Saturday night on Sauchiehall Street and happy revellers lurch and totter past. Lads yell to mates across the road, girls tug at miniskirts to just-about cover their bums. It’s a familiar booze-fuelled blur. At a club night inside Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) however, there’s no alcohol to be found. Not because there isn’t a bar, but because the punters have boycotted it in solidarity with staff in the midst of an employment dispute.
The water-only policy doesn’t dampen spirits. On stage, one woman performs a fusion of classical Indian dance and burlesque, a man adorned with flowers is attached to ropes the audience can pull and control, and a pair of trans performers (appear to) inject each other with oestrogen on stage. This is Buzzcut festival, on the edges of live art, dance and queer club culture. Something organiser Karl Taylor calls “a scramble of ideas”.
Earlier that day, the festival was at arts space Tramway, full of puzzling haircuts and welcoming vibe. There were people in harnesses clipping themselves to a complicated web of ropes and carabiners, and two naked women moving on the floor like squelchy sea creatures. Just some of the content warnings: nudity, sexually explicit language, violence, body fluids, scarification, loud noises, strobing lights, toxic masculinity, cultural appropriation, abuse, infantilism, addiction, pregnancy, birth and death. It sounds terrifying. But in conversation, the enthusiastic artists repeatedly talk about community, creativity and care.
Buzzcut is just one facet of Glasgow’s lively live art and performance landscape. Glasgow has its long-established dance scene – Scottish Ballet was founded in 1969, now also based at Tramway – but elsewhere, in what’s sometimes called expanded dance, movement meets sculpture, sound, visual art, theatre, to pull at the edges of genre, performance and human experience.
Glasgow has a history with experimental performance, hosting for many years the National Review of Live Art (NRLA). It was also home to legendary club the Arches, where artists used the various nooks and crannies of the building to perform, and where you might find “a 12-hour durational work in a corridor”, remembers artist Ashanti Harris.
The NRLA ended in 2010 and the Arches closed in 2015. The ecology has changed, but plenty of folk are maintaining the legacy. Like most things in the arts, it’s precarious, but fuelled by passion. “It always feels like we’re chasing our tail, rebuilding, to keep the scene alive,” says Taylor.
As well as Buzzcut, radical artists get a platform at the biennial festivals Take Me Somewhere and Dance International Glasgow, at activist arts organisation Arika, or queer clubs like Bonjour, “moving between fashion, performance and dance,” says Taylor. Many belong to artist-led organisation The Work Room.
The critical mass of Glasgow’s art school, conservatoire and three universities is part of the reason the scene is so buzzing, alongside its thriving music, theatre and club culture. “There’s an attitude here of collectivity in comparison with other places I’ve worked,” says Harris, who trained as a sculptor but now works with dance. “Everybody’s got the same mission and helps to make things happen. Glasgow has always been very do-it-yourself, it’s a very community attitude.” Harris’s work is strong on community. She’s currently working on a “collective performance” piece about Caribbean carnival, involving everyone in the audience. She co-founded Glasgow Open Dance School (GODS) with the idea that anyone can be a dancer, and with choreographer Mele Broomes she founded Project X, celebrating dance from the African-Caribbean diaspora.
Lots of people bring up the city’s DIY spirit. Taylor talks about an early Buzzcut held in a community centre in Govan. They had no furniture, so they went to a charity shop across the road and asked to borrow everything. “They said yeah, totally fine, and we made the festival their showroom for a week. The audience were buying the chairs,” he laughs.
“There’s a generosity in Glasgow, a friendliness,” says movement artist Claricia Parinussa. “There are a lot of artists but the scene is small so there’s a lot of collaboration. There’s a freshness about things, not necessarily sticking to ideas of what ‘should’ be.”
“I’ve felt the audience being willing to lean into whatever’s happening, not standing in judgment,” says Stephen Greer, an academic who is writing a history of live art in Scotland.
For Swedish artist Louise Ahl, having lived in Devon, Berlin and Leeds, in Glasgow “people seemed to really connect with what I was doing,” she says. “It was a shared humour – I would say I have quite a twisted, dark sense of humour. They found my work funny.” Ahl uses movement and voice and experiments with form. Her latest piece is a solo opera, with a scent designer making different smells for each act. “The reception I usually get with my work is either people absolutely love it and think it’s the most amazing, mind-bending thing, or they just find it completely tedious,” she laughs.
On a practical level, says Ahl, it’s cheaper to live here than Edinburgh (or London), which is useful when much of this work is being made on a shoestring. “I try not to romanticise that, because I think live art as a scene has a real problem in its attachment to having no money,” says Greer. “On the one hand it’s led to extraordinary things, but then it has made it harder to talk about exploitation and self-exploitation.” In other words, working for nothing.
That’s something producers are now trying to address. Buzzcut festival took a break for six years (Covid meant that was longer than planned) and decided to come back with fewer artists but pay them more. “[In the early days] it was huge and sprawling and full of all kinds of crazy wild energy … and that is wonderful and intoxicating but also makes it really hard to practise care to your artists and your audiences,” says Taylor.
Everyone’s feeling the financial squeeze, “artists are feeling burnt out,” says Taylor. “But I do feel positive,” says Parinussa. “The energy here is always full of potential. Every single day something new is happening.”
