Starting From Scratch: Nocturnal Scratch Nights

Violet Vincent McLean

Corvis and I met for a hot chocolate in the upstairs café of Waterstones on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street, in late 2019.

“I want to start a scratch night,” Corvis said. “I want a space for performance makers to try work out, get feedback from an audience, for us to network, to meet and collaborate with people. I want to run them monthly, and I want to pay our acts. Do you want to start it with me?”

We hadn’t known each other long, but we had quickly forged a powerful friendship in the flames of a stifling performance art course that we had found ourselves trapped in (and would eventually go on to quit). We were two queer performance makers making radically different aesthetics of work but with equal amounts of energy and passion—Corvis was dark and brooding and always in pursuit of beauty, whereas I was bouncy and comical and always in pursuit of joy. Neither of us felt nurtured by a toxic drama school environment that belittled and ostracised us, and so both of us needed a project to throw ourselves into. I said “yes” and Nocturnal was born.

Violet Vincent McLean and Corvis Oleander 2022, photo Samuel Temple

We spent £50 of our student loans on hiring out The Old Hairdressers’ upstairs gig venue, created marketing visuals out of an old performance picture of Corvis, published our first artist call-out on Instagram and Creative Scotland’s ‘opportunities’ listing page and gave ourselves the Christmas break to organise our first event in January 2020. The format was set up like a mixed-bill cabaret event, with 5-6 acts sharing 10 minutes of unfinished work-in-progress, with regular intervals for the audience to share feedback via post-it notes and online forms, followed by a group game where audiences and artists could mingle and connect. We made the early decision to emphasise support for work from “marginalised voices”, hoping that would attract a wide range of makers and identities who did not feel represented in the Glasgow performance scene. We would pay our acts in door-split of ticket sales (that were priced at a humble £4) and professional performance photography. It was a work-in-progress. We had no idea whether anyone would want to perform and if anyone would turn up.

We were shocked and delighted by our first turnout. A bustling crowd of 30ish people came out to support on a rainy January night and revelled in what was the first of many evenings of artists trying various performance works out. We had five performers – a poet who shared unfinished poems, a tap dancing drag king in a full red adidas tracksuit, a live art collective who recreated strange religious imagery, a new piece of musical theatre songwriting, a trial of a one-to-one bread making performance and a spoken word artist. Corvis and I hosted in the only way we knew how: with big cheerleader energy consisting of lots of whooping and clapping and showering compliments. And then we cajoled the room into playing a big team game of collective story writing at the end of the night, resulting in ridiculous tales and giggling strangers. The audience were a mixture of curious drinkers from the pub below, local art students and a handful of supportive friends, but everyone was as excited by Nocturnal scratch nights as we were.

Violet Vincent Mclean and Corvis Oleander 2020, photo Samuel Temple

Nocturnal, 2022. Photo: Samuel Temple

Me and Corvis laugh about our early motivations being full of ego. We wanted to prove ourselves to the seemingly gate kept performance art scene in Glasgow, to rub shoulders with artists whose work we liked and to hang out in darkly lit Glasgow venues. Corvis wanted their face on a poster, and I wanted to show off to friends in London that I was “making it” in Glasgow. But as soon as we started to curate and produce the nights, and witness what these spaces could stand for, these more personal motivations faded as the collective spirit of Nocturnal took hold. We realised we were seeking to find something that we felt was missing in Glasgow’s live art scene: a regular place to play, to try, to fail, to make friends. A space for artists and performers to do away with the stuffiness of serious art spaces and the professional competitiveness often found in industry scratch nights. Regular nights like Queer Theory were excellent for getting queer performers in front of a late-night club crowd, but what if you wanted to try your act out on an audience willing to give you constructive feedback? Annual events and arts festivals like BUZZCUT and Tron Theatre’s scratch night ‘Outside Eyes’ were brilliant for getting new performance makers in front of industry professionals and offering paid opportunities, but what if you wanted something more regular? What if you wanted more chances of being selected to perform than a singular yearly call out could provide?

Since 2020, we have produced, curated and hosted thirteen scratch nights; platforming and paying over sixty acts. Our nights have welcomed a solo ten-minute rendition of swan lake using a broom and toilet roll, a clown dressed as a banana stuffing bananas into audience members mouths, tender Ethiopian singing, two (!) harpists, a pole dancing projection artist making vital commentary about revenge porn, resurrected drag queens who had been left in the closet for 30 years, storytellers regaling epic poos, intimate coming out experiences and Indian folktales, songs about transness, about Britney, about call centres, about landlords, abstract theatre involving an unexplained kebab, a ukelele band, a duologue with a mannequin, a drag persona of a “pedagogical expert” orgasming over her love for art, and much more. A ticket to a Nocturnal Scratch night was always a ticket to an unpredictable evening of entertainment- we chose not to publish details of each act beforehand or post artist introductions on social media, only ever hinting or alluding at what might be coming up that month. Each night became an abstract collage of ideas, stories and disciplines, full of surprise and unknowns. Even as producers, we were often in the dark as to what would specifically happen in each ten minute act, and this “expect the unexpected” approach to watching performance was definitely something that kept audiences coming back.

The majority of acts who performed were queer and marginalised voices, with a wide range of ages, cultures, stories represented on the stage as well as in the audience. In seeking to attract work informed by a wide range of disciplines, experience and backgrounds, we took a relaxed approach to applications and callouts, only asking for a short email, detailing loosely what people wanted to try out, what topics they might explore and what they’d like to gain from a scratch night. This was to help take the pressure off application writing, but also to give weight and celebration to the unpolished, half-formed idea. Championing the unpolished and half-formed idea was important to us in a gig economy that so often expects freelancers to have a show ready to go, to have an idea fully realised ready for funding and commission call outs, but so rarely provides space for trying or testing ideas. We curated the events so that the lineups were diverse in tone, themes, styles and artists, to not only keep our audiences engaged but so that performers didn’t feel like they would be unfairly compared to other acts, as can sometimes feel like the case with theatre industry scratch nights.

We staged three scratch nights at the Old Hairdressers before heading into a pandemic, two scratch nights on Instagram live (see: early lockdown hyper-productivity) and nine monthly scratch nights from May 2022 to February 2023 at Gravitas. Gravitas was a beautiful wellness and massage space Corvis had set up full of soft furnishings, sumptuous lighting and deep, rich colours, resembling something like a Victorian drawing room. We filled that grand space with beautiful music, guffawing cackles and new friendships. We played big silly games of charades with the audience, falling into fits of giggles as groups of strangers acted out impossible prompts to each other, shouting with glee when they got an answer right and booing when they were beaten by another team. The group games were a bid to encourage relaxed networking and ice-breaking – and consciously reject the seriousness that seemed to dominate other art spaces – but they came to function as something more – as an act of communal joy to round off the night. A reminder that we could always come together and be silly, whether we were performers or artists or neighbours or friends or strangers, play exists. It was special.

Gravitas was forced to close its doors in 2023 when the building landlord increased the rent by such an extortionate amount that it could no longer afford to use the space. What now stands in its place – a starkly white, shiny real estate agent’s office – is such an eyesore that it never fails to tickle me whenever I walk past. Noone would know the queer joy, the communal chaos and laughter that took place in that space. It feels like a secret only the select few people who came along to our nights can recall; a memory whispered on the wind of North Street, drowned out by the busy sounds of the M8.

Gravitas on North Street, 2022

What the venue looks like in 2024

With every physical or virtual space Nocturnal scratch nights existed in, they evolved into something new, taking on new shapes, new forms, and new energy. Our time at Gravitas became like a monthly gathering of friends in a front room, which, after two years of social distancing and anxiety about physical closeness, felt like a precious thing. The nature of constantly evolving, transitioning, and finding new ways to take up space has come to feel inescapably queer. And there is something reassuring in knowing that the spirit of Nocturnal is not defined by the venue in which it operates but resides in the ethos of the queer-run space we have sculpted within each of its temporary homes.

2022

The spirit is ultimately rooted in mine and Corvis’s queer friendship, in the way we hold space for each other and then others. Even in this last year of hiatus, we have not been worried about what is next, we have trusted that Nocturnal scratch nights will be back at some point, in some way, somehow. Our creative relationship is built on being honest and upfront about our energy levels, our time commitments, our personal lives and artistic visions, and not compromising on doing things with intentionality or purpose. It has meant being able to bring our full selves to the project and run the company on our own queer time and in our own queer way, and not feeling pushed to keep producing events in order to remain ‘relevant’ or uphold some narrative of ‘progress’. Instead we are choosing to hold faith that our audiences will find us again as soon as we’re ready with a new offering for them.

We are currently making plans to head into our fourth evolution of Nocturnal. We don’t know what it will look like yet. Different, we imagine. We will attempt to set up home in Gravitas’ new venue – a downsized space that is cosy and peaceful and perfect for Corvis’s wellness business, but it might not work for our scratch nights… We won’t know until we try!

With deepest thanks to our incredibly talented photographer and friend, Samuel Temple, to whom Nocturnal is eternally indebted to for proof that our nights really did happen.

Violet is a queer performer, director, producer and dramaturg who recently graduated from University of Glasgow with a First Class Degree in MA Theatre Studies. They are the co-artistic director of Nocturnal Arts Glasgow, producing monthly scratch nights for emerging artists to build nourishing community networks and they can sometimes be found performing their drag persona Jude Judith Arabiata Bolognese. Violet is a skilled dramaturg, deviser and facilitator who enjoys queer methods of theatre making that delight in failure, radical joy, visual arts, physical imagery and queer critical theory. They are interested in how the process of creating and making theatre can mirror the themes being explored in a piece, and how form can be played with to test the boundaries of theatre and performance art.

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