Beltane Fire Festival

Beltane Fire Festival celebrates its 20th anniversary

May 1, 2007

Beltane Fire Festival pulled out all the stops to celebrate its 20th anniversary this year. NVA’s Creative Director Angus Farquhar reinitiated the festival in Edinburgh 20 years ago with fellow members of Test Department and was involved in the event again on this special birthday. It attracted a fantastic audience as always and was a resounding success. There was much press coverage leading up to the event, here is an excerpt from the Scotsman article featured on 19 Apr 2007:

Turning Up the heat for the biggest Beltane of them all By Lindsay Corr, Scotsman 19 April 2007

FOR some people, the Beltane Fire Festival is nothing more than a bunch of hippies getting drunk, getting naked and lighting hazardous fires on a hilltop. But there’s a lot more to Edinburgh’s festival of pagans and wiccans than that. This month Beltane celebrates its 20th anniversary, with a fortnight of activities, workshops and seminars leading up to the 30 April ceremony. Among the events is a photo exhibition at the Bongo Club and a geological tour of Arthur’s Seat. The day itself will see the first ever Beltane green audit, to assess the event’s impact on the environment.

Pete Renwick, now in his third year of producing the event, is excited about this development. “I’ve been involved with Beltane since I came over to Edinburgh ten years ago and performed in it, so I’ve loved watching it grow. The environment initiative is great because we’ll be able to recycle a lot of the waste left on Calton Hill, and it’s fitting that a fire festival should be assessing its environmental impact. We’re marking the anniversary with a buzz of activity and have a special performance from some of the people who were involved from the outset, such as Lyndsey John and Angus Farquhar, who’ll be doing a performance at the fire arch.”

The Beltane Fire Festival celebrates the heritage of Gaelic history, and marks the blossoming of spring and fertility. The name Beltane is thought…

To read the full article, go to the Scotsman online archive here:

http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=388&id=598892007

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