Hidden Door Festival, Edinburgh review: 'a welcome return'

Hidden Door, The Paper Factory, Edinburgh ★★★★★

“We played here in November and it was minus twelve degrees and we couldn't feel our fingers, but it was already pretty good,” said Glasgow art-punks Brenda on Saturday night, as the trio – a flurry of sharp melodies and hot sarcasm in boiler suits and red PVC – delivered one of the many highlight sets of a weekend marking the welcome return of Edinburgh’s Hidden Door festival.

It’s a sign of the developer era that the festival’s original calling to occupy and celebrate disused and derelict spaces and turn them into one-week music and arts festivals is increasingly drawing a blank on undeveloped sites in central Edinburgh. The Paper Factory – the former Saica paper and cardboard factory by Gogar roundabout – is on the city’s far western edge, behind the Edinburgh Gateway tram/train interchange and in view of Edinburgh Airport’s control tower. One day soon it too will be demolished, consumed by the sprawl of Scotland’s capital.

Tinderbox Orchestra at Hidden Door

For a few days, however, it was a site of pilgrimage. Much of what happened on the Friday and Saturday reflected the building’s heritage, from Jill Martin Boualaxai’s festival-commissioned performance art piece Ghost in the Machine, a gestural physical work performed in and around a piece of illuminated plant machinery, its shell being hammered on by Edinburgh’s reactivated Sativa Drummers, to the group work we have all been here – now into the light.

The latter featured an installation in the cluttered workers’ locker room featuring a stark electronic soundtrack and headphone interviews with former factory workers, a ghost memory of what used to take place here. Elsewhere in the vast space dubbed the “Factory Floor”, meanwhile, the Sativa Drummers reemerged on Saturday night to carry out their own thundering dancefloor performance, recreating the sound of industry as music for dance and catharsis.

Sign up to our FREE Arts & Culture newsletter at www.scotsman.com/newsletter

Other art, meanwhile, just sat beautifully in the space without responding much to it at all, for example Abby Warlow and Lewis Gourlay’s vaulting, ceiling-height films of figures dancing, or Juliana Capes’ captivating Rainbow Pools, a cascade of multicoloured balls caught in motion in mid-flow from the ceiling.

Alice Faye at Hidden Door PIC: Dan Mosley for Hidden Door

Most spectacular of all, the Crane Shed hosted another commissioned work, choreographer Tess Letham’s dance piece Spectral, with four female figures, two grounded and two spinning on aerial wires, filling this vast space to clubby music and lighting arrangements by Dave House and Sam Jones.

WATCH: Alice Faye’s Scotsman Session

There was also great music, and lots of it, across two large rooms perfectly reimagined as concert spaces; emerging singer-songwriter Alice Faye; the spiky, stylish beat-pop of PVC; the driving, heartfelt Americana of Katy J Pearson; the sheer catharsis of Tinderbox Orchestra, their joyous, semi-synchronised dance moves providing a self-professed antidote to the fearmongering of the moment; and the brilliant Voka Gentle, who cycled through spiky New Wave, dirty glam and gorgeous, understated lyricism.

A personal favourite, and the piece which fused most of the above, was the commission Production Line of Dreams, a theatrically-delivered musical fusion of jazz and space-rock by Scottish collective Acolyte, with dance interventions from Suzi Cunningham and AV backdrop by Eve King. Iona Lee’s poetic vocals touched on themes of industry and environment, for a hauntingly gorgeous evocation of unexplored and disappearing old spaces like this. As a work of art, it was perfectly suited to Hidden Door’s mission.

READ MORE: Kathryn Joseph, Glasgow review: 'songs of devastating heartbreak and witchy weirdness'