Looking Out To Sea

The initial enthusiasm for finding a new venue has been slowly waning over the weeks as we chapped on more doors and got more unhelpful responses. For the few venues that didn’t just say no there were other problems — mostly cost.

To distract us from issues of training spaces we gathered on Saturday past to rebuild our stock of instruments. We lost three berimbaus in the fire at the Steiner school so the plan was to get some replacements for the Glasgow group. We finished about five or six verga, waxed and with fresh leather caps for the few that were being refurbished. We used the recently harvested wire for new arame on these. The last stage we’ve not done anything about yet — preparing gourds and eventually marrying up the cabaças to make completed berimbaus.

And today I’m just back from The SPACE, which is approximately equivalent to the Out of the Blue drill hall in Leith, though less community-based. It’s in the floors above the Argyle Arcade so it’s harder to get at — the ground floor has many jewellery shops which don’t appreciate people tramping past at all hours.

It seems an interesting space which could provide something useful. The other option on the cards after a lot of hunting is the Overnewton Recreation Centre, curiously enough right next door to the Steiner school. For long enough they have not answer our calls but eventually we got through to them. The future of the space is under question but it seems we could get use of it for the next six months.

Finally things are looking up!