Culture in Everyday Life University of Aberdeen

From Mystery Plays to the Robin Hood revels at May Day, Aberdeen played a full role in Scotland’s popular dramas. Donald Smith explores some older forms of live entertainment, and their present day revival. Should we still go ‘A-Maying’? What does Robin Hood have to do with the Granite City? And does climate change mean we should move theatre back outdoors? 
In 2019, Donald Smith, the then Director of Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland, gave a public talk as part of the Elphinstone Institute’s Public Lecture Series entitled 'A Blond Wig for Maid Marion': Aberdeen and Scotland's Folk Dramas.

This presentation, which was recorded at the Elphinstone Institute’s 2017 symposium dedicated to memory of Bill Nicolaisen, by Elphinstone Institute Director, Dr Thomas A McKean, looks at performed and sung ballad texts in the light of Bill Nicolaisen’s ideas of time – performance, narrative, and historical – and place, beyond the beyond. Ballads and their performance express and encapsulate, ignore and elide time and place in dynamic, sometimes illogical ways, pulling and stretching realities to maximise impact. Using North-East ballads, Dr McKean explores some of the ways singers and composers use and are affected by these concepts.

For more information about Dr McKean’s work, please visit: (abdn.ac.uk)https://www.abdn.ac.uk/people/t.a.mckean/

Hear about a folklorist’s journey from scholar to activist to facilitator of change, and back again. Through narratives of migration, motherhood, courage, and food, Skillman uses the transformative power of story to create agency and resilience among refugee and immigrant women in the USA. These stories and more illustrate our responsibility as cultural advocates to help build and foster community self-esteem and well-being.

Adam McNaughtan delivers an illustrated talk with Gordeanna McCulloch entitled ‘Words for Tunes: Robert Burns as a Lyric-Writer’ at the Cullerie Singing Weekend in 2009.

In this episode, Emeritus Professor Michael Pickering maps out the major ways in which music figures in registering and referencing the past, both in autobiographical memory and in vernacular memory.

The late Leonard Primiano discusses his research on Catholic kitsch in this guest lecture given at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen.