Learn English in the UK with Art, Culture and Music
This blog is a review of an amazing event our language school attended last night in the city of Perth, Scotland.
If you learn English in the UK, cultural events are a fantastic way to practice English skills and immerse yourself in the culture of the place.
As a language school which coaches culture lovers (including international artists, designers and other creative professionals), we often take our language learners to top-quality music events.
As usual, this blog is written for English language learners; both as an English lesson and to introduce you to the people you will meet on your English language holidays.
We want to give you a taste of the places we visit, the activities we offer – and the food and drink we celebrate!
Read on for a free English practice exercise at the end.
A Standing Ovation
It had us leaping up from our seats in praise.
Learn English in the UK with Cultural Immersion
A Story of Scotland
Over a compelling, rapid journey ships are built and launched and steel girders poured and sheet metal beaten.
Like waves, scenes of automated production lines with glass bottles being filled and shifted (with brutal efficiency) flip to women deftly hand-cutting and arranging Lino strips. Then, we see skeletal scaffolding supporting part-built ships. They reach cathedral-like into Glasgow’s skies.
A Story of Her People
In this portrait, people are both fragile and heroically strong.
Within superb, grim settings both men and women throw themselves at repetitive (and dangerous) jobs in industries producing tangible goods.
Such roles have all but disappeared as jobs got automated and whole Scottish industries died.
“We tumble into wartime, and a woman waving a smiling goodbye with fear-haunted eyes, the camera pans to show whole crowds with the same odd mask slipping between pride and dread. The ocean liner slips from its berth, with tiny, anonymous arms waving handkerchiefs. Will their mums ever wash their hankies again?”
Ruth, Blue Noun, 2020
For One Night Only
From Scotland With Love is a montage of fleeting, memorable portraits of people whose work was so hard it physically shaped them. The few glimpses of respite or refreshment we get; whether a quick sandwich perching on a girder or even an exchanged look or smile brings a relief we also share.
While parents work, children raise themselves in carless streets. A girl unsteady under the weight of the younger sibling she carries (so old and so young at the same time). Then, scenes of children playing, accompanied by a soundtrack of railings being rattled and chanting seeps into the live music. It carries us past bedtime kisses, loving caresses and a domestic production line of crashed out children all asleep in the same bed.
Freedom Lost
We tumble into wartime, and a woman waving a smiling goodbye with fear-haunted eyes, the camera pans to show whole crowds with the same odd mask slipping between pride and dread.
The ocean liner slips from its berth, with tiny, anonymous arms waving handkerchiefs.
Did those same arms build this ship?
Will their mums ever wash their hankies again?
Machine Nation
The Second World War brings us a small battleship powering away, low in the water and peppered with proud, uniformed men.
How could anyone possibly believe they would survive the ocean, never mind the war?
Bombs fall, (but we are saved from much of the close-up horrors of war). Soon, a flock of children race headfirst down a sand dune to tumble into the sea without a care in the world. The first lick of an ice cream. An impossibly crowded Portabello Beach. (One little black boy’s ebony body standing out against an otherwise pallid scene, telling a whole other story in a flash). A sandcastle being purposefully destroyed. We feel the pure abandon of a glittering, flashing fairground with its various mechanical arms to swing people about in the air.
Radio Scotland presenter, Vic Gallloway interviewing Kenny Anderson (King Creosote) about living in Fife and making music with the Fence Collective.
“Fife for Life”
Kenny Anderson, 2012
The Craft of Collaboration
The film ends while we are still trying to hold onto a thousand images we care about, but before we are too overloaded to want more.
Our own story is woven in there somewhere too, like a photograph album proving our parents existed before we did.
The music is a superb and inspirational symbiotic match to the film edit. (Indeed, it is hard to imagine one without the other).
Portrait of the Artist as a Scotsman
Ordinarily, King Creosote (Kenny Anderson) slips snapshots of his own life into songs, layering personal and intimate into songs which carry Scottish melodies seeming as old as the land itself, gently twisting and entwining around an unpredictable collage of modern sounds and quite abrupt moments.
Like all King Creosote music, in the film too there is a heartbreak lying just out of reach – primal, urgent, unsettling.
The talents on stage making music happen together, gave one of the purest, most genuine performances I’ve ever seen, sharing smiles and exchanging looks of support which unwittingly matched every detail of the screenfuls of caring cascading behind them.
From Scotland With Love is the collective memory of our nation.
Everything is Transitory
For the audience at Perth Concert Hall last Wednesday, with the unfurling Corona Virus pandemic gathering in the wings of our society (and with little doubt that it will become the next line in the story of Scotland’s people), everything in the fragile, beautiful film and music montage told that touch is the most real thing that any of us have.
Let’s hope you can come and learn English in Scotland with us again soon. We’ll have other cultural gems to share with you then.
Stay safe in the meantime.
How can our love of Scottish history help your English?
Learn more
Further Information
“Montage is a film editing technique in which a series of short shots are sequenced to condense space, time, and information. “
Wikipedia, 2020
Your English Language Challenge
In this blog, I describe a film montage collaboration between musician Kenny Anderson (AKA King Creosote), his fellow musicians – the Fence Collective and film director Virginia Heath. It’s a complex montage with many elements.
What would a montage of your morning look like?
Describe 5-10 moments as images in chronological sequence.
You could use past simple or present simple here, both could be correct – just pick one and stick with it.
Imagine you are sketching out scenes from a film. Describe each moment as if instructions for a camera person.
“What would a montage of your morning look like?”
