Behaviour Festival returns to Glasgow

The break seems to have done the festival good: at eight weeks long it’s now four times as big, for a start. While still pulling in some excellent international acts, the programme feels much more rooted in its home city than ever before, exploring the idea of Glasgow as a city where art has sprung up in the cracks left by post-industrial slump.

Like contemporary art festival Glasgow International (GI), with which it overlaps and collaborates, Behaviour is plugged into Glasgow’s grassroots creative scene, using unusual venues and a Creative Scotland One Step Forward award to create a series of performances around the city.

“This is what’s really exciting, this year,” says Arches artistic director Jackie Wylie, “to be taking the Arches out of the building and coming to the people. We’ll be able to reach audiences coming to the Victorians Weekend at Kelvingrove, or walking along Sauchiehall Street, who’ve never known about the Arches, or thought to come to a performance festival in a cave in the city centre.”

In the past, Behaviour might have presented an almost entirely international programme, allowing local artists the less formal, experimental space of September’s Arches Live festival, but this year the line-up features new theatre pieces by Robert Softley (most recently known for writing and performing the National Theatre of Scotland’s Girl X), Stef Smith (the playwright behind Roadkill), Eilidh MacAskill of Fish and Game (whose iPad play Alma Mater was a hit at last year’s Fringe) and Nic Green, best known for her barnstorming feminist opus Trilogy, which has now toured all over the world. Alongside them are plays by rising stars Kieran Hurley (Hitch) and Gary Gardiner, the winners of this year’s Platform 18 awards which allow performers the space and resources to create new works.

“Like GI, Behaviour is an international festival, which means that there’s work coming in from abroad, but that the local artists we’ve selected are all just as capable of performing on that global platform,” says Wylie.

“These are all Scottish artists who ought to be treated as major, internationally reaching forces within Scotland. It’s about being really confident that we’re putting fantastic local work alongside its counterparts.”

To extend the GI analogy, Wylie and her team are making the case for experimental theatre artists like Green, MacAskill, Hurley and Smith to be regarded with the same reverence the city extends to its contemporary visual artists like Karla Black, Alex Frost and Martin Boyce.

MacAskill’s two-wheeled Bicycle Boom starts the festival off. A one-woman performance, a cycling tour and a reconstruction of Glasgow’s 1901 Cycling Gymkhana, it’s been built out of research MacAskill did when working at Kelvingrove Museum and the Museum of Transport into the way the emergence of the bicycle assisted the growing emancipation of women.

Over several days, and dressed in an authentic replica of an 1890s “rational dress” costume deemed appropriate for lady cyclists, MacAskill will lead a lecture in character as a Suffragette cyclist. She will also chair what she describes as “the last meeting of the great Kelvingrove cycling club, where we meet up to discuss our ‘passion for the bicycle’, then take a cycling tour – with little performance interludes – from Kelvingrove to the Riverside museum”.

“I’m really interested in the idea of these parks and public areas being created for the people, at a time when we’re really trying to work out what’s important to a city, to its society,” says MacAskill. “Kelvingrove Museum was built in 1901 as part of Glasgow’s second Great Exhibition: a city showing off everything it has both for the people who live there and as a legacy to the world. Museums and public parks are both spaces that contain so many different layers of people’s memories and histories.”

Green, in her hotly anticipated new work Fatherland/Motherland, is engaging with an entirely different version of Glasgow. She was born in the city, to a Yorkshire mother and Glaswegian father; when the relationship failed she was taken back to Yorkshire as a baby and has only met her father once. However, as an adult, she gravitated back to the city again, and Fatherland, the first half of the piece, is a particularly pertinent exploration of place, and national and local identity.

“I’m trying to understand what role my relationship – or non-relationship – with this man who I was born to has played in my relationship to this place,” Green explains. “Am I allowed to call myself Scottish, even? I don’t have a Scottish accent, and without that it’s difficult to claim my legitimacy here.

“I wanted to explore an idea of Scottish and Glaswegian cultural heritage, begin to claim it as part of my identity. Some of it is very difficult, and certainly not what you’d see on a Visit Scotland advert.

“My father had a difficult relationship with alcohol; there’s a certain paradigm of Scottish masculinity that might be part of this place. I’m also using Scottish folk music, traditional rhythms with resonance to Glasgow, to Scotland: the only person on stage with me is a drummer.”

Even the non-Scottish aspects of the festival are well programmed to chime with the city and its inhabitants. Bryony Kimmings’ 7 Day Drunk, looking at a week when the artist stayed drunk for the duration, examines our relationship with alcohol. Berlin/Nottingham group Gob Squad will lead a discussion forum on “the city as a cultural site”. Montreal musician Martin Messier’s Sewing Machine Orchestra creates a piece of live music from another powerful symbol of the Clyde’s industrial past – a job lot of classic 1940s Singer sewing machines. The Arches are working with the Clydebank community – created and then decimated around the world’s biggest Singer factory – to bring school and community groups to the performance.

Lebanese performance artist Tania El Khoury’s Maybe if you choreograph me, you will feel better will take place amid the bustle of Sauchiehall Street, while Behaviour’s grand finale Haircuts By Children is set to happen in the window of a Gibson Street hairdresser. That show really does exactly what it says on the tin, by the way: Toronto theatre company Mammalian Diving Reflex will work with a class of local ten-year-olds, giving them two weeks’ hairdressing training before letting them loose on the barnets of anyone brave enough.

“Art – visual art, live art – has been a massive drive in the shifting perception of Glasgow from an industrial city,” says Wylie. “We’ve got all these reappropriated industrial spaces turning into arts centres, like SWG3 or the Glue Factory.

“It’s the sort of place where you ought to – or might expect to – see a strange performance in the middle of Sauchiehall Street, or in the window of a West End hairdresser. We’re just responding to the sort of place Glasgow is.” «

Behaviour is at the Arches and other venues across Glasgow from Saturday until 29 April. www.thearches.co.uk.