Circling the Fair Ground - by Dr Merlyn Seller

Written by Dr Merlyn Seller

“The fairground is fair only in name”

Showmen’s Theatre Company, Arcade Trilogy

Showmen’s Theatre Company Arcade Trilogy (Photo: Jon Davey)

Play gives and it takes, it’s serious business. When Fun City closed in 1998, its rides were taken far from Portobello, but no-one took away the arcade, and with Art Walk Projects’ 2025 Arcade commissions, we’re reminded of what play can help us grasp. As game studies scholar Aaron Trammell has it, play takes from the played and gives to the player, across lines sketched out in space, time and power. These relationships are always both ephemeral and historied in their repetition, and in the moment of play artists and their audiences can give fleeting life to dynamic architectures and communities both past and present. This is because, in the words of the late anthropologist Victor Turner, play dwells “betwixt and between” the power structures and geographies of our world, cutting slices out of material reality. Play is a liminal creature drawing imaginary lines on the ground where magic can happen. Hazy horizon, twinkling tide, pitted sand and sodden promenade; while a beach might be a risky place to build on, it’s the perfect place for play to call home.

The 2025 Arcade commissions are united by an interest in play betwixt and between land and sea, past and present, give and take. A recurrent refrain of the many artists and performers adding levity to the liminal is a local proverb, “Portobello had a Music Hall before it had a Church”, and capturing and enacting that long history of transient performances is the challenge they take up. During September’s Art Walk Porty festival each work playfully haunted the promenade with ephemeral histories of showmanship and the vanished spaces that once housed play. They let us appreciate how Portobello beach is still home to play, and how play might expose the deep time of fleeting moments through live and looping performances. Moreover, they performed this by criss-crossing social and affective margins, pressing close on the horizon between fantasy and materiality. As the game scholar Ian Bogost argues in Play Anything, magic comes from seeing the everyday anew, giving in to the moment and reclaiming something from moments past, shaping play out of the world. During the festival, passers-by, children, dogs and birds all danced in and out of the audience’s periphery much as they have for decades before and since the ground was laid for Nobles Amusements Arcade with Harry Marvello’s construction of a music hall in 1907.

Fibi Cowley Living Pictures (Photo: Jon Davey)

Theatrically, Fibi Cowley’s Living Pictures dramatised Portobello memories and the attempt to hold onto them with audio interviews played over a puppet theatre of fabric figures. Puppet play followed an allusive logic, sliding between vignettes of past and present, with sound carrying the lived experience of performers and locals as well as the process of recording itself. Sat in an intimate cluster of seats, we were treated to an intimate archive: a small space of soft figures and seaside sound. In the way that dreams play with memory, this conjunction powerfully embodied people and place.

In contrast, using living bodies, The Arcade Trilogy reassembled a miniature show ground on the green, complete with theatrical backdrop and minimal props. Here Showmen’s Theatre Company questions the fairness of the fairground by performing magicians’ rivalries and articulating the displacement of seasonal economies and Traveller communities from the heyday of Harry Marvello. In short order, playful provocative exchanges acted in their words as “beacons of hope” and “savers of memory.” Alongside Living Pictures, The Arcade Trilogy got the audience to question who plays and who is played, with staged motions and nostalgic atmospherics.

Emily Nicholl (in collaboration with Julia Chan, Gabbie Cook, Robyn Gray, Lauren Jamieson, Matthew Wright, Saya Yamaguchi) In the Round (Photo: Jon Davey)

Moving from theatre to dance, Emily Nicholl’s In the Round and Jorja Follina, Melissa Heywood and Jemma Steins’ Dance Token moved their participants through beach and promenade to trace the vanished spaces of Portobello’s past. In the Round reclaimed liminal spaces from the ring worn into the earth by Thomas Ord’s circus in years past with a circle drawn in the sand. Dancers’ arms and legs cleaved and refilled temporary trenches in the beach, while viewers formed the circle, our eye-line close to the material of play as we sat on the sand. Bodies stacked and cascaded in an open-air ring like waves on the shore.

Dance Token conversely, took us on a journey of music and movement. In one moment we were swimming in a vanished pool through rhythmic mime, and in another we danced around Scotland’s last bottle kilns, now encircled by housing, in a flagstone-hopping imaginary game of ‘the ground is red hot clay’. With these site-based moves in our repertoire, this dancing tour culminated in a full routine of motions set to chiptune music evoking videogames’ coin-operated past. Here the players and the pavement were the material of play. In both of these dance works, the body grounded us in space through the irruption of playful temporalities.

Jorja Follina, Melissa Heywood and Jemma Stein Dance Token (Photo: Jon Davey)

Perhaps most liminal of all, Solen Collet and Ailsa Lochead’s Roll the Dice offered a non-interactive arcade cabinet to arcade-goers – a silent video installation in bare balsa wood at the entrance to Nobles Amusements. Its black-and-white montage acted as a mirror to its environment, visualising both flashing machinery and sea-surf reflections inside and outside. Giving us space to listen to ambient sounds and feel the play of forms across the seaside, it visually rhymed penny-pushers with tides and matched claw-machines with sand slipping through human hands. This begs further entanglements: rhyming with the clouds that seem to kiss and depart at the open and close of Living Pictures, Roll the Dice toys with a similar Surrealist toolkit from the chance procedures evoked by its title to faceless silhouettes that permit the viewer to project onto the frothy surf of the silver screen. Dream logic here contests what video games theorist Alan F Meades has called the “mythic arcade” of collective memory, the sanitised and simplified nostalgia of arcades as purely digital and innocent, by weaving in histories of hardship. It reminds us of the persistence of analogue machines and the long tradition of children’s low-stakes gambling. Even today, slot machines are back-to-back with Mario Kart, separated only by a forked entrance where Collet and Lochhead’s cabinet sits. Betwixt and between, as always, is where play happens.

Solen Collet and Ailsa Lochhead Roll the Dice (Photo: Ellie J McMaster)

What unites all these works is an interest in the material and imaginary edges of the ‘magic circle’, which the grandfather of game studies Johan Huizinga describes as a ritual other place in which reality is supposedly suspended for play for all games. It’s a powerful concept, one that seems to articulate our serious commitment to silly things and the transformation of the ordinary, whether gathering tokenised street dance moves as an adult or avidly absorbing the dramas of scrappy cloth figures as a child. However, it’s an idea which has been much critiqued – play can be unfair, play can be work, play is made of real things, and we don’t leave all our baggage at the edge of the circle. With a pre-determined ‘game’ of bingo, the Showmen’s Theatre Company tell us that play can be rigged, but that it can also get us to pay attention to forgotten histories of performance when the numbers punctuate an actor’s dialogue. The magic isn’t otherworldly; it’s very much ‘of’ this world, and it gets participants to ‘attend’ to reality with fresh eyes in Bogost’s sense: the playful gets us to invest and to take everything in it seriously, as worthy of our attention. What the Arcade commissions show us is how drawing a line in a space can open up other aspects of its material reality. The fair ground might not always be fair, but it does draw equivalences and it does draw people together. We feel this when the site of a demolished swimming pool manifests mimed performances and a different kind of ‘exercise’ in Dance Token. Any patch of sand can become a circus when we sit In the Round.

The line in the sand, the line of the promenade, the filmic cut and the fourth wall of theatre are all parts of the magic circle’s infinite edge. Each artist plays with this horizon – audio recordings connects viewers to puppetry, a silent film ties us to the noise of the arcade, dance pushes us through side-streets, and we share grass and sand with actors and dancers. Where land meets sea, these works lap at our toes. We aren’t so much ‘immersed’, a much-abused epithet in the world of games and fine art installation, but we paddle – remembering who we are and where we are, just a little bit differently. It’s give and take.

Dancers suspending each other on the beach leave traces, desire trails that churn the sand. Mark-making like the circus they bring back to life, body connects to material from different perspectives for viewers ‘in the round.’ However, the circle here is in a literal sense broken, a gap in the fabric surrounding the performers, and in a figurative sense by the sound of dogs and children crafting their own make-believe worlds out of the very same beach. When Nicholl’s dancers break out towards the tides in their conclusion, they make connections betwixt and between the structures of society clear with the unfurling of a Palestinian flag. Fair grounds aren’t always fair, like Portobello’s they can even be bulldozed, but where ground meets water we had opportunities to reflect on our horizons.