Return is a piece for four speaking voices, a string quartet, pipes, drums and dance. It’s an exploration into where long poem, ritual theatre and ceremony meet.
It weaves together and layers up text, music and performance as a celebration of the wheel of the year, of emerging and receding, and the common ground of death and renewal that unites us regardless and inclusive of all faiths and heritages.
It speaks of cycles and returns, of seasons, elements and the beyond human realms and rhythms; of expansion and contraction at our base and at our back that refuses the violence of fractured whiteness, patriarchy and linear consumer capitalism. It is a meditation on the need to both mark and lose all track of time; how we inhabit the greater whole and have it be frame, container and guidance.
Return was first performed in the round, and by candlelight (voices and musicians) in Govan & Linthouse parish church, over the full moon (occurring at 9.24pm) on Saturday October 28th 2023.
It was performed in the same place, exactly a year later Saturday 26th October at 19.30, in an expanded version including masked dancers.
Return platformed women, non-binary and/or trans performers, and was accompanied by programme notes about the concept and construction of linear clock time, of timelessness, of marking time and connection to place.
Performers 2024:
Voices: Beth Frieden, Lisa Fannen, Babs Nicgriogair, Susannah Stark.
Strings: Elena Inei (violin), Una McGlone (double base), Joanna Stark (cello), Semay Wu (cello).
Pipes: Emma Hill.
Drums: Eilidh Graham, Amy Redford.
Dancers: Sophie Jeffery, Saffy Setohy, Raindrabath X Bhose, Clarinda Tse, Aya Kobayashi, Monika Smekot, Fran Till, Kirstin Halliday, Aby Watson.
Beth Frieden (she/her) is an actor and a poet. She performs and writes in Gaelic and English, and is learning BSL. Her background is in theatre, with strong physical theatre skills, but she also works on screen and as a voieover artist. She loves trying new things, and is currently learning aerial hoop, and continuing to practice her fiddle. Work this year includes: Rough Mix Autumn 2024; a set of online comedy advertisements for a puzzle website; CARAN, a multi-roling Gaelic theatre development; and a feature film directed by Nadia Latif.
www.bethfrieden.co.uk
Lisa Fannen (she/her)
Lisa has been writing, and sharing words solo and with musicians/ soundmakers, in particular as part of a duo Claquer with Jer Reid. She published a poetry collection Faultline in 2018 and released it as a collaborative recording project in 2021. Lisa is also a bodyworker and activist concerned with dialogue and information exchange about health in the broadest sense of the term as part of movement for social justice.
lisafannen.uk/ inthebody.uk
Babs Nicgriogair (they/them)
Babs Nicgriogair is a stornoweegie poetician, a lover of hybrid and liminal spaces with a commitment to worker power, community building and collective joy.
Susannah Stark (she/her)
Susannah is a musician, printmaker, cleaner and gàidhlig learner who likes to blur the boundaries between all of this through song, improvisation & collaboration with other musicians, with the aim to communicate in multiple levels through music and evoke places, both internal and external. Her debut album ‘Time Together (Hues And Intensities)’ came out on Stroom record label in 2020. she is currently working on new music and interdisciplinary art project ‘Minor gestures’ due out in 2025.
Elena Inei (she/her)
Elena Inei is a violinist and improviser based in Glasgow. She is a member of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, Collective Endeavours and The New Strings Collective. Elena also collaborates with Barrowland Ballet’s intergenerational dance company Wolf Pack, and plays in various other project based formations.
Una MacGlone (she/her)
Una works across improvisation, jazz, traditional and classical genres. She also collaborates regularly with dancers, actors and poets, using improvisation as a key transdisciplinary process. Some career highlights include recording with a film soundtrack and two albums with David Byrne; touring with Savourna Stevenson; recording three albums, touring and performing at two Celtic Connections festivals with Rab Noakes and playing at the Proms with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. As a founder member of Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, she has an important role in performing and leading on creative projects such as an innovative annual exploration of Gaelic culture and improvisation with Ceòl ‘s Craic, a leading Gaelic Arts organisation. As well as these collaborations, her own music has been commissioned for and played on BBC radio 3.A new album with Jim McEwan has just been released on Scatter:scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/sun-shadow
Joanna Stark (she/her) is an eclectic musician from North-East Fife, currently based in Glasgow, where she recently obtained her MMus in Cello Performance at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS). Drawing from her roots in classical and Scottish traditional music, Joanna has enjoyed working across multiple genres and disciplines as a performer, composer and improviser. She has premiered over 15 new works by Scottish based artists/composers (most recently in Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp with Tree Burton, 2023) and regularly performs her own work with her folk duo Vágr. She is currently a Live Music Now Scotland artist with No Borders Trio, and a 2024 ambassador for the Benedetti Foundation, with whom she enjoys developing her skills as an educator and workshop leader.
Semay Wu (sē mā wo͞o) (she/her) works as a composer, cellist/improviser, and media/sound artist. Greatly
influenced by improvisational frameworks, Semay often uses interdisciplinary relationships to explore ideas of play, through collaboration and spontaneity. Recent performances and recordings have developed as solo cello and electronics, however, Semay’s other works have found shape as video pieces, performance/interactive-installations, graphic scores, as well as creating an online audio cookbook for Manchester’s communities.
semaywu.com
Emma Hill (she/her). Having grown up in Connel, a small village in the West Coast of Scotland, Emma was immersed into the wonders of traditional music from an early age. A recent graduate from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, she is developing her own style of piping through composition and collaboration, performing alongside the voices of piano and cello. As well as performing, Emma has been passing on her passion and skill of the bagpipes to the next generation of up-and-coming pipers through a variety of teaching and has loved seeing young musicians find their own joy in music.
Eilidh Graham (she/her) 
works in community cycling and community arts. Supporting people to take part in wellbeing and creative activities such as group percussion sessions, craft sessions from a cargo bike, group bike rides to explore nature, connect with people and services in the community. She has played in a Glasgow Samba Band for 15 years, and she cycles everywhere on her colourful bicycle!
Amy Redford (she/her) Amy settled for a guitar at 16 because despite 4 years of pestering up until then, they just wouldn’t get her a drum kit. She’s been hitting guitars increasingly harder ever since. She final
ly realised the drumming dream when she joined SheBoom in 2009, where she now teaches and leads that drumming ensemble. On guitar, she’s currently co-fronting Sequence 369 and busting out riffs with They Theory. Previous acts include Electric Ladygarden, Blood Of The Bull, Touch And Go, and Stotally Toned. Amy is a nihilistic malcontent with a fair amount of existential dread, which is expressed in her riffs, solos, and frenetic drumming.
Sophie Jeffery (she/them) is deeply invested in building community as a means of resisting structures of racial/carceral/border imperialism. She loves moving with people and finds hope in how it makes new worlds feel more possible.
Saffy Setohy (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer and facilitator from a dance background. Working in varied contexts, her practice explores connections between ecology, regeneration and soft activism. She works with somatic and sensory practices, collaboration and emergence as guiding threads through her practice. Recent work includes; Bodies of Water, a participatory performance exploring our relationship with this live-giving element; Sharing Cowlairs, a community regeneration project with visual artist Margaret Kerr, exploring responses to ‘derelict land’ in Possilpark, North Glasgow; Garden Series, a collaboration with dance artist Claire Pencak in hospital gardens, researching healing connections between people and plants; Remembering Together, a community project in Stirling exploring pandemic recovery through connection with nature & seasonality.
www.saffysetohy.co.uk Photo credit: Julia Bauer
Clarinda Tse – Yung Kee 雍記 (she/they) is an interdisciplinary performance maker and embodied researcher, Hong Kong-born and Glasgow-based. Their habitat explores emergent compositions of material ecologies through rituals and bodies as agency for worlding. Their making process is drawn from the sensorial experience of moving through familiar places (both physically and mentally) and finding expansion, amongst hanging air roots and tidal lands layered with micro and macro plastics. They currently think with seaweed. Recent works have been shown and supported by Glasgow International 2024, CCA Glasgow (2024), Cafe OTO (2024), Take Me Somewhere Festival 2023, Deveron Projects, Huntly (2022). Photo credit Tiu Makkonen.
Kirstin Halliday (they/them) is a dance artist and performer based in Glasgow who has choreographed, facilitated and performed in diverse contexts including; visual arts, music videos, club nights & community dance workshops. Grounded by their research background in Geography, their movement practice is motivated by the co-generative relation between moving bodies, social space, & interpersonal relations & identities. Their research at University of Glasgow & University of Iceland focused on emotional geographies, the geographies of the body, gender & movement. This research ignited questions relating to bodily agency, identity & resistance through movement, questions that drive their work to date, as they consider the dancing body as a site of queer potentiality & gender fluidity.
Rabindranath X Bhose (he/him) is an artist and dancer based in Glasgow hailing from London, Scotland, France, India and Brussels. He has a performance-rooted practice, pulling movement, text, drawing, and sculpture into close interaction. His research circles around queer masculinity, sacred transness and spiritual transformation, focusing on a sense of ‘crossing over’. In 2024, he performed Corpores Infames: Disreputable Bodies at Glasgow International in collaboration with Oren Shoesmith and Belladonna Paloma, a contemplative performance in a bog near Glasgow, teasing out the connections between trans and disabled bodies, boglands, and the ancient Celtic rituals honouring them. In 2023, he presented the exhibition DANCE IN THE SACRED DOMAIN commissioned by Collective, Edinburgh, including a performance entitled Body of the Bog, a writhing dance of a mummified bog body come to life. The research for this performance was developed in a Tramway Supports Residency for his project ‘Movement Alchemy: the Gender Fugitive’s Toolkit’ exploring the figure of ‘the gender fugitive’ to dance through queer ecology, disability justice, and gender transition.
Other recent exhibitions and performances include Beyond the Archive, Dundee University with GENERATOR Projects and Bbeyond, Dundee (2022); and At Practise and David Dale, Glasgow (2021; 2022). Photo credit: Sean Patrick Campbell.
Aya Kobayashi (she/her) is a Glasgow-based performer, choreographer, and teacher originally from Japan. She has worked with various artists and companies, including Yael Flexer, Rosemary Lee, Charlie Morrissey, Gecko Theatre, and Scottish Dance Theatre. She is also a member of Collective Endeavours and practices improvisational performance. At the heart of Aya’s work is inclusion. Between 2019 and 2023, she led Barrowland Ballet’s intergenerational company, Wolf Pack. She has collaborated with various inclusive companies and communities, such as Anjali, Indepen-Dance, Stop Gap, and Paragon, creating numerous pieces and training dancers. Aya also works as a movement director for Tricky Hat Production, helping amateur performers to bring brilliant life stories to the stage. Aya teaches weekly professional classes in Glasgow, hosted by The Work Room, and is dedicated to activating the dance community in the city. She is also a part-time lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She enjoys creating site-specific work as well as leading educational workshops and participatory performances in galleries such as Tate, V&A Museum of Childhood, and Tramway, as well as Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. Her work has been presented both in the UK and abroad, at locations including The Place, the Paralympics 2012 torch relay ceremony, Royal Festival Hall, Northern Ballet, Cairo, Madrid, Tokyo, Ofunato, and Queretaro in Mexico. Photo credit: @lawdesignstudio @otagostreetcollective
dr. ABY WATSON (she/they) is a neuroqueer artist, choreographer, academic, performer, and activist whose work straddles contexts of contemporary performance and knowledge exchange, with a hyperfocus on radical neurodiversity. With special interests in stimming, sensuality, presence, and consciousness, Aby’s playful and stimulating choreographic sensibility embodies non-neuronormative potentialities through rhythm, repetition, multisensoriality, and togetherness. They trained in Contemporary Performance Practice at The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where they recently completed their PhD in neuroqueer choreography. Aby’s work has toured nationally and internationally, and has been supported by National Theatre of Scotland, British Council, Unlimited, and The Workroom among others. She is excited by folk (particularly Morris dancing) and ritual practices, and in her spare time she likes to make music with friends, tear up nightclub dancefloors, and paddle in rivers // www.abywatson.co.uk Photo credit: Tiu Makkonen.
Fra|n(cesca) Till (they/she/he) is a freelance movement artist based in Glasgow. Fran moved to Scotland from Italy to train in contemporary dance performance at SSCD in Dundee, and be close to the magical Scottish nature. Since moving to Scotland they have been travelling to intensives in Scotland and Europe to expand their movement knowledge. Fra’s greatest excitement is when working with the floor, improvising/researching movement with self and others. Fighting Monkey principles, soft acrobatics, partnering/contact improvisation. They love hiking and moving with(in) nature, being still in nature and moving in the comfort of their home. Fran performs and choreographs on stage, outdoor and screen; collaborates and group researches. They facilitate classes in Scotland and Italy – they love witnessing the beauty of people’s unique movement. They are one of four creators/members of Vaiven Movement Collective ~ creating and performing outdoor movement work in Scotland. Fran was part of: A Wee Journey by Farah Saleh and Oğuz Kaplangi, Fàilte Gu BSL by Evie Waddell, Shoreaway by Vaiven, City Girl (The Cairo within) by Nashwa Maatouk
Monika Smekot (she/her) is a Glasgow-based video and dance artist who skillfully blends dance and cinematography. With a background in contemporary dance and various styles, she captures movement with exceptional clarity. Co-founder of the dance theatre un dó, Monika specializes in screen dance and is an active member of The Work Room, where she has received multiple residencies. She has created a vast portfolio of dance films, experimental works, and educational videos, and has curated screenings at the Centre for Contemporary Arts. Monika also directs the Glasgow Theatre and Arts Collective and balances her creative work with motherhood. Photo credit: Brian Hartley
Performers 2023:
Voices: Jj Fadaka, Lisa Fannen, Babs Nicgriogair, Susannah Stark.
Strings: Elena Inei (violin), Una McGlone (double base), Simone Seales (cello), Semay Wu (cello).
Pipes: Mairearad Green, Malin Lewis.
Drums: Eilidh Graham, Amy Redford.
Jj Fadaka (she/her)
is a feminist writer and workshop facilitator living in Edinburgh. In a mix of non-fiction and storytelling, she explores community, feminism, and love as a path to change. Jj’s workshops are based on black feminist radical traditions that allow us to imagine the world without barriers. Jj was featured as Poet in Residence for the 2023 StAnza International Poetry Festival. Her poetry zine ‘3 Days in Community’ is available from Lighthouse Books.
Lisa Fannen (she/her)
Lisa has been writing, and sharing words solo and with musicians/ soundmakers, in particular as part of a duo Claquer with Jer Reid. She published a poetry collection Faultline in 2018 and released it as a collaborative recording project in 2021. Lisa is also a bodyworker and activist concerned with dialogue and information exchange about health in the broadest sense of the term as part of movement for social justice.
lisafannen.uk
inthebody.uk
Babs Nicgriogair (they/them)
Babs Nicgriogair is a stornoweegie poetician, a lover of hybrid and liminal spaces with a commitment to worker power, community building and collective joy.
Susannah Stark (she/her)
Susannah is a musician, printmaker, cleaner and gàidhlig learner who likes to blur the boundaries between all of this through song, improvisation & collaboration with other musicians, with the aim to communicate in multiple levels through music and evoke places, both internal and external. Her debut album ‘Time Together (Hues And Intensities)’ came out on Stroom record label in 2020. she is currently working on new music and interdisciplinary art project ‘Minor gestures’ due out in 2025.
Elena Inei (she/her)
Elena Inei is a violinist and improviser based in Glasgow. She is a member of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, Collective Endeavours and The New Strings Collective. Elena also collaborates with Barrowland Ballet’s intergenerational dance company Wolf Pack, and plays in various other project based formations.
Una MacGlone (she/her)
Una works across improvisation, jazz, traditional and classical genres. She also collaborates regularly with dancers, actors and poets, using improvisation as a key transdisciplinary process. Some career highlights include recording with a film soundtrack and two albums with David Byrne; touring with Savourna Stevenson; recording three albums, touring and performing at two Celtic Connections festivals with Rab Noakes and playing at the Proms with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. As a founder member of Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, she has an important role in performing and leading on creative projects such as an innovative annual exploration of Gaelic culture and improvisation with Ceòl ‘s Craic, a leading Gaelic Arts organisation. As well as these collaborations, her own music has been commissioned for and played on BBC radio 3.
A new album with Jim McEwan has just been released on Scatter:
https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/sun-shadow
Simone Seales (they/them)
Originally from Florida, Simone Seales is a Glasgow-based cellist who completed their postgraduate studies at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2021. They focus on free improvisation, both tonal and atonal, and devising music for theatre.
Simone is passionate about exploring sound, how sound can reflect emotional states of being and how emotions are embodied. Their creative influences come from Black feminist leaders such as Audre Lorde, Assata Shakur and bell hooks. Within Simone’s creative work, they centre Blackness, sexuality, intersectional feminism and anti-racism. They believe Western Classical musicians are capable of making meaningful social change.
simoneseales.com
Semay Wu (sē mā wo͞o) (she/her) works as a composer, cellist/improviser, and media/sound artist. Greatly influenced by improvisational frameworks, Semay often uses interdisciplinary relationships to explore ideas of play, through collaboration and spontaneity. Recent performances and recordings have developed as solo cello and electronics, however, Semay’s other works have found shape as video pieces, performance/interactive-installations, graphic scores, as well as creating an online audio cookbook for Manchester’s communities.
semaywu.com
Mairearad Green (she/her)
Having grown up in the West Coast Coigach peninsula of the Scottish Highlands – an area steeped in culture and local traditions – Mairearad was introduced to folk music at an early age. Renowned for her deft and lyrical accordion style, as well as her dextrous piping, Mairearad is in great demand as a performer and composer. Many of her compositions are well known in the Scottish music scene. Among the favourites are ‘Maggie West’s Waltz’ and ‘Dram Behind the Curtain’. As a visual artist also, Mairearad’s work can be described as impressionistic, and a visceral response to the landscape she is so familiar. Her latest limited-edition vinyl release ‘Hearth’ seamlessly combines Mairearad’s two passions – art and music.
mairearadgreen.co.uk
Malin Lewis (they/them)
Malin is a queer multi-instrumentalist inspired by humans, queerness and the universe. One of Scotland’s most exciting creators, Malin melds tradition with innovation on a unique newly invented, self-made bagpipe. Malin’s long awaited debut album Halocline, is named for the layer between salt and fresh water. Halocline is a sequence of compositions reflecting on the liminal spaces between Malin’s outer and inner worlds as a trans person. Recently Malin has been touring the UK with Making Tracks international Residency, Recording film music in Berlin, studying folk music in Helsinki and learning the tradition of the extinct Finnish Bagpipes as well as writing and performing music for theatre and contemporary dance.’
malinmakesmusic.com
Eilidh Graham (she/her) works in community cycling and community arts. Supporting people to take part in wellbeing and creative activities such as group percussion sessions, craft sessions from a cargo bike, group bike rides to explore nature, connect with people and services in the community. She has played in a Glasgow Samba Band for 15 years, and she cycles everywhere on her colourful bicycle!
Amy Redford (she/her)
Amy settled for a guitar at 16 because despite 4 years of pestering up until then, they just wouldn’t get her a drum kit. She’s been hitting guitars increasingly harder ever since. She finally realised the drumming dream when she joined SheBoom in 2009, where she now teaches and leads that drumming ensemble. On guitar, she’s currently co-fronting Sequence 369 and busting out riffs with They Theory. Previous acts include Electric Ladygarden, Blood Of The Bull, Touch And Go, and Stotally Toned. Amy is a nihilistic malcontent with a fair amount of existential dread, which is expressed in her riffs, solos, and frenetic drumming.
Behind the scenes & crew 2023 & 2024:
Lisa Fannen (she/her) Concept, script, music and movement score, director: see above.
Jer Reid (he/him) Dramaturgy, sound design, music & movement score: Jer Reid is a musician, sound engineer and dramaturge based in Glasgow. He has and does play in bands (dawson, sumshapes, Painted X-Ray, God Is My Co-Pilot etc) and improvising ensembles (he has played a lot with Luke Sutherland, Raymond MacDonald, Rafe Fitzpatrick etc and with Lisa Fannen in their spoken word and guitar/ sounds duo Claquer). He organises gigs and tours, runs Gruff Wit Records and for six years he has done the monthly open improvising sessions on behalf of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra called GIOdynamics. In 2010, with Solène Weinachter, he founded the music/dance group Collective Endeavours who’s performances have included Tectonics Glasgow and Dance International Glasgow as well as lots of places that dance isn’t usually seen in and who’s members now include Aya Kobayashi, Molly Danter, Alex South, Elena Inei, Beth Edwards and Dylan Read. His dramaturgy work has included working with long time dancer collaborator Rosalind Masson and visual artist and writer Corin Sworn. He was thrilled last year to, along with Una MacGlone, make the music for Cloudberry MacLean’s singular film Low Rent. He has toured in thirty countries and has had his music played on BBC Radios 1, 3 and 4. In 2023 he released his first book of writing called Days and Diary Entries.Photo credit: Luke Sutherland
Nora Winstanley (she/her) Live Sound Engineering:Nora Winstanley is a sound engineer, educator and musician deeply rooted in Edinburgh.
Marix Leahy (she/they) Stage Management & Live Sound: Marix Leahy (she/they) is a community musician, teacher, facilitator, songwriter, and budding sound engineer/technician. Experienced in community events, making spaces where art and magic can happen. Having worked with National Theatre Scotland, Tron Theatre, Givin’ It Laldie, LGBT Health & Wellbeing, and more besides. Marix is both alert to and appreciates those details that should be carefully tended to so that an audience, artist or participant can have a smooth, engaging and enjoyable experience. How making spaces with heart and intent means that taking part in a creative process is unobstructed and enhanced. Marix leads choirs, works with kids and adults in community music settings across Glasgow and loves to dabble in sound engineering.
Cloudberry MacLean (she/jher) Production: Cloudberry MacLean (she/her) has made an interesting film called Low Rent about the year she spent secretly living in a hut built on her allotment in Edinburgh back in 2005. It follows the full cycle of the seasons and captures moments such as early dawn from the hut doorway, a fox running with a scavenged egg in her mouth and trees bending with fruit. In its course she explores questions that continue to preoccupy her about land ownership in Scotland, class, poverty, colonialism and how the violence of capitalism and the joy of life meet in our bodies.cloudberrymaclean.com
Lucy Mason (she/her) Safeguarding & accces: Lucy Mason (she/her) is a person-centred therapist, counselling trainer, social justice facilitator and conflict mediator. With a background in community organising, campaigning and mutual aid projects, she loves supporting people to transform themselves, their relationships and their communities, using an anti-oppressive, collaborative and abolitionist approach. Lucy is also an aspiring potter interested in making functional pieces with pleasurable forms.
Rex Chakley (they/them) Image creation & design: Rex designed the Return poster and programme. For the imagery, Rex made cyanotype prints from ritual and domestic objects and plants, which they reworked in Photoshop. Smitten with words, images and movement through space since they were a kid, Rex is currently engaged in metalsmithing, design, accessibility, building queer and trans community, and lifting heavy things.
Ise Gross (they/them) Altar design & making: ise is a trained cabinet maker and artist. they also practice as a somatic counsellor and love all these vocations. they can be found most thursdays in galgael:)
Gail Power (she/her) Mask design & making: Gail Power is a textile artist & designer with repair, reuse and upcycling central to her practice. After graduating from GSA she pursued a career in theatre & television as a design assistant & prop maker. Based in Glasgow she creates her own line of stylish upcycled garments & accessories for her brand Gail Power Art Design. www.gailpower.co.uk She is also an experienced workshop facilitator, sharing her textile skills & reuse experience to encourage others to discover & develop their creative abilities. facebook.com/GailPowerArtDesign @gailpowerartdesign1
Understudies: Jessica Argo (cello), Rafe Fitzpatrick (violin), Seth Bennett (double base), Kim Moore (voice), Hannah Allum (voice), Eala Mcelhinney (pipes), Shelby Johnston (drums).
Mugort burners: Gehan MacLeod (she/her), Nosheen Khwaja (she/her), Ise Gross (they/them), Soraya Bishop (she/her) and in 2024 Katharina Sack (they/them).
Front of House: Dot Whelan (they/them), Sam Peachey (they/them).