Axed show did get Creative Scotland funding for real sex

Director Leonie Rae Gasson secured a total of more than £110,000 of lottery money from the arts body.

It said Rein, which Gasson said was going to be part of Glasgow’s Take Me Somewhere Festival in 2024 and then toured internationally, was initially supported as a “challenging, creatively ambitious piece of experimental performance art”.

Responding by letter to a Scottish parliament committee last month, Creative Scotland chief executive Iain Munro praised Ms Gasson’s “track record”.

He said the application showed a “clear storytelling narrative, strong sexual themes and simulated sexual performance, and would speak to a particular audience rather than the mainstream”.

In the January round of the public arts body’s National Lottery Open Fund for Individuals, £84,555 was awarded to Ms Gasson. She had already received £23,219 from the same fund in August 2023.

The project was to use “pornographic processes” to film “non-simulated sex” in the Highlands.

The Rein website, which has been taken down, described it as a 45-minute art installation with audience interaction showing explicit footage on three large screens emerging from pools of water.

Research and development for the project included a nine-minute sexually explicit film which was only available for potential supporters to watch privately.

Creative Scotland had already paid 90% of the second grant to Ms Gasson and has been able to recover £67,741 of that.

The arts body decided not to claim back the £8,359 already spent, mainly on sub-contracted freelancers, “in the interests of protecting the, often precarious, income” of these workers.

These included a British Sign Language translator who made a video version of the casting callout describing the explicit acts that would be part of the performance.