'Take your broken heart....'

Happy 2017 :-) Wishing you all good things in life and work this year, and here's hoping we're all feeling strong enough to greet the challenges ahead with hope, love, and solidarity with the oppressed. I started my year by reading 'Fight Like A Girl' by Clementine Ford....this book should be required reading for all genders! Earth-shaking...

'Take your broken heart and make it into art'. RIP Carrie Fisher - thank you for your courage and wisdom. And thank you Meryl Streep for an earth-shattering call to arms for artists at the Golden Globe Awards. Let's get right to it. One way to challenge the kind of hateful polemic becoming all too familiar in our media, on political platforms, and on our streets, is to make art, to make art of quality, power, and truth, and to make it accessible and affordable so that as many people as possible can go and see it, can be faced with challenging questions in a space devoted to letting them ponder them, and can leave a different person from how they entered. I am really excited and inspired at all the great work being made in Scotland just now - it's an intensely complex and wonderful fabric to be a part of.

At the moment I am continuing my development of Buaireas anns an Uisge / Trouble the Water. I was so happy to be named as one of the National Theatre of Scotland's Starter for Ten artists, and used my residency at the brand spanking new Rockvilla to explore some more ideas with an amazing group of artists. Head to the Trouble the Water page for news on this.

This year we're also developing a musical inspired by Aberdeen's Beach Ballroom, and some other things in that fine city. We're hopeful we'll get to spend some more time in the North East soon :-)

As ever, come say hi on Twitter @StoirmOg or @bettywrote

Els xo