IN THE COURSE of the next few days, Govan will be buzzing with live art and experimental performance, not just in various spaces at the Pearce Institute but at selected sites in the surrounding neighbourhood.

An artist from Chicago, Mairead Delaney, will be in action down by the riverside, Anthony Hüseyin Pharaoh (from Turkey) will be seeking sanctuary from an honour killing threat In Govan’s Old Parish Church – which will also host Sarah Glass’s solo noise project, Grimalkin555. FK Alexander – like Glass, one of the Scottish participants – will engage with Govan’s past when she performs in one of the now empty shipbuilding sheds. Meanwhile, the usual rule of “ssshhh - keep quiet” will be suspended at Elderpark Library when Rachel Mars arrives there with her Joke Translation Service, a real-time encounter where two people – who do not speak each other’s language – try to discover if humour really can cross boundaries between countries and cultures.

Add in some outdoors kissing sessions or the conversations with regulars at the Fairfield Working Men's Club and you get a strong sense of how this sixth Buzzcut festival – the fourth to be located in Govan – has worked strategically to make itself at home in the community.

“We’ve even got our own office in the PI (Pearce Institute),” says Nick Anderson who co-founded the festival with Rosanna Cade in 2012. He laughs, because neither he nor Cade – at the time they were recent graduates of the Contemporary Performance Practice course (based at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) – imagined that Buzzcut would continue beyond that initial event. Nor did they envisage it becoming part of the world’s leading organisation for Live Art, LADA (Live Art Development Agency), a status that puts them on the professional map at home and abroad, thereby bringing profile-raising invitations to take work overseas. Come June, a Buzzcut entourage will head to Canada.

As for running the whole shebang from a year-round base in Govan? Anderson himself is prone to laugh at how grown-up and organised the Buzzcut initiative is these days, and yet the core values and innate laid-back/informal style of that first festival are still to the fore. There’s still a “pay-what-you-can” policy, while the process of programming the five days of installations, durational work and live performances still operates on the basis of open submissions.

“Among the applications we had,” says Anderson, “were three from artists based in Germany. We couldn’t fit them into our programme but, thanks to the Goethe Institut, we’re able to include them in the daily Side Burns sessions that are led by academics Phoebe Patey-Ferguson and Simon James Holton.”

Side Burns are where discussions among artists (and others) air the nitty-gritty issues that – especially in a post-Brexit vote environment – affect the freedom of ideas to move within communities, and not just the community of artists that Buzzcut came into being to support.

“More than ever, we’re putting our energies into brokering partnerships with the people on our doorstep,” says Anderson. We’re chatting in Cafe 13: it’s just a stone’s throw from the Pearce Institute and Anderson is clearly a weel kent face in here.

“We’ve got a gig in here during Buzzcut, and they’ll be catering for us as well,” he says. “It really matters to us that what we do connects into this community, whether it’s about being totally visible with the outdoor site-specific work or by bringing local young people in for our Close Shave (Live Art For Young People) which is in collaboration with Imaginate. We found out recently, that there’s a motto that belonged to the Govan Weavers: “Weaving Truth With Trust”. That speaks to us of what we want Buzzcut to be, for artists, audiences, and here, for the community in Govan.”

Buzzcut opens at Pearce Instute, Govan on Wednesday and runs until Sunday.

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