Fringe show Not For Glory promises 'a rebellious unravelling' of traditional music and dance

The answer, for dancer-choreographers Charlotte Mclean and Jack Anderson, and piper Malin Lewis, is that you grow up, move on, study different forms of music and dance; but find yourself, years later, increasingly drawn back towards that first performing and creative love, and to your complex relationship with it. And the result is their new show Not For Glory - billed as “bodies, bagpipes, brutality - a rebellious unravelling of Scottish and Irish tradition” - which they will be performing as part of this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe,

“I wanted to look at my experience in Scottish Highland dance as a child, dancing competitively from a very early age,” says acclaimed dancer-choreographer Charlotte Mclean, who grew up in Arbroath, before training at The Space in Dundee and London Contemporary Dance.

“I knew that Jack had done Irish dance competitively as a child, so I called him up. And as soon as we started our first residence on the idea, at the Workroom in Glasgow, we realised that we needed live music - so we got in touch with Malin, who had played bagpipes competitively as a child, and is now doing amazing work on developing that tradition.”

The show’s title, though, is not only about three artists rediscovering their love for the traditional art-forms they learned as children. “The title comes from the Declaration of Arbroath,” explains Mclean. “I was passing the Clutha Bar on the bus on the way to the Workroom one day, when I saw that fragment from the Declaration in a mural on the wall, and also a big Ukrainian flag painted onto the upper part of the building.

“And that got me thinking about nationalism and national identity, and war, and the way traditional music and dance has been used in battle - and that’s certainly true of the bagpipes, and of some elements of Highland dance.”

“I think complicated is a good word for our relationship with these traditions,” says Anderson, who began his professional career as an Irish dancer before retraining in ballet and contemporary dance at the Rambert School in London. “I grew up in Cumbernauld, in the 1990s, and I joined an Irish dance class purely because I had seen Michael Flatley in Riverdance, and fallen in love with it.

“So unlike most of the kids involved, I had no Irish heritage at all; and I think that even as a young child I was emotionally aware of being a slight outsider to the whole thing, with a slightly different perspective on it, which I’m still exploring today.”

And in Skye, meanwhile, Malin Lewis was also standing a little apart from the great bagpiping tradition of the islands, when - at the age of only eight - they were encouraged by their parents to take up bagpiping, instead of avoiding school altogether.

“In the Hebrides,” says Lewis, “piping is often a family business, passed down from generation to generation; and I wasn’t part of that at all. But I loved it right from the start; and the title of this show means a lot to me, because my love for it had nothing to do with winning the competitions. I loved it because of the beauty of the great pibroch laments; and because pibroch is a musical tradition that you can develop in all sorts of contemporary ways.

“I think all of us are grateful for what we learned as children, and for the technique we were able to develop. And now, we want to share our love for these traditions, and our feelings about them - whether it’s moments of parody, or celebration, or lament; as well as recognising that our show is just one of the million ways of taking these art-forms forward, into the future.”

Not For Glory is at Assembly@Dance Base, Edinburgh, 11-23 August, and will tour across Scotland in 2027

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