Over two September weekends, biennial outdoor arts festival Inside Out Dorset, postponed from 2020, celebrates the county's natural landscape and sense of place, transforming it with art and performance in distinctive rural and coastal locations.
This year's Festival has themes of sustainability, land use and lifecycles, human and environmental, at the heart of the programme - and it is entirely free to experience.
Luke Jerram's iconic and monumental 3D globe Gaia is at Moors Valley from 17 to 19 September, installed in the pine forests where it can be viewed from the Tree Top Walk. Seven metres in diameter, the internally-lit sculpture features detailed NASA imagery of the Earth's surface and provides an Overview Effect - the opportunity to see the planet on this scale, floating in three dimensions.
Jerram says: "I hope visitors to Gaia get to see the Earth as if from space; an incredibly beautiful and precious place. An ecosystem we urgently need to look after - our only home. Halfway through the Earth's sixth mass extinction, we urgently need to wake up and change our behaviour. We need to quickly make the changes necessary to prevent runaway climate change."
Moors Valley Country Park and Forest, Inside Out Dorset's opening location, is a working forest, one of the best havens for dragonflies in the UK and home to a successful water vole reintroduction programme. The Festival will be working with Forestry England and Dorset Council on the programme there.
Also from 17 to 19 September is a new audio artwork, No Going Back, focusing on the accelerating dangers of climate change in the pandemic world. Artists Karen Wimhurst and Ed Bursey have sculpted a compelling soundtrack from original music and the voices of diverse people talking about their changing priorities, what they love and what they can let go of.
For the Festival's second weekend, from 24 to 26 September, Jerram's Gaia moves to the woodlands of the Symondsbury Estate. The estate lies within the Marshwood Vale, a low-lying, bowl-shaped valley which has escaped wholesale ploughing and large-scale agricultural intensification, leading to a landscape that still contains a wealth of wildlife. The land lies within the Dorset Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, one of the Festival's partners.
Also at the Symondsbury Estate is an artwork trail with new commissions from three exceptional creators of outdoor art - Dave, The Shouting Mute, Red Herring and Lorna Rees.
Inside Out Dorset presents the world premiere of Partnering with Earth, a performance poetry installation created by Disabled artist Dave, The Shouting Mute who asks 'If the Earth could speak, what would it say?'. Dave interviewed scientists, conservationists, activists and land workers about their relationship to the land and their thoughts on climate change. He has taken these thoughts and reflections and used the conversations as a starting point to write a series of poems which, with extracts of the verbatim recordings, will form a soundscape within the installation. A live cast including several Disabled performers and artists will read the poems.
At a time when bird species and many human languages are threatened with extinction, Red Herring's Whistlers follows a fictitious tribe of remote bird-loving humans as they explore the language and communication of birdsong and dialects. For this installation and series of performances in the woods, Red Herring have worked with a wildlife expert and Dorset-based participants to add local bird song to European birdsong collected from earlier performance locations. Audiences are invited to enter the curious world of the Whistler Conservation Society...
In Geophonic, artist Lorna Rees of Gobbledegook Theatre responds to the landscape of the Symondsbury Estate to tell the story of rock, how it forms and how it literally is the bedrock of our lives. This joyful performance piece and sound walk encourages people to listen to the geological processes of the earth. Using large recycled plastic geophones, audiences stop to listen at various points on a guided journey. Some of the sonic content will be naturally occurring, some made by human voice, and some with augmented sound and music. Geophonic is about recognising how geology shapes our landscape and remembering that humans are part of nature too.
Other Festival events with an environmental theme include Fingerprint Dance's Two and a Half which takes as its theme from the 2.5°C rise in Arctic sea temperatures and the resulting lost ice, shrinking habitats and climbing sea levels; Angel Exit Theatre's new show (currently untitled) revolving around characters who are climate refugees; and Les Quat' fers en l'air whose gravity-defying aerial duet Gravir is set on melting ice caps.
Throughout the Festival, Dorset Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty will run its Talking Tent, a facilitated space to weave together threads of thinking and conversations around how the living landscape holds personal memories and stories. Talking Tent will be curated and facilitated by storyteller Martin Maudsley and poet Sarah Acton.
Learn more at www.insideoutdorset.co.uk.
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