Fringe by the Sea: Launch and Sula Bassana

Big Top, North Berwick 31/7/26

Erland Cooper and Lewis Gourlay

Fringe by the Sea, which runs for 10 days in North Berwick every year, is much more than a fringe of a fringe; it’s always had its own quirky personality. It has just enhanced its status by commissioning its own film.

This year’s theme is “Love of Life”, referring not only to good cheer, but to “Biophilia” – our innate longing to connect with Nature. Jackie Shuttleworth brought together Orcadian composer Erland Cooper and Scottish film-maker Lewis Gourlay to create ‘Sula Bassana’ - ‘A symphonic meditation on North Berwick and the Firth of Forth: the Air, the Sea and the Land’. It premiered on the afternoon of FBTS’s first day to a packed Big Top.

An impressive number of local children had attended workshops last week to make a “flock” of paper gannets to bear aloft in a parade from the harbour up to the Festival site. A great idea. The children decorated their seabirds in a variety of colours. I would have preferred white birds like the gannet's original colour. But they made a cheerful launch to Fringe by the Sea, and were greeted by two large “official” gannets when they arrived at the Big Top.

Erland Cooper’s immersive style is perfect for this celebration of our town’s natural life. Moving between deceptively simple riffs and melodies it has an underlying complexity fit for the 89-strong BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra – including near the start an enigmatic deep bass throb from their authentic wind machine.

Meanwhile around North Berwick the sun had smiled on aerial cinematographer Patrick Steel and, underwater, Joseph Seal as they gathered images of woodland and sea-tangle; gannets soaring, seeming lit from beneath; diving, gorging, nudging bills. Finally, Lewis Gourlay had moulded the footage around Cooper’s symphony, bringing us birds in air, on land and undersea.

After the showing Cooper and Gourlay described working on the project, along with installation artist Naomi Mcintosh who has woven around one venerable tree a delicate sanctuary “Nest” for people to enter. Though it says little to me of actual gannet nests made of bladder-wrack and debris glued with guano, as a sanctuary for the soul it really works.

Some visitors who missed the launch have had the chance to see ‘Sula Bassana’ playing on loop from 7.30 for this weekend only, in the Wavelength Dome in 'Love of Life 360º'. The experience was here magnified: “360º” refers to the spherical camera lens which did much of the filming, especially underwater. You watched this wonderful film on screen, then borrowed a VR-style headset to immerse yourself in clips of a deeper reality from those shots – looking all around, as marram morphed into seagrass, and gannets swam in front, behind and beneath you, plunging past your ear to the fish at your ankle, shooting to the surface just as fast.

The chance may have gone by the time this review gets out. But Erland Cooper releases his audio EP on the 21st of this month and I hope the film will also become accessible somewhere soon.