LJ Idol - Week Two
In the heart of Edinburgh’s Old Town, all cobbled streets and crooked old buildings, there sits an empty car park very dear to my heart.
A shadowy, unremarkable Edinburgh cobbled lane with a large metal gate at the far end and slabs of wood in the foreground, an archway slicing the picture in half. It’s very grey, and very empty.
For ten months of the year, it’s simply a derelict building; dark, empty, snowball-shaped mould growing in the corners of air-hanger shaped rooms, and the constant drip of constant rain through heavy iron-clad ceilings. But come July, we move in and everything changes. Come July, every year, the Edinburgh Fringe starts to take shape and the Underbelly is reborn.
I’ve worked for Underbelly for five years now, always as a theatre technician helping to run one of the sixteen venues that seat anywhere between fifty and one thousand people. I’ve worked for one year in a huge space that took fifty people, two years in a hot, dank, cabaret room that fitted up to two hundred, and two years in a rather special tent shaped like an upside down purple cow that fits four hundred people and really does have to be seen to be believed. When it gets too windy, the legs that stick in the air are deflated. When it’s REALLY bad weather, down comes the head.
An aerial view of the Udderbelly cow all lit up at night, an enormous square purple tent structure with a white Udderbelly logo blazened across the front. The front end has an inflated upside down cow head with wide white eyes, four inflated legs sticking up in the air on the roof and a massive inflated cows udder with inflated cows teats on top.
The special thing about Underbelly is that it’s entirely temporary, never existing for more than two months in any one place, never staying as one permanent structure in one permanent home. When it’s time for the Fringe we quite literally build it from the ground up, bringing in lights, plumbing, staging, sofas, drapes, alcohol, computers, loudspeakers, control boards and hundreds of tins of paint. Absolutely nothing exists in that building between September and June, but when August comes around it becomes, as one newspaper called it, a ‘vertical Glastonbury’ of theatre, music, bars and festival-goers, all crammed in to one layered building beneath George IV Bridge.
There are seven rooms in Underbelly alone, each on top of the other and each with their own personality and quirks. All of them are ‘Bellies’; Belly Dancer, Big Belly, Belly Button, White Belly - the list goes on. The first to take paying audiences were White Belly and Iron Belly, and the rest were worked downwards from there, with Dancer and Big the very last to open. Iron tends to leak; Belly Laugh possibly has a ghost. Belly Dancer is the loudest and latest and mine for the last two years, with a bar inside and a bar next door, and some of the best equipment and best shows in the whole building.
I operate technical equipment for all of the shows inside, helping to turn them around from one show to the next in fifteen minutes or less, and cleaning, tidying and repairing the equipment during any rare time off. Show time is my time; I get to drink tea in the staffroom or eat takeaway at night with the other crew members. We call dinner ‘Kipling’ - it’s our radio code for when we’re ordering food, and it’s a communal affair every day, sharing Thai and Chinese or Indian or pizza between us, technicians and front of house and bar staff all squashed together in one tiny dilapidated room, sprucing up bare walls with swagged fabric and coloured lights, squashing in cushions and adding blankets wherever we can to make our temporary space just that; ours.
It is hard to see why I love that place so much?
When the time comes for the ‘out’, everything is stripped from its temporary home. The lights are not just dimmed, they’re unplugged entirely. The bars become void of all drink, each venue loses everything that’s not bolted to the walls and most lose even that. The chairs and sofas get packed onto enormous lorries that trundle off into the Edinburgh darkness, the signs come down and drapes come out.
When we’re not there, Underbelly is just another derelict building, lost to dank and dark and the musty memories of Fringes gone by. The shock of looking into what was a bustling white cafe with music and coffee and muffins and chairs and seeing it as just one large empty car park never fails to amaze me, both for what was gone and what we achieved by having it there in the first place.
Right now, as I type, Underbelly sleeps. But in eight months time, it’ll be Fringe time again, and then there’ll be light and music and talk and the best party in town. Hush - can you hear it? The sleeping lion is stirring. Those cobbled streets are remembering what’s really beneath them - what really should exist. Have another look at that dusty old car park next time you’re passing by - it’s amazing what can be created there, just with a lick of paint, a little bit of Fringe inspiration and a team of Cow Crew doing what they love best.
A photo looking upwards at deep blue netting with lines of festoon lights swagged along it. Silver aluminium truss holds up purple banners with patterns of inverted cartoon cow heads all over them, and on the left in the foreground is a large vertical banner with ‘Q Here For Big Belly’ stamped upwards on it. The overwhelming colours are deep blue and deep purple with pretty white lights dominating.The viewpoint, amazingly, is from almost exactly the same spot as that first empty photo of the cobbled lane.
If you'd like to learn more about the Underbelly, then trot along to the Underbelly website and have a look at all the cool photos and promo videos contained within. For more explanation of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the largest arts festival in the world and Underbelly's place within it, here is the EdFringe website which will go much more in depth with what the Fringe is or how it works. Alternatively, feel free to ask me as many questions as you like!
This was my Week Two entry for therealljidol, Deconstruction. Please feel free to leave any constructive criticism and please do vote for me in the poll at the end of the week!
A shadowy, unremarkable Edinburgh cobbled lane with a large metal gate at the far end and slabs of wood in the foreground, an archway slicing the picture in half. It’s very grey, and very empty.
For ten months of the year, it’s simply a derelict building; dark, empty, snowball-shaped mould growing in the corners of air-hanger shaped rooms, and the constant drip of constant rain through heavy iron-clad ceilings. But come July, we move in and everything changes. Come July, every year, the Edinburgh Fringe starts to take shape and the Underbelly is reborn.
I’ve worked for Underbelly for five years now, always as a theatre technician helping to run one of the sixteen venues that seat anywhere between fifty and one thousand people. I’ve worked for one year in a huge space that took fifty people, two years in a hot, dank, cabaret room that fitted up to two hundred, and two years in a rather special tent shaped like an upside down purple cow that fits four hundred people and really does have to be seen to be believed. When it gets too windy, the legs that stick in the air are deflated. When it’s REALLY bad weather, down comes the head.
An aerial view of the Udderbelly cow all lit up at night, an enormous square purple tent structure with a white Udderbelly logo blazened across the front. The front end has an inflated upside down cow head with wide white eyes, four inflated legs sticking up in the air on the roof and a massive inflated cows udder with inflated cows teats on top.
The special thing about Underbelly is that it’s entirely temporary, never existing for more than two months in any one place, never staying as one permanent structure in one permanent home. When it’s time for the Fringe we quite literally build it from the ground up, bringing in lights, plumbing, staging, sofas, drapes, alcohol, computers, loudspeakers, control boards and hundreds of tins of paint. Absolutely nothing exists in that building between September and June, but when August comes around it becomes, as one newspaper called it, a ‘vertical Glastonbury’ of theatre, music, bars and festival-goers, all crammed in to one layered building beneath George IV Bridge.
There are seven rooms in Underbelly alone, each on top of the other and each with their own personality and quirks. All of them are ‘Bellies’; Belly Dancer, Big Belly, Belly Button, White Belly - the list goes on. The first to take paying audiences were White Belly and Iron Belly, and the rest were worked downwards from there, with Dancer and Big the very last to open. Iron tends to leak; Belly Laugh possibly has a ghost. Belly Dancer is the loudest and latest and mine for the last two years, with a bar inside and a bar next door, and some of the best equipment and best shows in the whole building.
I operate technical equipment for all of the shows inside, helping to turn them around from one show to the next in fifteen minutes or less, and cleaning, tidying and repairing the equipment during any rare time off. Show time is my time; I get to drink tea in the staffroom or eat takeaway at night with the other crew members. We call dinner ‘Kipling’ - it’s our radio code for when we’re ordering food, and it’s a communal affair every day, sharing Thai and Chinese or Indian or pizza between us, technicians and front of house and bar staff all squashed together in one tiny dilapidated room, sprucing up bare walls with swagged fabric and coloured lights, squashing in cushions and adding blankets wherever we can to make our temporary space just that; ours.
It is hard to see why I love that place so much?
When the time comes for the ‘out’, everything is stripped from its temporary home. The lights are not just dimmed, they’re unplugged entirely. The bars become void of all drink, each venue loses everything that’s not bolted to the walls and most lose even that. The chairs and sofas get packed onto enormous lorries that trundle off into the Edinburgh darkness, the signs come down and drapes come out.
When we’re not there, Underbelly is just another derelict building, lost to dank and dark and the musty memories of Fringes gone by. The shock of looking into what was a bustling white cafe with music and coffee and muffins and chairs and seeing it as just one large empty car park never fails to amaze me, both for what was gone and what we achieved by having it there in the first place.
Right now, as I type, Underbelly sleeps. But in eight months time, it’ll be Fringe time again, and then there’ll be light and music and talk and the best party in town. Hush - can you hear it? The sleeping lion is stirring. Those cobbled streets are remembering what’s really beneath them - what really should exist. Have another look at that dusty old car park next time you’re passing by - it’s amazing what can be created there, just with a lick of paint, a little bit of Fringe inspiration and a team of Cow Crew doing what they love best.
A photo looking upwards at deep blue netting with lines of festoon lights swagged along it. Silver aluminium truss holds up purple banners with patterns of inverted cartoon cow heads all over them, and on the left in the foreground is a large vertical banner with ‘Q Here For Big Belly’ stamped upwards on it. The overwhelming colours are deep blue and deep purple with pretty white lights dominating.The viewpoint, amazingly, is from almost exactly the same spot as that first empty photo of the cobbled lane.
If you'd like to learn more about the Underbelly, then trot along to the Underbelly website and have a look at all the cool photos and promo videos contained within. For more explanation of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the largest arts festival in the world and Underbelly's place within it, here is the EdFringe website which will go much more in depth with what the Fringe is or how it works. Alternatively, feel free to ask me as many questions as you like!
This was my Week Two entry for therealljidol, Deconstruction. Please feel free to leave any constructive criticism and please do vote for me in the poll at the end of the week!