Letting The Light In

Karine Polwart has been chosen as the Artist-in-Residence for Scotland Unwrapped, a year-long celebration of Scottish music and spoken word at Kings Place in London. Scotland Unwrapped will see performances of innovative contemporary composers, folk musicians and Scottish classical ensembles, as well as poetry representing Scotland’s vibrant literary scene, throughout 2024.

Polwart, a five-time BBC Radio 2 Folk Award winner and a leading voice in the Scottish folk movement, is curating two weekends across the year. When I speak with her in October, she tells me she is “hunkered down” just south of Edinburgh where they are experiencing the tail end of Storm Babet. 

Looking forward to Scotland Unwrapped, she explains how much she likes the model of a more sustained relationship between a venue and an artist: “Normally we fly by on tour and it’s a very fleeting, ephemeral relationship,” she says. “But this way, you get to have a more meaningful relationship with audiences and you have a chance to programme other artists you love.”

Artists to appear at Kings Place in 2024 will include Kris Drever, Fara and Gnoss. Polwart’s role is to curate two weekends that ‘bookend’ the year. She begins her residency with Come Away In, a weekend of performances and workshops (January 12-13) that celebrate the traditions of hospitality, conviviality and refuge. Pianist Dave Milligan and Scottish-Caribbean poet Courtney Stoddart will join Polwart on stage for their first London performance. Polwart and Milligan recorded the 2021 album Still as Your Sleeping while Stoddart’s poetry, which speaks of the young, Black diaspora experience in Scotland, impressed Polwart when they met at Celtic Connections in 2023.

The second curated weekend, Sing to the Dark, includes an interactive choral project featuring community singers, audience members and guest artists. This takes place at the start of November, a time of winter rituals, coinciding with the Celtic festival of Samhain. “I wanted to play around with the whole idea of the descent into darkness and the emergence out of darkness,” says Polwart. This is a recurring theme in her recent work. Last year, she collaborated with sound designer and composer Pippa Murphy on a three-part BBC Radio 4 documentary called Seek the Light, which combined science, music and folklore. Sing to the Dark will also involve Heal and Harrow (Rachel Newton and Lauren MacColl’s project on the Scottish witch trials) as well as young Gaelic singer-composer Kim Carnie.

On both weekends Polwart is involved in a workshop capacity including, in January, a song workshop and a family storytelling workshop called Queen of the Birds. Prior to becoming a professional musician Polwart worked with children and throughout her career has done music-based work with young people: “Like a lot of folk musicians, it’s a big part of what I do. It might look like we’re touring all the time but a lot of us are working in schools and community settings.” 

For the November weekend, Polwart and Murphy will perform with 100 singers, in collaboration with the Nest Collective’s Fire Choir. “The layout of the hall lends itself to the whole upper level being a massed choir,” she says. “The performance is going to have a ritual arc, almost like heading into darkness and back out again, using the whole space in an immersive way. The venue has fabulous acoustics and a really terrific sound system that you can configure in different ways.”

In fact, Polwart can’t hide her enthusiasm for Kings Place which, she says, “has done a really good job in trying to represent Scotland in its cultural and geographic diversity. There are only a handful of venues that are willing to programme things that are more bespoke. One of the interesting things about Kings Place is [that] they’re programming across music, spoken word, literature, ideas. They’ve also got a commitment to developing emerging artists and taking risks.”

Polwart is an artist working across several media, juggling multiple projects. She tells me that, for the past few years, she has been experimenting with the shift between song and spoken word. “I’m interested in enquiry and questions, and music is one way of making sense of the world, but so is documentary and spoken word, so I’m interested in all these forms.” 

Full details of Scotland Unwrapped can be found at kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/scotland-unwrapped/