Greg Sinclair

Greg Sinclair is a performance artist, composer and cellist from Edinburgh, Scotland.

He makes performance work in a variety of ways, with a focus on music, sound and movement. His work is often made in collaboration with other artists, children, young people, community members, or its audience. Greg also composes music for theatre and performs in other companies work.

Greg's performance A Piece of You is performed for small audiences either face-to-face or online. 

In 2016 Greg won a Children's Theatre Fellowship from The Arts Foundation. His most recent work for young audiences is Animals for ages 6+ which is a show about... animals. And Lots and Not Lots which is performed by an ensemble cast of young people and was commissioned as part of National Theatre of Scotland's Futureproof festival.

As a composer / performer he has worked with companies including: Lung Ha, Dundee Rep, Fish & Game, Macrobert, Frozen Charlotte and Starcatchers.

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Working with Imaginate

Greg worked with Imaginate on the Livescore project in 2016. This is what he said at the time:

"I am very excited about the opportunity to devise livescore, a digital youth arts project in partnership with Imaginate. This has been a fantastic way to further explore and develop some key themes within my arts practice: creating contemporary performance that starts with a musical idea, and collaborating with young people to make my work. While I would never describe myself as a digital artist I do incorporate digital elements into my work through sound design, video and projection. For me, digital art practices are an extension of my human connection, creation and understanding of art.

The musical starting point for livescore is the concept of alternative scoring systems: graphic scores - where pictures, graphics, colours, graphs, photographs etc. are used in place of or alongside more traditional forms of music notation, and instruction scores (sometimes referred to as text scores or event scores) – where written instructions form the starting point for an interpreted performance.

I use graphic scores all the time in workshops with young people because they don’t require any specific musical training, you just have to have a creative open mind to figure out what sound would best represent a blue triangle! I really love the way that these scores have to be interpreted; there’s no correct way of performing them. And that’s what is most exciting about using them in livescore – we are working with young people in different locations: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dunoon, the Isle of Coll, and Ghent (Belgium). By using the same scores as starting points in each of these very different geographical locations and with very different people I hope to find surprising differences and similarities that celebrate individual creativity."

About ‘As The Crow Flies’

The performance I made as part of livescore is called As The Crow Flies. I collaborated with some of the young people form the workshop process to make the piece which was performed by myself live alongside livestreamed video of young people in different locations projected into the space.

I was excited to find a process of working with young people as co-performers in a way that didn’t get caught up all the planning that goes with that particular process. Ultimately I have set up a process with its own particular set of problems – mostly to do with broadband speed! I want to use various digital technologies within the piece to enhance the human connections between myself and these young people. The title for the piece comes from thinking about that imaginary line that connects different locations together. A straight line that a bird would follow but humans cannot. It’s kind of how I think about digital communication – because I can’t see the data being transferred from my laptop to a school on a Scottish island or a theatre in Belgium I imagine it as a digital invisible straight line.