Outskirts festival at Platform: Our highlights

Outskirts is back at multi-arts hub Platform this April with a packed mini-festival featuring 30 artists performing a wide range of work. As ever, the Easterhouse Conversations promises something special. The annual project sees local musicians collaborate on fresh songs documenting the lives of the people of Easterhouse, and this year members of two of Glasgow’s most exciting bands are at the helm: Suzanne Rodden and Lewis Cook of Free Love and Eilidh Rodgers, one half of SAY Award-winners Sacred Paws.

If frenetic jazz from the Glasgow underground sounds like your jam, be sure to check out the performance from Banana Oil, the jazz-funk trio featuring members of LYLO and Golden Teacher, who aim “to sound like the Mothers Of Invention without all the toxic masculinity.” If you haven’t already guessed it, the group’s live show brings a pleasing dose of humour along with the breakneck grooves.

In theatre, be sure to catch the UK premiere of Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse’s The Guitar Man. Translated by Louis Muinzer and directed by Nora Wardell, the play’s focus is a man who makes his living singing the same songs day after day on the edge of town. Themes of loss, longing and loneliness are explored as we hear the man’s story in a show blending text, song and silence.

Who could resist a show titled Bi-Curious George and Other Side Kicks? This is live artist Lucy Hutson's curious collaboration with her dad Addrian aka Professor ‘the Amazing’ Addrian, a Punch and Judy man extraordinaire. We’re told this earnest artist will clash with her glib entertainer old man as “they reenact childhood magic tricks and reflect on what it means to choose the life of an artist”. Sounds tense.

Also look out for some finely-calibrated absurdist theatre in the form of Shaking the Habitual from Platform Young Company. Using movement, text and sound, this derived performance questions the ways in which we conform to the world around us. The show recently went down a storm at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh as part of the Chrysalis Festival.