Back in the Scrapyard

Spent the day with the people from Scrapyard as they launched their latest project at Summerhall, currently the venue in Edinburgh for exciting new things in theatre and the arts. The project is part of the Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival that is happening at the beginning of February. The Scrapyard project will culminate in a one-off show at the Traverse but kicked off today when the participants had a chance to meet each other, discover the inspiration for their pieces and get divided into teams. This time round there are four teams, all working on the same theme but if the last Scrapyard performance is anything to go by I expect they will produce widely disparate pieces of work. Lots of fun just capturing the day of workshops and creative discussions - amongst my favourite sort of photography where I have free rein to take candid shots of people completely engrossed in another activity. Looking out for the moments that make a good picture. This one was quite early in the day, while people were still getting to know each other. I think this exercise was actually one where the centre of the room represented where we were and the rest of the room was a living map in which people had to place themselves according to where they lived. An interesting flexible scale seemed to be at play, with the centre of the floor differentiating between different parts of Edinburgh, while the edges of the room seemed to stretch to London and beyond. And the distance stretched even further when the next places to find were where people's parents were born and where they'd like to spend a holiday if money was no object. When everyone was round the very edges of the room - no 'staycations' in this group!