Intercultural Youth Scotland: Celebrating art, diversity and youth with Scotland in Colour festival
Intercultural Youth Scotland is a charity for young BIPOC Scots, providing a community, a service and a voice for young people across the country.
Proudly youth-led, they provide a safe space for their participants to be creative, and most importantly, be themselves.
Scotland in Colour is their yearly youth artist festival, giving young people a chance to perform in front of new audiences and helping them grow and develop as artists.
Watch a clip of Scotland in Colour 2020
Scotland in Colour is a celebration of art, diversity and youth, offering an opportunity to perform to singers, rappers, poets, instrumentalists - any member of the IYS community who wishes to do so.
In 2020, due to restrictions, the festival had to be scaled back - but Intercultural Youth Scotland (IYS) were still determined to go ahead in some way, providing an opportunity for young people to perform after a very challenging year.
IYS explained “We managed to organise a show just before Christmas as a bit of a morale booster for staff and young people and while the show itself had to be heavily restricted regarding capacity and following COVID guidelines, this actually helped create a sense of intimacy in the performances that we all appreciated following the year 2020 turned out to be.”
Image: courtesy of Intercultural Youth Scotland
“Getting involved with IYS has been nothing but beneficial for me. After the covid-19 has locked us indoors for months, I finally decided to join IYS, when the restrictions got lifted and I started getting involved in many activities. One of these has been Scotland in Colour 2020 (SIC).
That had been my first ever performance in a very long time and I was thrilled to do it. After participating to SIC, I started getting more and more involved with activities such as song writing, performing and workshops with the girls group. It has helped my creativity and it has also helped me socialise with more teenagers and young people. I’m so grateful to have joined IYS and I can’t wait to continue my journey with them.”
— Grace, 17
Many of the young people selected to perform at Scotland in Colour come through the Block Beats studio programme, giving young Black and POC musicians a space to gain experience recording and producing music.
Intercultural Youth Scotland explained that for them, it’s important to keep a variety of experience levels in the mix for Scotland in Colour.
“They’ve all got an interest in performance, but some of them are at different stages of their journey. Some of them need time to work with a producer, and some of them just need a discussion.
For example, at the last one we had a young person who was 14 but had already been making their own music and singing for a while, and that’s quite young but they had reasonable experience. There were others who were 18 but it was the first time they were letting people hear their music.”
Scotland in Colour sees young artists get the chance to experience the full process of putting on a show, from initial selections, through to rehearsals, and of course, the day of the festival itself.
Image: courtesy of Intercultural Youth Scotland
Image: courtesy of Intercultural Youth Scotland
“My favourite performance with IYS this year was the SIC festival performance.
Covid had shut down many places to perform and this really got me in a bad mood, so when IYS contacted me saying that I could perform in their SIC festival I was buzzed.
Finally I can do something with my music live and see where I’m at and what needs to be fixed.”
- El Richie, 18
Scotland in Colour sees young artists get the chance to experience the full process of putting on a show, from initial selections, through to rehearsals, and of course, the day of the festival itself.
It’s an opportunity for learning as well as performing, and gaining confidence in how to approach putting on shows in the future. Whether that’s understanding what type of equipment you may need to create your live sound, to building experience of being on stage, Intercultural Youth Scotland know how important this is to their community of artists.
“Scotland in Colour is one of those programmes where it is quite a platform for a lot of young people throughout our organisation.
Sometimes people do book performers through us so people that get involved with the festival are then on our roster for performances, and these are all paid through organisations we vet and we know they’re okay from a safeguarding point of view.
That’s one of the major ways – it gives them an opportunity to be part of a system that lets them get a bit more exposure.
We’re not an events booking service, that’s nowhere near our primary function, but there have been several opportunities where young people have gone on to do paid work.”
In the future, IYS want to expand that offering even more for the young artists involved with Scotland in Colour.
Whether that’s offering a wider selection of activities at the event, such as the chance for small business owners to have stalls, or larger headline acts so that the performers can have the experience of supporting and meeting artists they can learn even more from, they’re committed to making sure that the festival gives participants what they need to get the most from the event.
“We want it to be a platform for young people and community businesses. A day a year where you’re guaranteed to make a lot of money because you know everyone’s going to this festival - as a business that’s something that creates sustainability. You’re giving them an audience, an event, you know your friend is performing at it etc, that’s what Scotland in Colour should be. And in the long term, [we want it to be] that, but massive. We want it to be a draw for culture.”
Image: courtesy of Intercultural Youth Scotland
Image: courtesy of Intercultural Youth Scotland
“The whole place was literally made of pianos, from the seats to the stage, everything was a piano or was made of piano parts.
As a Pianist, It was a really enjoyable experience performing on a piano surrounded by pianos. The drome had vibrant and rich acoustics which made singing in that environment mesmerising.
We didn’t expect to have any performance at all due to the pandemic and lockdown/social distancing restrictions, however IYS always finds a way to make the impossible possible and to execute it perfectly.”
- Danny Cliff, 19