Luminate Festival 2013

Throughout October 2013, Luminate’s nationwide celebration of creativity as we age featured 400 events. 

The programme included:

• Recount: Bunker Stories , three site-specific installations by Shetland-based artists Roxane Permar and Susan Timmins, commissioned by Luminate.  The project explored Shetland’s role in the Cold War, bringing together older people in Shetland to share their experiences. 
• The Luminate Suite , a song cycle created by composer Bill Sweeney, commissioned by Luminate. The Suite was inspired by music, poems and songs shared by older people on the islands of Mull, Skye, Tiree, Iona and Islay. Musicians from Live Music Now Scotland toured care homes and community centres to perform the songs as part of the Festival’s Outreach programme. 
• Super Vivere , an exhibition by photographer Susie Rea at The Macrobert Arts Centre, Stirling, and at Platform, Glasgow.  Rea used portraits, audiovisual narrative and text to explore the lives of siblings in their 90s. Created as part of an EU-funded project in collaboration with Dr Maeve Rea, a geriatrician at Queen’s University, Belfast. 

• Scottish Makar, Jackie Kay, read from stories and poems in her book Reality, Reality, which explores themes of ageing. A portrait of Kay by artist Joyce Gunn Cairns MBE was part of an exhibition featuring portraits of people ageing creatively at The Lochgelly Centre, Fife.  
• A touring production of  Translunar Paradise , Ad Infinitum’s award-winning mask and movement theatre piece that told the story of William as he retreats to his memories following the death of his wife.   The company also led movement workshops with older community dancers as part of our outreach programme. 
• German dance company resistdance, choreographed by Artistic Director Silke Z, brought two dance theatre episodes from The Generation Project to Edinburgh, exploring the challenges of our later lives.   
• Old Skool saw older and younger people work together with graffiti artist TrenchOne, creating a permanent mural challenging preconceptions of ageing in a Livingston underpass. 
• 24 Carat Gold and Friends performed at Dance Base in Edinburgh, sharing the work of this group of older dancers. 
• The Howard Doris Centre in Strathcarron held a mini arts festival for older people in their day centre and for the wider community. 
• Care:Create:Connect, a programme of artist-led workshops in 9 care homes across Aberdeenshire as part of the Festival’s outreach programme. 
• The Luminate Poetry Slam returned to the Ghillie Dhú, Edinburgh, compered by Jenny Lindsay, winner of the 2012 BBC Slam. 
• Our annual film tour included The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, preceded by a 1928 archive film of the Lochgelly Old Age Pensioners’ Drive to Crook O’Devon. 

Luminate, Scotland’s creative ageing festival, ran between 2012 and 2019.