Culture of Empathy: Fair Saturday in Scotland

In venues across the world on the last Saturday of November, artists are gathering to take part in the global charity initiative, Fair Saturday. Booked as a sorely needed counterbalance to Black Friday’s unfettered consumerism, Fair Saturday has a simple but bold manifesto – to promote the value of empathy and culture for building a better society. 

It sounds ambitious, but the premise is quite straightforward. Creatives put on any kind of event and pledge a portion of its income to a charity or cause of their choice. If financial support is too much to commit to (as it has been for many artists of late), then participants can still use their platform to spotlight a charitable organisation. It’s a concrete way to demonstrate how the arts can make a positive impact in the world, and how much poorer we would all be without it – an especially vital message these days, when the fallout from COVID-19 and ongoing economic crisis are threatening the future of venues, festivals and individual artists.  

“Culture is really important in and of itself,” says Suzy Ensom, the regional manager for Fair Saturday Scotland. “There are a lot of things that you can do through art, music or theatre that help people to look at the world a bit differently. I think that the arts and culture have a part to play in bringing people together and to help think about the more vulnerable members of the community.”

Fair Saturday started out as a pilot event in 2014 in the city of Bilbao in northern Spain, before rapidly growing to 45 participating countries and 3,924 artists the next year. So far in 2022, more than 42,000 artists worldwide have signed up, and more will keep joining in the weeks leading up to the event. Usually it is cities or regions that join as Fair Saturday hubs, but Scotland is the only nation that hosts its own Fair Saturday programme. 

Cultural organisations both big and small are taking part all around the country. The Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh will host a concert featuring the 'all-welcome' Soundhouse choir, multi-instrumentalist and singer Inge Thomson, and Edinburgh makar/poet Hannah Lavery, with proceeds going to Soundhouse’s work promoting local gigs and musicians. “We wanted very much to provide artists with the opportunity to support themselves,” says Ensom. Meanwhile in Bo’ness, the Hippodrome Cinema will screen the Me Too drama She Said, which coincides with the UN’s 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence. Up in the Highlands, the rural arts promoter SEALL are putting on the Festival of Small Halls, which brings together musicians in remote community halls across the Isle of Skye and Raasay for a performance and ceilidh. 

“The thing that makes Fair Saturday a bit different is that anyone can take part,” Ensom says. “Anyone can take part in the Edinburgh Fringe, but actually there's often a cost involved. At Fair Saturday, it doesn't have to be very costly, so it could be a local Scouts group putting on a display of what they've been doing or an amateur dance group.” These collectives can then take advantage of the global reach that Fair Saturday offers – last year, 37 countries tuned in to a livestream of the Festival of Small Halls’ ceilidh. It’s an opportunity, says Ensom, to feel part of something bigger, knowing that similar events are happening in other small halls – or large concert venues – in places like Lisbon, Bilbao, or La Rioja.

As for what audiences take from the day, Ensom hopes that by pairing the promotional power of the festival and its larger participants, people will be nudged to discover new activities in their area. “There's a lot of good work being done, but I think the arts still sometimes don’t feel accessible to particular groups or communities,” she says. “What I really want is for all people in Scotland to feel like there's something there for them.” Take Orkney’s Northlight Gallery which, in a series of short films titled Orcadian Stories, is shining a light on locals who have made a difference in their community. Or the Oban Winter Festival, a ten-day event that showcases local performers, food vendors, and light shows. “Having those kinds of community activities is really important for opening a new window to the world for people.”

For Ensom, it’s these smaller events outside the cities’ more traditional cultural centres that hold the biggest potential for Fair Saturday’s goals. “We’re empowering communities to create their own content and share that content with the world,” she says. “It’s about building bridges and understanding others and sharing the culture that makes us us and makes communities communities. Every community in Scotland, they've got something really precious to share. I think that this is the platform where they can do that.”

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Fair Saturday, events across Scotland, 26 Nov
standrews.fairsaturday.org/