Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Sound Strokes
Wan Xing
Genre: Live Music, Visual Art
Venue: Symposium @ the Space
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Following the success of Waves of Tradition last year, Wan Xing, Gregor Black and Eleanor Dunsdon return with a vibrant intercultural programme. The expressive sound of the Chinese guzheng meets Scottish musical traditions inspired by the photographic scroll of Qiu Yangzi. Drawing on the natural forces that shape the art of writing, water, air and fire, the music traces flowing lines, rhythm, balance and movement in sound.
Review
Shimmering soil from Glasgow, Edinburgh, London, and Hong Kong creates a visual art backdrop and backbone for this delicious fifty minutes of music blending Scottish, Irish, and Chinese traditional music. They order the work by the four elements- the visual art behind them signals “earth” first and there are fast fingers, elegant spirals of sound, celtic lilts. The three musicians, Wan Xing, Gregor Black, and Eleanor Dunsdon play pieces that reflect those elements and can reflect each other, joining the traditions to create something new.
I say that they blend the music- this is not three musicians taking it in turns to play traditional music with inflections from other cultures. Pieces have been selected for a very sophisticated sort of mash-up. The very fast Chinese Fire Horse piece is paired with an Irish polka, a gaelic song once sung by women keeping time while working the cloth meets Hong Kong’s version of the same. It’s amazing how well it works, whether hearing the notes of guzheng meet a Celtic melody on the harp or finding the bodhrán underlying the eastern pentatonic scale. There are echoes and conversations between the instruments. And sometimes they slot into the other tradition as if they had always been there.
Soil Remembers, the artwork draped behind the performers, is a ten-metre scroll of camera-less photography exposing the earth to the sun. Created by Qiu Yangzi, bodhrán player Gregor Black says it represents that “no matter how much we mistreat the earth, we can always repair it”. This awareness of history and practical hopefulness for repair sets the tone for the work. They take us back to basics, back to the elements, to traditional songs made new. They show us connection and how to rebuild, how to make something new and old at the same time.
Beautiful and thoughtful choices are made throughout in this performance of finer details. The whites and browns of their clothing match the scroll behind them, even the drum kit is a sparkly muted gold to match the gold leaf that is sprinkled through the Soil Remembers. While the audience waits for the performance to begin, a soundscape of the literal journey from Hong Kong to Edinburgh plays in the background. When Wan Xing on the zheng talks about the air element she brings the idea of qi, breath, into every movement. She draws our attention to the strings echoing through the air and compares them to calligraphy strokes, like the mini scrolls they will show us for each element.
The musicians have a lovely, easy, rapport. Their bodies move easily with the music, smiles and nods to each other as they play. They talk about first meeting each other and harpist Eleanor Dunsdon says how excited she was to discover the zheng for the first time with Wan Xing and to find its similarities to her instrument. The last two pieces they play to represent water, the contemporary ‘The Ways of Water’. It is undulating, like following water that will disappear into a trickle, the performers skillfully bringing us all the way down to slow, quiet and near silence before building back up to a lively flowing finish. Wan Xing is especially mesmerising to watch here, hands moving like ripples, like weaving turned to summoning, at one point it even reminds me of cooking.
This is a lively, healing balm of a performance that feels like a discovery and a place to rest at the same time. There is a little bit of magic here.
