Alma Mater @ Scotland Street School

This looks like a lot of fun, Created by ex-Southsider and Ukuele player extrordinaire Eilidh MacAskill and her company Fish and Game, Alma Mater is a new site-specific performance-for-camera tour created for Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Scotland Street School. With an original musical score from John De Simone and in collaboration with a range of Glasgow-based artists, Alma Mater engages with themes of childhood and the coercive, civilising power of education.

Individual audience members use portable video screens to explore the school and encounter traces of performances past. In its pioneering form, the work explores the nature of theatricality ‘in the flesh’ and on screen, the relationship between architecture and memory, and how stories can be told once the teller has long since gone.

The photos from their site look amazing. We've seen loads of their creations in the past and all have been fantastic. Def worth trying to get a ticket if you can, but eh leave it five minutes will you until we get ours bought.

10:10-16.30

4-6 November

Scotland Street School Museum, 225 Scotland Street GLASGOW G5 8QB

Info/ Entry every 10 mins. Last admission at 16:30.

Price/ Free. Must be booked in advance. (Security deposit or credit card may be required)

Box Office/ CCA: 0141 352 4900

Alma Mater is being shown as part of the IETM International Performance Conference – http://www.ietm-glasgow.eu/

Whats in a name?

The area around Bridge Street underground has gone through a lot of changes. At one point it was the centre of all Glasgow trade with Central station sited there prior to its moving across the river (more on that another day). After WWII and the motorway plans were drawn up, the final link of the system was to head down highstreet across the river, passing through the gorbals straight over Bridge Street and ending at the Kingston Bridge. Though this was never completed the whole area was left in Limbo while the threat of the new road hung over it.

The road never came but ,partly as a result of the limbo status, while a lot of the area was knocked down the two large public buildings were left alone. The Colisseum Theatre which became a cinema and then a bingo before ending up empty and the Eglinton Street United Secession Church which became the Bedford then the New Bedford cinema, then "Glasgow's most successful bingo club" before in 2003 becoming the Carling Academy. This is how most people these days will know it, but that too has just changes and now as the result of a new deal it has become the O2 Academy.

Not sure that this is really news or not but I always find the stories that buidlings go through very interseting and I lioe to wonder what the original Church goers would make of the fact that someone with the name Ghostface Killah is performing where their alter used to sit?

I've never actually been to the Carl . . . O2 Academy but my friends who go to gigs a lot say that its not that great a venue and that the sound isn't too hot?

Anyone else had problems there? Where is the best Southside place for gigs?

O2 name change

Images of the Bedford and Coliseum

History of Bedford Cinema