At the Edinburgh Fringe: ‘The OS Map Fan Club’

Helen Wood
Helen Wood

At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival? You may want to check out The OS Map Fan Club, an hour-long solo performance about Ordnance Survey maps that sounds relevant to our interests. Written and performed by Helen Wood, The OS Map Fan Club has been making the fringe and festival circuit this year and has been getting good reviews (see here, here and here). At the Edinburgh Fringe until 18 August; details and tickets here. [Map of the Week]

Previously: Cartography: ‘A Gently Interactive Show’ at the Halifax Fringe Festival.

Cartography: ‘A Gently Interactive Show’ at the Halifax Fringe Festival

If you’re in Halifax, you might still have a chance to catch a showing of Colleen MacIsaac’s Cartography at the Halifax Fringe Festival. As The Coast describes it:

For Fringe she has meticulously constructed a small show at The Living Room—maximum 30 seats and 20 minutes—in which she paints a map live, trying to get back to a single tiny, perfect moment in time. […] “I liked the idea of the need to make a map,” says MacIsaac on the patio at The Haligonian, “as opposed to the need to follow a map.”

It’s a gently interactive show: The house size dictates which geographical feature MacIsaac uses as the map’s start point. Patrons are handed a tiny program (“for wayfarers”) that contains a questionnaire asking for places they feel safe, alive, that they can’t remember. “I wanted it to be something where the audience would have a chance to reflect,” she says, “or have some moments in the show where the audience could contemplate their own histories, or their own memories.”

Three showings left: one tonight, one tomorrow afternoon and one Sunday evening. [WMS]