Anatomy is a wild, quarterly cabaret night, featuring wonderfully unique performances from artists across the country. It's been described as 'an unpredictable cauldron of mischievous performance, featuring everything from tactical action to bleak bouffon, from noise art to fart jokes, from opera to pop and ballet to biscuits.' In other words, it's like nothing you've ever seen.
The team behind the programming also do excellent work championing inclusion and diversity, by making their events as accessible for everyone as possible, and integrating disability needs into their core thinking.
This spring, Anatomy is heading to the Traverse Theatre for two nights, so that they can accommodate their ever-growing audience. Their first performance, Finest Cuts, takes place on Thursday 10th and Friday 11th May.
We caught up with Harry Josephine Giles from the Anatomy team to find out more about the event, their aims and their important view of diversity and inclusion in the arts.
We started because Ali and I didn't have anywhere to perform the work we liked making, so we thought: let's just make it ourselves. We started from there and then it got out of hand, and now we're building a year-round professional multi-arts producer that puts on the strangest and most diverse live events possible.
I think aim number one is to bring as many different art forms together into one night, bringing together difference audiences and artists in a magical cocktail crossover between disciplines.
I think aim number two is to bring as many different people together into one night as we can. Because when the people in the room are all different, and differently strange, then better art happens.
That there is glorious invention bubbling out of the grassroots of the performing arts, that vibrant and powerful things are happening everywhere on a shoestring, and that they should seek it out!
I want the arts industry to see access and diversity work as something that must be built in from the start. And that, when you do it, it makes more interesting art happen- Harry Josephine Giles
The directing team all has disabilities and/or chronic illnesses, so it's more a question of why we wouldn't try to do this than why we are doing it. For us, it's always been about saying that disability arts is and can be integrated as just another part of professional arts, that disabled and non-disabled artists should be working and sharing together, and the audience work also follows from that - though specialised work is important too!
That said, that doesn't mean we're experts or that we always get everything right: disability is so various that you always have to be prepared to make mistakes, to listen, to ask, and to do a lot of learning.
Scotland has a massive whiteness problem in the arts (and across society) that institutions and communities have been pretty bad at addressing so far, I think. We've got work to do there too. I think we have to name that and work on it as much as possible.
Overall, I want the arts industry to see access and diversity work not as a chore, not as an add-on, not as an afterthought, but that something that must be built in from the start - and that, when you do it, it makes more, better and more interesting art happen. It opens opportunities for great art.
We're constituting as a Workers' Co-operative Community Interest Company - a way of reshaping how arts organisations are formed economically as well - and working towards having more long-term funding so that we can do better and deeper work!
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