In response to Portobello’s seaside era of showground entertainment and travelling showpeople culture, ARCADE explored public spaces in and around Portobello Beach and Promenade as a playground for encounter. A series of performance and installation based works were created featuring circus, acrobatics, dance, theatre, puppetry and film.
Works were commissioned by Art Walk Projects for the 2025 Art Walk Porty Festival ‘ShowGround’, funded by Creative Scotland.
EMILY NICHOLL ‘In the Round’
Inspired by Portobello’s history of travelling circus shows, In the Round is a playful spectacle and community gathering that invites spectators to become participants in a series of choreographed performances along Portobello beach. Conceived by Emily Nicholl in collaboration with Julia Chan, Gabbie Cook, Robyn Gray, Lauren Jamieson, Matthew Wright, Saya Yamaguchi, the project celebrated the area’s rich heritage of circus history while also offering vital shared practices of support and solidarity.
Emily has been particularly inspired by Thomas Ord’s travelling circus of the early 1800s: every year, Ord would return to the same circle, marked out in the grass to delineate the performance space. It is said that, even 20 years after Ord’s circus made its final visit to Portobello in 1859, this circle remained visible on the ground.
About
Emily Nicholl (she/her) is an Edinburgh-born crop multi-disciplinary arts worker, interested in the overlapping roles of artist, neighbour, citizen and friend. She has worked internationally on award-winning projects for all ages, her performance collaborations and visual art work often drawing from what circus arts can teach us about interconnection, solidarity and sharing weight.
Gabbie Cook is a dance and circus artist specialised in contemporary dance, acrobatics and Chinese pole; working as a performer, teacher and movement director. She has toured work nationally and internationally for theatre audiences, street theatre festivals and under the circus big top at Glastonbury and Shambala Festival.
Lauren Jamieson (she/her) is a Scottish aerialist and acrobat who has been performing and teaching since 2009. She loves exploring movement language within circus and specialises in acrobatic basing, straps and corde lisse.
Matthew Wright is a saxophonist, creative producer, science communicator and community organiser. He performs with the improvisation-led band S!nk and is a founding director of the Pianodrome, the world’s first amphitheatre made entirely from pianos. He is excited by the potential that improvisation has for creating something beautiful in every moment.
Saya Yamaguchi (she/her) is an Edinburgh based aerial dancer, hair hanger and acrobat. She has created works for a variety of international and nationwide projects and is a regular teacher and performer for All or Nothing Aerial Dance Theatre. Saya loves challenging gravity, flying, dancing, draping, dangling and getting tangled.
Julia Chan and Robyn Gray have been performing in circus together for about 1 and half years, having both previously competed in gymnastics. They specialise in group and partner acrobatics. They are specifically interested in exploring new and creative acrobatic movements. Their work has included working with company’s like Paper Doll Militia, Cirqulation with Delighters circus and Ghost house media.
FIBI COWLEY ‘Living Pictures’
Living Pictures is a pop-up avant-garde puppet theatre show that combines soundscape and performance to breathe new life into local stories, legends and histories. Staging a playful, slightly absurd DIY performance near Noble’s Amusements on the waterfront, the project revisits Portobello’s history of travelling shows, pop-up theatres and sideshows.
Through a socially-engaged research process of radical listening, that has involved hearing people’s memories of the area, Living Pictures manifests a return to the idea of a ‘people’s theatre’ – centring performances made entirely for the pleasure of the community. Cowley’s core enquiry is about democratising space and joy: revisiting the ‘pleasure grounds’ of the past. In a world where much of our interaction now happens online and physical gathering spaces are being defunded or erased, the work asks: whose voices are being heard, and whose stories risk being forgotten?
About
Fibi Cowley is an artist and puppeteer based in Glasgow. Inspired by hyper-imagination and counter-cultural mischief, Fibi draws on the legacy of puppetry as an outsider art form to disrupt and reimagine the ways in which we relate to the world around us.
SHOWMEN’S THEATRE COMPANY ‘Arcade Trilogy’
– Yana Harris, Ava Hickey, Bailey Newsom
Arcade Trilogy: Big Wheel, FunCity and Amusement Caterers, three site-specific, interactive performances
Roll up! Roll up!
The Showmen’s Theatre Company celebrates Scottish Showpeople’s largely undocumented, tantalising history. They aim to humanise an often misunderstood minority group, the only way they know how: by putting on a show.
The Showmen’s Theatre Company invites you behind the scenes. Come and hear of Portobello’s entertainment industry from the entertainers themselves. Framed by their vintage showfront, the company presents Arcade Trilogy: Big Wheel, FunCity and Amusement Caterers, three site-specific, interactive performances celebrating the history of seaside amusements. From music hall to side-show, from FunCity to Noble’s arcade, these performances theatrically explore Portobello’s many links to the Scottish Travelling Showmen community.
About
The Showmen’s Theatre Company is a Showmen’s artist collective creating theatre and workshops. Graduates of The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Yana Harris, Bailey Newsome and Ava Hickey come from many generations of Showpeople. Attributing their adaptability, work ethic and storytelling to their heritage, together they are using these skills to celebrate the community and preserve their history.
JORJA FOLLINA, MELISSA HEYWOOD, JEMMA STEIN ‘Dance Token’
Dance Token is an interactive, arcade-inspired community dance walk that transforms Portobello’s promenade into a living game board of movement, joy, and participation. Promenade visitors are guided along a mapped route, stopping at a series of playful dance zones, each inspired by arcade games and historical fairground spots once found along the Portobello seafront.
At each stop, audiences collect a ‘dance token’ – a short dance move or game. The journey concludes with a joyful communal dance, where all the collected tokens come together in a celebratory, flashmob-style performance.
People of all ages and abilities are invited to take part – whether by dancing, cheering, or simply following the route and enjoying the show. Through the work, the Promenade becomes both stage and playground, echoing the nostalgia and the vibrant spirit of Portobello’s seaside history.
About
Jemma, Jorja and Melissa are three dance artists and friends based in Scotland with a desire to make fun and playful work for audiences to get involved in. With accessibility at the heart of their process, they create spaces for audiences and artists to dance together.
SOLEN COLLET & AILSA LOCHHEAD ‘Roll the Dice’
Drawing inspiration from the layered patterns found in nature and urban play spaces – tidal rhythms of waves and slot machines, moonlight shimmers and flickering arcade lights – Roll the Dice explores tensions between randomness and repetition, pleasure and discomfort, connection and disconnection, winning and losing.
The resulting film layers abstract fragments of movement and light from a bespoke Move To Feel session held on Portobello Beach in July, led by Ailsa Lochhead and filmed by Solen Collet. Intercut with the neon pulse of Noble’s Amusements, the black-and-white installation becomes a sensory collage – blurring serenity and overstimulation, meditative dance and hypnotic gameplay – inviting viewers to gamble with perception itself.
About
Ailsa Lochhead and Solen Collet collaborate at the intersection of process, image and emotion. Guided by somatic intuition and creative play, they transmute experience into layered works that deepen the dialogue between body and material. Their collaboration is an evolving exploration of place, image, and the unseen currents within.
JANA MIDDLETON ‘One Point’
In situ until 30 September
Co-commissioned with The Portobello Bookshop
Where does it all begin?
One point.
The point.
The universe.
The Earth.
Life.
The journey.
The book.
The play.
The motion.
The game.
The chance.
One Point is a paper-based installation inspired by the golden age of 19th-century seaside entertainment in Portobello. This era of rollercoasters, variety halls, skating rinks, and helter-skelters celebrated movement, spectacle, and chance. Central to the work is the fascination with arcade tickets, endless paper strips marked ONE POINT/ONE TICKET symbols of possibility and joy. Made from pages of books and vintage amusement tickets, the piece spirals outward like a rollercoaster track or skate trail, reflecting the rhythm of stories and games. It’s a nostalgic landscape of imagination, where memory, motion, and narrative all begin from a single point.
Special thanks to Nobles Amusements for sharing the very last of their prize ticket stock. You can visit The Portobello Bookshop to collect a commemorative bookmark, a strip of five tickets, made from this final batch of Nobles Amusements tickets. Grateful thanks also to The Greatest Showman for the gift of the magical red tickets.
About
For over twenty years, Jana Middleton has made her home in Portobello, following her studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich.
Her practice spans multiple media and disciplines, integrating monumental sculpture, drawing, and spatial choreography. Through this multidisciplinary approach, Jana explores experience and sensation, developing new perspectives and methodologies within a cohesive thematic framework.
Among her recent achievements is the large-scale visual transformation of a city concert hall in the Czech Republic, where she created a 17-metre monumental floating sculpture. She is currently preparing for her major solo exhibition at the former cubist monumental mill, Gočár Gallery, opening in autumn 2026.
Alongside these ambitious projects, Jana continues to create more intimate works and commissions for local businesses, where her vision and passion for materials remain central.
ASSOCIATED WORKS:
In collaboration with the Moving Images Cinema Caravan we screened 15 artist shorts through our curated programme ‘Super Slide’. Read full programme here.
Writer Tom Jeffreys wrote an article ‘Public Bodies’ as part of our printed programme for the Showground themed festival.
“Portobello is full of surprising stories, if you only know where to look. Take a walk along the Promenade and pause for a moment outside Nobles Amusements. Look up. Notice, under the eaves, a series of painted battle scenes. Once upon a time, these eaves were home to depictions of Mickey Mouse. But not any more. Notice the tartan-clad footsoldiers. The brightly coloured knights. In the 1690s, the Scots tried to establish their own colonial project in Panama but were defeated by, among other things, the Spanish military. The debilitating economic effect of this failure was a significant factor in Scotland’s elites accepting the Act of Union in 1707.”
Read full text
View printed ‘ShowGround’ 2025 Art Walk Porty curated programme here