has never been done before; making music in collaboration with robots and living plants. Or in technical terms, pinched from their blog: “Software on the microcontrollers plays music composed for the installation that reacts to the presence of humans and changes in the soil of the plant beds…”

tuned robotic chimes – see how they run on Ziggy and Simon’s blog:

3pm Tuesday 10 June, Simon and Ziggy unload Three Pieces from the car; that’s one yang-chin, 12 chimes on bamboo stakes, 3 small sensor boxes, the electronic ‘brains’ of the outfit and a lot of very fine, brightly coloured electric cable. In the Palm House they find RBGE’s Fiona Inches and Steve Herrington have cordoned off their space with a ‘men at work’ barrier. Four days of wiring and calibrating lie ahead.

6pm Wednesday 11 June, chimes are sounding from the foliage, light filters through the leaves. “What a fantastic place to work,” says Simon. Time to stand back and enjoy the space with friends. Ziggy carefully rakes over any soil they have disturbed in the course of inserting bamboo stakes. Enough for today, tomorrow the yang-chin…

3.40pm Wednesday 12 June, Simon (left) and Ziggy discover that the yang-chin, now sitting discreetly among bamboo, is out of tune and not quite audible enough. Steve joins the consultation and as a result brings wooden planks which raise and tilt the instrument so the beaters hit the strings with a cleaner sound. To quote Ian Hamilton Finlay, “art is a small adjustment.”

4pm, Friday 13 June, Art has had a few more small adjustments (we’re talking micromillimetres at a time) but now Three Pieces is playing as intended. Rosie Lewis and Jacqui Skelton of Poor Boy arrive for the Health and Safety inspection prompting a celebratory performance from robotic chimes and yang-chin. “This is absolutely fantastic,” says Rosie. A bird flies across the border setting off another ripple of chimes. It’s that robin again.

Three Pieces is open 14-29 June.

Special thanks to David Mitchell, Fiona Inches, Steve Herrington – and all the staff in the Palm House who will know the melody very well by the end of the exhibition!

“To the great distress of my neighbour Audrey, I will be dipping (the bamboo that is) and sawing for the next three weeks. This will make for a very unsafe place for clean washing…”

9.30 am Tuesday 10 July. The moment of truth. Susie and Simon Kirby deliver the bamboo (now dipped and tipped with glowing colour) through the building site at the West Gate. It’s cold but at least it’s not raining. Friends come and go, helping to sort bamboo poles into lots of 100 beneath the trees of the Lower Birch Lawn. RBGE’s Martyn Dickson arrives with two formidable looking metal rods to make sure the bamboo goes firmly and securely into the ground. Rosie Lewis brings a pass to let Susie get a good sustaining lunch in the staff canteen.

5.30pm Wednesday 11 July. A watchful crow struts between the flowing line of bamboo. Susie has designed the sculpture after discussions with the dancers, Anne-Marie Culhane and Chang Zhang who will weave between the clusters symbolising death and rebirth during the live performance of Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo on midsummer night. With help from more friends and Garden staff (”They have been really lovely, so helpful”), Natural Progression is very nearly finished. Passing visitors stop to admire it along with the crow.

4.00pm Thursday 12 June, a night of heavy rain leaves the bamboo unmoved. Susie puts finishing touches of paint to coloured tips. She chose the colours after discussion with dancers Anne-Marie and Chang Zhang who will weave flowing fabrics through the poles but by happy accident the yellow matches candelabra primula in the borders. The curving line emulates the natural growth pattern of bamboo in the wild. Curator David Knott jokes that he will bring his skis for slalom practice. At least, we think he is joking.

10am Saturday. Natural Progression has passed the Health and Safety test and is now open to the public until Sunday 29 June. Please come and enjoy it with us.

Special thanks to Garden staff: David Knott, Tony Garne, Phil Ashby and Martyn Dickson!