Over 900 of the world’s most talented performers make up the cast of the Tattoo and, among those, are a group of 50 highly experienced, traditional Scottish dancers. The demands of so many performances, 26 over a relatively short period of time, has – not surprisingly – a huge impact on the dancers’ physical wellbeing as well as their costumes and especially their shoes. When Thistle Shoes Scotland stepped in, a fabulous in-kind sponsorship story was choreographed…

In the mid-19th century, ‘bird’s eye view’ illustrations of British cities were all the rage and one of the most celebrated is Thomas Sulman’s sketch of Glasgow, depicting the city on the cusp of becoming the ‘Second City of the Empire’. Gallus Glasgow is a fabulous contemporary perspective of Victorian Glasgow created through the digitisation and animation of Sulman’s original drawing and supported by an extensive outreach programme.

Journey to the East is a nine-day festival that celebrates and platforms the best in Asian contemporary arts and Eastern performance. The focus of the festival is to provide Scotland with a window to Eastern artforms and practices, delivered via a multi-artform approach including live performance, music and film.

Edinburgh is the city in which BSL was codified and is home to the largest arts festival in the world, yet Deaf Action identified that local deaf people did not see the Edinburgh International Festival or Fringe as ‘something for them’. In a bid to change this, August 2023 saw the Edinburgh Deaf Festival (EDF) deliver a 10-day programme of over 70 events to celebrate deaf culture and promote a positive deaf identity. Designed to be accessible for deaf and hearing communities alike, hearing audiences were transported to a deaf world for a fully immersive experience.

Each August, Edinburgh plays host to around 3,000 shows performed by artists from around the globe. For the 2023 Fringe Festival, two key deliverables were identified to help enhance the audience experience – a return of the Fringe App and an expansion of the free Fringe Street Events programme. A partnership between the Fringe Society and Playbill brought both to life.

Materials Matter ‘Remade’ was a project delivered by Midton Plastics and The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) Sculpture and Environmental Art department between December 2021 and November 2022. Using the recycled plastic material ‘Remade’, twenty students created six public art sculptures, produced a film about their experiences, and staged a public exhibition at Midton Open Day as part of the Argyll Art Map.

In 2021, the departure of Debenhams from Ocean Terminal Shopping Centre in Leith left almost 6,000 square metres of retail space empty. Keen to develop their offering far beyond shopping and hospitality, Ocean Terminal approached The Living Memory Association to collaborate on a creative, community engagement project in return for rent-free use of the empty spaces.

With the COP 26 climate summit coming to Glasgow in November 2021, the Scottish Youth Film Foundation (SYFF) were able to recruit 12 young people as video journalists, and embed them as reporters through a COP TV initiative, thanks to sponsorship from energy giant ScottishPower and match funding from the C&BS Fund.

Established in 2019, the Sufi Festival aims to bringing different communities together in a spirit of cohesion and harmony. Taking place in July, across various Glasgow locations, the 2022 Sufi Festival saw more than 50 different artists deliver a wide range of activities to share and celebrate the Sufism tradition of Islamic Mysticism.

Through the year-long, in-kind loan of two superb grand pianos, Blüthner Pianos supported and enhanced Absolute Classics’ 2021/22 performance and education activities in Dumfries & Galloway. The project brought world-class performance to Scotland’s remote communities and – thanks to C&BS Fund match funding – online, around the world.

With a shared ambition to inspire young people to understand and consider STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) and to make a meaningful contribution to Edinburgh’s communities, the impact of this ten-year long partnership has been significantly enhanced by match funding from the C&BS Fund.

Thanks to match funding from the C&BS Fund, not only was a brand new piece of music created – a piece emotive, relevant and highly accessible – but a short film recording its creation and performance was also created, providing a living legacy on the theme of climate change for both partners.

Thanks to an inspiring partnership and match funding from the C&BS Fund, visitors enjoyed exhibitions by 252 artists from 34 countries, and the Supported and Open Programmes element of the Festival saw audience visits rise by 26%.

Celebrating a project that more than reached its ambition to celebrate ‘people, place and performance’ by turning the spotlight on the community hall as a space in which to gather and unite and attracting a dazzling array of Scotland’s finest traditional musicians.

A vibrant community-based event that embraces the positive associations of light and hope, regeneration and rejuvenation, through an intriguing – and perhaps unexpected – culture and business partnership.

Thanks to the support of a local chiropractic firm, Dippy – the Natural History Museum’s Diplodocus skeleton cast – was supported on the Glasgow leg of its UK tour with a volunteer programme to deliver the public learning programme.

Perfectly balanced creative aspirations and commercial needs saw world-class theatre created in the heart of Scotland. Reaching an astonishing 32,900 audience members during a six-week, sell-out run in Edinburgh, the show then transferred to London’s Old Vic.

Having secured early support from DC Thomson and Brewin Dolphin, a commitment from NCR which was match funded by C&BS Fund secured the overall budget required to stage an ambitious project with the aim of shining a national and international spotlight on Dundee and the museum.