Projects

Performance for a Woken Up World was the first of a series of showcases of outdoor theatre directly inspired by Global Warming which was put to a public audience at Big Day Out, a cross platform outdoor arts festival based in Berkshire.

The programme featured brilliant work from across Europe. There was Nottingham’s Institute of Crazy Dancing, whose ‘LifeBoat’ gained a legion of young fans who could not be dissuaded from lying all day in the plenitful hammocks, asked gently to contemplate the world and what the future holds for them…

There was Belgium’s Odile & Pinson and their ingenious Against The Tide, a farce set sometime in the future, where daily life has changed dramatically and every moment of their days is spent trying to be more sustainable.

People heard a piece of music, written by one of the UK’s new classical ‘fanfare’ bands, Perhaps Contraption, about the ‘angst’ of living in a rapidly warming world. And finally FanSHEN’s Pantomime-like Green & Pleasant Land sent audiences on a journey to find Plan B, risking all to go against the laws of consumerist culture. The showcase was intended to engage and question received wisdom rather than to lecture. And surprisingly, it seems to have worked on some people, especially families on a day at their local arts centre. It seemed that considering these wide issues isn’t a bad thing at all. They didn’t seem patronised and that was, perhaps, the biggest test of all, That we didn’t turn people off.

In a way, you could argue that out here in places like Bracknell is the litmus test of ecologically inspired art. Whether artists and makers can actually change the world. For out here in commuter-land: Surrey, Berkshire, Kent etc… is where the daily grind of life is pretty much completely dominated, en masse, by commuter necessities and seemingly unavoidable high personal carbon footprints. For if she/he can’t use a train to get to obscure little towns, he or she jumps in a car every day, stuck in log jams on the M5/M25, for hours and hours and hours and hours……

If that’s the case, then the work work has only just begun……