Following the announcement of the Made in Scotland 2016 programme for this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Summerhall is once more pleased to welcome a number of the shows in the strand to our venue throughout August.

A partnership between the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, Creative Scotland, the Federation of Scottish Theatre and the Scottish Music Centre, and funded through the Scottish Government’s Expo Fund, Made in Scotland’s mission is to showcase the wealth of world class performance created in Scotland through the year to a festival audience. Presented by Kieran Hurley (Beats, Chalk Farm, Hitch) and Show and Tell, Heads Up is a new piece from award-winning theatremaker and performer Hurley alongside composer Michael John McCarthy, an investigation into the end of the world from the perspective of disparate characters including a priest who has lost his faith and a city finance worker. From performer Sam Rowe alongside Stirling’s Macrobert Arts Centre and Showroom, Denton and Me fuses Rowe’s own life with the story of early 20^th century queer literary icon Denton Welch, a favourite of and influence upon Alan Bennett, William S Burroughs and John Waters.

Music Highlights

Musically, some of the highlights of the Made in Scotland programme are at Summerhall. Virtuoso guitarist Simon Thacker is working alongside cellist Justyna Jablonska and singer and violinist Masha Natanson to create Karmana, Songs of the Roma, a Romani musical which borrows from the Indian, Balkan and Spanish Gypsy traditions. Composer and guitarist Graeme Stephen, meanwhile, presents a new score for Fritz Lang’s ground-breaking 1927 science fiction film Metropolis alongside Dutch string quartet ZAPP 4 and drummer Tom Bancroft. This is Stephen’s seventh film score; the others include FW Murnau’s Sunrise, which won the Innovation Award at the Scottish Jazz Awards.

Last year’s instrumentalist of the year at the Scots Trad Music awards Mairi Campbell presents Pulse, which premiered at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival in January and enjoyed great reviews. Combining viola, voice, movement, animation and storytelling, this Kath Burlison-directed piece of musical autobiography from Greengold Projects and Authentic Artists Collective details Campbell’s desire to ‘come home’ to Scotland via travels in London, Mexico and Cape Breton.

Aimed mainly at children aged 9 to 12 years of age, writers Andy Manley (also the director) and Rob Evans’ Mikey and Addie is a two-handed piece of visual storytelling which deals in compelling fashion with the idea of confronting reality as you grow up. Presented by Red Bridge Arts, it tells of a boy named Mikey who believes his father is working on a secret mission up in space for NASA, until he meets a straight-talking new friend called Addie who leads him to question his beliefs.

For full details of the 2016 Made in Scotland programme visit www.madeinscotlandshowcase.com.

Book now via edfringe.com and via summerhall.co.uk from Saturday 4 June.