New venue The World has made quite an impression on this year's Fringe – a success it will be celebrating at The Scotsman Fringe Awards on Friday, reports Tim Cornwell
PALOMA is sipping iceless water in an Edinburgh bar, just across the road from St George's West church. "I don't drink cold things because of my voice," she says. Then the 23-year-old Brazilian singer is drawn, giggling, into the story of how a
t the age of 15 she once tied her cat to a chair, to hear her practise a song by the Brazilian popular legend Elis Regina. "I didn't have anybody to listen to me and I was at home by myself. The cat was there on the sofa."
Fringe producer and director Toby Gough first saw Paloma Gomes – she goes by her first name – singing at a street party in Salvado de Bahia, Brazil, run by the Pracatum music school, a place that changed her life. He has now brought her to Edinburgh as the throaty, full-voiced singer for Capoeira Knights: Warriors of Brazil.
Gough is a creative maverick who has won five Scotsman Fringe First awards for shows he has written or directed. His formidable powers of persuasion have enlisted supporters such as Kylie Minogue, Peter Gabriel, and actor Brian Cox. Past successes include Children of the Sea, a Shakespearean adaptation performed by Sri Lankan children at Edinburgh in 2005 in the wake of the devastating 2004 tsunami. Gough has brought shows to Edinburgh for years, often to the Royal Botanic Garden – from Linneaus, Prince of Flowers, about the man who discovered the sex life of plants, to another featuring a troupe of Tibetan monks. Gogo, the Man With the Magic Feet, was about landmines in Africa.
This year, though, Gough has got a whole venue – The World at St George's West Church, formerly used by the Assembly. Like a globe-trotting magpie, he has hatched a programme of exotic and noisy music and dance shows, two from Cuba and the others from Cambodia, Tanzania, and Brazil. Gathering a raft of four-star reviews, the performers – many away from home for the first time – have turned The World into a brash new presence on this year's Fringe. It's an achievement they'll be celebrating this Friday morning, as The World stages a special, one-off venue showcase performance at The Scotsman Fringe Awards at Assembly Music Hall.
"It's one of the most uniquely beautiful things I have ever done," Gough enthuses about the venue. "We choose special people, open-hearted and generous. Everyone is helping each other change sets. We have a Friday and Saturday musical jam. When you have musicians who don't speak the same language, communicating through music, that's a beautiful privilege to enjoy. They all come from socially trying places, where they work hard to survive, where music is a lifeline."
There is a wide range of shows at The World. Capoeira Knights revolves around street face-offs in the Brazilian favelas – in the form of dance rather than violence, where sinewy young men vie to outdo each other with spectacular and aggressive flips and twists.
Paloma was raised in the ghetto of Candeal Brotas, in the city of Salvador de Bahia. She shared a bedroom with four sisters and one brother, and grew up singing Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff songs with her uncle's band. At 15 she was spotted by Brazil's popular composer Carlinhos Brown, who got her a place at his Pracatum school, and she has since worked on his recordings. She helped her way through selling ice-cream on the beach, and is now the only wage-earner in the family.
"She is destined," says Gough, "to be a star on the Brazilian musical horizon." She was about to start work in a shoe factory when he offered her the Edinburgh trip.
The Cambodian teenagers of Children of the Khmer take their meals in the hall of St Stephen's Comely Bank Church. The venue's cultural melange is reflected in its menus – the Brazilians eat feijoada, the national stew of black beans with beef or pork. The Cambodians get acacia omelette and sour beef ball soup, rice with palm sugar and coconut, cooked by a chef from Peter Gabriel's recording studios.
The young Cambodian dancers are from run-down areas of Phnom Penh, where they attend classes run by Cambodian Living Arts. The US-based foundation was set up to find "master" musicians and performers who survived the Khmer Rouge, when an estimated 90 per cent of artists and actors were killed, to pass on their skills to a new generation. Their show ranges from slow and meditative classical and dances, to popular turns like the peacock dance. At 21, Kavich Neang is the oldest of the dancers. "During that time everything was damaged," he says. "Culture, dance, music. We need to make it revive."
He is from Bassac in Phnom Penh, home to prostitutes and drug dealers. And now he is on his first trip outside Asia.
Gough describes Leng Sithul, director of the Cambodian group, as "the Frank Sinatra of Cambodia". The teenagers perform with him at weddings and temple openings. "Some kids have a mum and no dad, some a dad and no mum, some are from poor homes," says Sithul.
The Zawose Family – another four-star show – opens with a film about Tanzanian musician Hukwe Zawose, who toured with Gabriel's Real World Records before he died from Aids in 1983, aged 65. By repute he had seven wives and over 40 children. In 2007, Gough brought the family's show to the Botanic Garden, and it has come back to The World.
Sitting with the Cambodians at lunch is Valerie Hemingway. Enlisted by Ernest Hemingway as his secretary at 19, she worked on his papers after his suicide two years later, and married his son Gregory. Now 68, after a career in journalism and publishing, Valerie provides the narrative thread for Hemingway's Havana, The World's Cuban show. She contributes reminiscences between displays of Cuban dance and music.
Hemingway's Havana boasts music from Papi Oviedo of the Buena Vista Social Club, and the ultra-smooth salsa dancing of Julio Padron. The performers provide male and female sex appeal in spades.
Hemingway met Gough in Cuba a few months ago when he was scouting for talent and she was writing a magazine article. "Toby said, well, you should be in the show," she says. "I didn't know him well enough to know he actually meant it. The ticket arrived ten days before the flight."
As a production, Hemingway's Havana is raw. "We had no rehearsals," says Hemingway. "Toby said, 'I like the freshness'."
On stage, however, responding to set questions and obliged to finish answers with a cue for the next song, and with an awkwardly large face mike, her words seem wooden. The show clearly needs some refining.
It turned out Ernest Hemingway had hired the-then Valerie Danby-Smith in much the same way as Gough. She was sent to interview him in Spain; the 59-year-old author, declaring his passion, invited her first to go to Pamplona with him, then to Cuba. He told her that every ten years he fell in love and out of that he produced a great novel. "It was like the Toby thing, you know," she says. "Hemingway offered to book me tickets and a hotel. Then he offered me a job."
• The World is at St George's West, 58 Shandwick Place.
• The World will stage a one-off venue showcase performance at The Scotsman Fringe Awards at Assembly Music Hall, Friday 22 August, 10am. The event is free but ticketed – see page 12 for more details.
