Festival of the Dark Archives - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

Conversations with Work That Connects

Climate change dramatist and activist Julia Marques introduces a series of lively and engaging conversations she has recorded with fellow members. Artists and researchers explore their experiences with wide-ranging topics which inform the creative work that ClimateCultures celebrates.

2,970 words: estimated reading time 12 minutes + videos

The inspiration for this journey into podcasting came from the imposed self-isolation that we are all currently facing because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and that we have faced (on and off) for nearly a year now. As a fairly extroverted human, I miss connecting. I miss collaborating. I miss conversing in 3D; the whole-body language that cannot be translated through a flat screen, no matter how hard we try. As a human being, there is also a need to create. So, working within the current limitations, I decided to set about creating a podcast for ClimateCultures members to become more acquainted with each other. I started with a small pilot group of five members all linked to theatre practice in some way: Daniel Bye, Tessa Gordziejko, Matt Law, Jennifer Leach and Andrea Carr.

I am myself a theatre maker, mainly with amateur groups at a community level, and I discovered the melding of the two worlds of theatre and environmentalism during my climate change studies at King’s College in London a few years ago. I also directed and produced The Children by Lucy Kirkwood in 2019 with my local theatre group. Having worked in the environmental NGO sector for a bit, I decided to foray into the business startup world last year and set up a business with a team-mate that aimed to connect media professionals with environmental community stories.

As well as being interested in why people have joined ClimateCultures, when they first decided to combine art and environmentalism and what they are working on now, our conversations explored what art and environmentalism bring to each other – and more along the way.

I’ve included a short clip from each conversation, with links to the full interviews in the notes and in their ClimateCultures member profiles.

“Galvanising the faithful”

‘Preaching to the choir’ is a common criticism in environmental circles. However, writer and performer Daniel Bye doesn’t think this is a problem because even among the broadly like-minded each person brings their own interpretation of a situation and how to take it from here to there. As Dan points out, there would never be another rally or march if all you were trying to do each time was convert people who don’t share your views. There is power in gathering with like-minded people who are also individuals nonetheless and carry their own life history and views and opinions with them. Everyone can bring something to the table.

Daniel Bye on ‘galvanising the faithful’

I think there is a lot still to be learnt from faith communities and religion – often overlooked in the climate change discussion. For many years they have successfully galvanised the faithful and ‘preached to the choir’ to great effect. The ‘guardians of the Earth’ narrative is one that many people will identify with — we have been given this wonderful planet by a higher power and we need to take care of it.

Dan spoke to me about How to Occupy an Oil Rig, and his more recent piece These Hills Are Ours made with Boff Whalley of the band Chumbawamba. The first is more overtly political and has very clear links to climate change. The second is more subtle about the subject matter, but it is very much linked to our connection with the natural world — walking the path between urban and country with different groups of singers.

How to Occupy an Oil Rig
Photograph: Reed Ingram Weir © 2013

There is something about walking that has magical properties; we step on the ground in order to walk — “that patch of ground upon which you tread to go to the local shops” as writer, performer and storyteller Jennifer Leach put it in our discussion. Walking is our constant connection to the physical earth that we live on. We also walk on marches — to have our voices heard. We walk to get us somewhere, but also as a leisure activity. Walking slows us down, we have time to appreciate what’s around us. With no other means of transport, we walk. There is huge potential in walking too, as initiatives like Slow Ways are showing – walking connects us.

When watching the videos of the walks that the choirs were able to do with Dan and Boff, you get a sense of something powerful in a group of people all singing together on top of a hill. Voices into the wind, feet planted on the ground, nothing else around but grass and stones. They have made a journey, and this journey has brought them here — but the journey is not yet finished. The art is in the process, not the product. They hope to make more performative journeys later this year.

“Just enough beauty to stay with the darkness”

As you watch the singers trudge up the hills with Dan, you can see the hardship that must be gone through before they reach the peak and sing for joy. You must go through the darkness to reach the light — there cannot be light without darkness. Jennifer and writer, performer and creative producer Tessa Gordziejko are sure of this. If we cannot stay with the darkness then we will forever be chasing the light. Tessa quotes Dougald Hine, co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project: “Art can give us just enough beauty to stay with the darkness, rather than flee or shut down.” This reminds me of Donna Harraway’s Staying with the Trouble and the work of Joanna Macy — climate work very much rooted in psychology. Tessa is in fact connected to the Climate Psychology Alliance and has started to weave tapestries using social dreaming — untethering what is sitting on the bottom of our lakes of consciousness and letting it ‘bob to the surface’.

Tessa Gordziejko on ‘Facing the darkness’:

Tessa also likes to weave music into her work; she says it helps to immerse people in the work so they feel part of it. There is also an element of dance – she misses dancing with people – as a way of connecting when words run out, and of circus performance via her collaborations with circus artist Mish Weaver. Dancing, music, song — these elements run throughout Tessa’s work, and Dan’s too.

Breath[e]LESS – a blend of spoken word, soundscape, projection and dance music on environmental themes that Tessa Gordzjieko collaborated on.

“You learn as much as you teach”

We all go into situations with preconceived ideas of how things will be. What art does is make it okay for us to be uncomfortable with the way things actually turn out — as we figure out what’s really going on. Art embraces uncertainty, as does science. The not knowing is what drives both pursuits. And for both, the process is as important as the results. It would make sense then that the two join forces so that we can all welcome the unknown with open arms.

As a geographer, Matt Law has been introduced to the power of art as connector. He is crossing disciplinary borders within Bath Spa University and has co-created a piece of theatre with the drama department that addresses environmental issues. The Last Hurrah (and the Long Haul) is the result; a piece very much focussed on the community level of climate change and how incremental changes can unravel but also eventually strengthen a tightly-knit group. Plans to tour it have been put on hold but will hopefully go ahead later this year.

The Last Hurrah (and the Long Haul)
Photograph: Matt Law © 2020

Being an educator, Matt really feels as though the process of using art to communicate science has been as much of a learning process for him as it has been for any of the students he has taught. His work on the project Future Animals with Professor Jaqui Mulville from the archaeology department at Cardiff University was the spark that ignited his interest in merging art and geography to make sense of climate change.

Matt Law on ‘You learn as you teach’:

“Ecology begins on your doorstep”

Jennifer Leach looks out of her window at a holly tree and tells me that if everyone could see this tree then there would be no need for words to explain the beauty of the natural world in which we live. The beauty lies in the ordinariness of the thing. The everyday ecology.

I really think this is crucial for that all-important shift in consciousness from understanding something with our heads to really feeling it with our hearts. Big, lofty ideas are not going to get us far — ordinary, everyday things are what will change hearts and minds. And art has a way of celebrating the ordinary, of holding it up to the light so that we can really see it for the beautiful thing that it is. Jennifer identifies this in the work of American visual artist Joan Jonas who celebrates the ordinary, albeit in a thorough and intentional way.

Jennifer Leach on ‘Ecology on your doorstep’:

Jennifer herself has made canvasses out of plastic bags used in an art exhibition and organised the Festival of the Dark, where people were encouraged to re-embrace the seasonal cycles of dark and light. As she puts it:

“It’s only by being still, by being quiet and by completely embracing the fact that death and decay – endings – are part of our cycle that you learn to live in harmony with everything else that lives within the seasons of nature. We are the only species that don’t.”

Showing the gathering for The Night Breathes Us In, part of Festival of the Dark, . Photograph by Georgia Wingfield-Hayes — The Night Breathes Us In – part of Festival of the Dark, March 2017
Photograph: Georgia Wingfield-Hayes © 2017 georgiawingfieldhayes.org

She’s currently working on Duende with fellow ClimateCultures member Andrea Carr — a project that came to life through one of those preciously ordinary things that we now crave; a chance meeting on a staircase, and a conversation about Federico Garcia Lorca at a TippingPoint gathering. The unnamed catastrophe in Duende has forced two insects to hide underground — a strange portent of what became reality in 2020 for many of us. This piece is still a work in progress, and Jennifer and Andrea are looking to collaborate with others who appear in connection with this project. However, as Jennifer says, “what’s become super clear to me now is that my work is not about product, it is about process”, so you could say that the art has already been created.

“Our new brief”

So, what is the way forward for environmental theatre? For designer and scenographer Andrea Carr, it is the vision that all artistic practice will hold the environment at the centre of all it does — so the prefix ‘eco’ will no longer be needed. She has pioneered this approach to making theatre, and now she has joined forces with other scenographers and created Eco-stage, a soon-to-relaunch platform which will serve as a library of eco-theatre work and a space for dialogue on the topic.

Orlando after Virginia Woolf
Photograph: Andrea Carr © 2019

Andrea has her own set of values which she has defined on her own terms, and she encourages others to really think about what these highly generalised words mean to them as well:

Creativity – “cultivating curiosity”
Sustainability – “where the dreamer … the idealist and the pragmatist will work together”
Collaboration – “active listening”, “developing openness”, “pooling expertise”, “welcoming and honouring diversity”
Radical optimism – “celebrating and noticing what works and doing more of it”

She also speaks of honouring the materials that we use to create art — these things that we regard as single-use but have a life that extends far beyond our imagination.

Andrea presents us with our new brief: to place the ‘eco’ at the heart of everything we do.

Andrea Carr on ‘Our new brief’

One thing that really inspired me in my conversations with these five people was that each was proud of all of their work, large and small, and no one was afraid of making something that may or may not fly. All creative work is valid. Having spent a year in the business incubator world where you are constantly asked how ‘scalable’ your idea is, it was really nice to be reminded that ‘small and quiet’ is also worth something and this is where change starts — at the local, smaller, community level. This has inspired me to pursue more of my own environmental community theatre work, to put something out there and see where it goes. After all, if we don’t act now, then when will we?

I would like to thank Dan, Tessa, Matt, Jennifer and Andrea for their time and their great insights into making environmental art, and life more generally! The videos of my conversations with them are all available below, and in their profiles in the ClimateCultures Directory.

Conversations such as these are part of the bigger conversation on art and climate change and how to make sense of the world we live in. The idea is also that they will become part of a spiderweb of conversations starting with the ClimateCultures community, reaching further and further out until they include all members and eventually beyond. So I’m hoping this first set will also spark more conversations and collaborations within our community. If you’d like to be part of future discussions – just let me or Mark know!

Find out more

Julia Marques

A climate change dramatist, activist and communicator specialising in social and cultural aspects of climate change who has worked in the nonprofit and media sector.

You can read about Julia’s production of Lucy Kirkwood’s play in her post Directing The Children.

Do watch Julia’s full conversations with Dan, Tessa, Matt, Jennifer and Andrea below. This post and our brief summaries here give just a flavour of what they discussed!

Theatre writer and performer Daniel Bye discusses the value of dialogue with the community of other makers, and shares his experience of creating work (including How to Occupy an Oil Rig and, more recently, These Hills Are Ours) as starting points to bring people together, galvanise those with existing environmental awareness, reach new audiences and have impact beyond the performance, expanding the opportunity for activism.

Writer, performer, creative producer and activist Tessa Gordziejko discusses her involvement with the Climate Psychology Alliance and Dark Mountain Project as inspirations for work such as Breath[e]:LESS and The Divided and explorations of ‘social dreaming’ as ways to address our emotional responses to climate crisis. Tessa also shares plans for a deep adaptation project working with the land and conversations around the campfire.

Environmental change and sustainability researcher Matt Law shares his experience of crossing academic boundaries, coming to climate theatre as a geographer and bringing arts and geography students together for The Last Hurrah (and the Long Haul). He also discusses art, music and performance as ways to explore ways of engaging people with environmental histories and futures, and being connected to a community.

Artist, writer, performer and storyteller Jennifer Leach shares her environmental passion as a creator of projects such as The Festival of the Dark, reconnecting with nature’s cycles of life and death, and learning how the process is as important as the product. She shares ideas behind Duende, her new collaborative project with Andrea Carr, and the importance of finding what feeds you rather than what drains you.

Designer and scenographer Andrea Carr shares her childhood model for environmental action, developing her core values through works such as Orlando after Virginia Woolf, Stuck and The Chairs, working on eco-scenography with other designers to directly incorporate ecological thinking into theatre and make activism visible. She also discusses Duende, her new collaborative project with Jennifer Leach as hybrid encounters with times of ecological uncertainty through stories, song, imagery and myth.

As well as exploring these members’ activities via their ClimateCultures profiles, you can explore the following links for film and other materials from some of their theatrical works mentioned in the post: Daniel Bye — How to Occupy an Oil Rig and These Hills Are Ours; Tessa Gordziejko — Breath[e]:LESS; Matt Law — The Last Hurrah (and the Long Haul); and Andrea Carr — Stuck. And you can read about Jennifer Leach’s journey from a ‘sharing of darkness’ at a climate conference for artists and scientists, and the year-long festival she created in its honour, to her recent book in her post Dancing with Darkness.

Slow Ways is a project to create a network of walking routes that connect all of Great Britain’s towns and cities as well as thousands of villages.

The Dark Mountain Project is making art that doesn’t take the centrality of humans for granted, tracing the deep cultural roots of the mess the world is in, and looking for stories that can help us make sense of a time of disruption and uncertainty.

In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016) Donna Harraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants.

Joanna Macy is the root teacher of The Work That Reconnects, a framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application.

The Climate Psychology Alliance is a network focusing on climate change not as a scientific problem waiting for a technical solution, but as a systemic problem that engenders fear, denial and despair, forces uncomfortable dilemmas about justice, nature and equality into consciousness and challenges all of us in modern societies both personally and politically.

The Future Animals project on art, Darwin and archaeology included artist Paul Evans, Ciara Charnley from the National Museum, Wales and bioarchaeologist Jacqui Mulville from Cardiff University.

Eco-stage is a public commitment and positive declaration to work ecologically in the performing arts sector. It includes a set of intersecting values, objectives and provocations for engaging with ecological practice. The pledge is envisioned as a conversation starter to help bring an ecological ethic to performance production and as a tool for motivating action.

Dancing with Darkness

Artist and writer Jennifer Leach recalls the journey from a sharing of darkness at a climate conference for artists and scientists, and the year-long festival she created in its honour, to her new book, Dancing in the Dark.

1,440 words: estimated reading time 6 minutes

In 2016, Festival of the Dark was born on Winter Solstice in Reading, and ran for a full year. It had bloomed remarkably quickly from a seed planted at the TippingPoint climate conference — Doing Nothing Is Not An Option — that had been held in Warwick in June of that year. These TippingPoint conferences had for many years brought together scientists and artists, in the context of climate change; the scientists brought the facts, the artists the imagination to creatively take these facts along with their work and out into the world. The 2016 conference could not, initially, shake off a persistent sentiment of doom. Many scientists said they had little new to say, many artists felt they had tried and failed to effect change. Many delegates felt we were still hooked on looking for solutions, rather than extricating ourselves from that singular goal and extending our sight over a wider terrain.

What is it that we fear?

Yet something developed over that weekend that was unpremeditated, and I believe it was the presence of a coterie of particularly feisty women who may have had something to do with it. They began talking about the heart, rather than the head. One delegate counted the number of times the men said, ‘I think’, and the number of times the women said, ‘I feel’. One delegate humorously objected to being told, ‘Doing Nothing Is Not An Option’ and she set up a break-out group called ‘Doing Nothing IS An Option’. I was too busy lying under a yew tree doing nothing to go, but I hear a remarkable rainbow appeared from nowhere and spread across the wall of the small unprepossessing room in which they sat. By the end of the weekend we were talking of a new spiritual paradigm, a shift of focus from the head to the heart. There was no point, many of us agreed, in trying to find solutions until we had fully explored why and how we had arrived in this place of self-motivated disaster. Why are we acting as we are? What is it that we fear? What is it that we are resisting?

It is a much longer story than I can tell here, but in the course of the conference, someone suggested that there could be a day set aside for all theatres in the UK to turn off their lights and play in darkness, or by candlelight. This throwaway suggestion, one of many in a series of brainstorming sessions, brought about such extreme reactions that a small group of us attended to the energy generated and set up a breakout group to explore the darkness. Why was the darkness seen as Luddite, why was turning off the lights seen as a reactionary action, an action that contained within it all that people loathe about the ‘environmental lobby’? Why is darkness seen as non-progressive, as negative?

Showing Jennifer Leach's suggestion for Learning to Love the Dark - a discussion at Doing Nothing Is Not an Option. Photograph by Mark Goldthorpe — Learning to Love the Dark – a discussion at Doing Nothing Is Not an Option, June 2016
Photograph: Mark Goldthorpe

I recall feeding back from our group to the plenary session, and slightly tongue in cheek saying we’d hold a festival in Reading, at the end of which we’d turn off the lights across the town. ‘If it can happen in Reading [which it didn’t quite!], it can happen anywhere.’ So was born Festival of the Dark, which opened around four months later, with full Arts Council funding.

Darkness honoured

I did not know where the Festival came from, it surprised me, and I did not know what it wanted. It was perhaps conceived as being grand; it ended up sweet, subtle, subterranean, dancing beneath the streets of Reading like the Holy Brook whose waters do likewise. It did not end with the sweeping gesture of a great Lights Off ceremony (in a corporate town at the height of the Christmas shopping season?!), yet soft candles, and faces lit by campfire stories, and even darkness, came to be its keynotes. It softened as the year progressed, and the steely imperatives of its inception transformed into a more mellow weave. Yet what it held was radical, daring, brave, and those who chose to participate showed courage. The festival ended in darkness on 21 December 2017. After a night of food, music and reminiscence, as we watched snatches of video from each of the Festival’s 21 events, we stood unable to see one another, arms around each other, and sang. A quite glorious community anthem slipped out from the darkened windows of a generous venue, now boarded up, and escaped into the night.

Darkness - the gathering for The Night Breathes Us In, part of Festival of the Dark, . Photograph by Georgia Wingfield-Hayes — The Night Breathes Us In – part of Festival of the Dark, March 2017
Photograph: Georgia Wingfield-Hayes © 2017 georgiawingfieldhayes.org

I wrote Dancing in the Dark for the Opening Ceremony and in many ways it became a signifier for me, for the Festival itself. Its unknown origin, its uncanny form, its darings and challenges, and its unswerving message of quiet assurance that ‘all shall be well’ came in from outside my self. The work, I am sure, bubbled up from our sharp ancestral past, when death, hunger and danger were ever-present and the skull was a bed-fellow for the living. It wove through the starry heavens of Galileo who unhooked us from the secure centre of a human-anchored universe, and flung us out into orbit around a foreign star. It took me deep into my own heart, to a place of fear, and asked me to jump, into the racing pulse of the unknowable, and the unknown. And it led back out into the weightless universe where, divesting of the small and false securities that keep us tied to fear, there is to be found a joyful liberation in our magnificent insignificance.

'I do not know what darkness meant then' is an image from Jennifer Leach's book, Dancing in the Dark — ‘I do not know what darkness meant then.’
Artist: Jennifer Leach © 2019

Freed from the tyranny of our dread

I worked with a dear friend on presenting the piece. She brought music to it. On four long nights we found ourselves in a back garden multifaith temple, in midwinter, breathing the words over candles and a calorgas heater, cold but entranced. The magic happened here. Strong ancestral stirrings were at work, and we felt perhaps that we and our ancestors were clumsily mapping out a new way to work with these crazy descendants who don’t, to misquote Hamlet, know a hawk from a chainsaw.

The ‘performance’ itself was imperfect. A childcare crisis arose minutes before we began, we broke a microphone in the dark, and we could not see. It mattered not. The power was in the process, in the imprecise nature of the very real exploration of imagination that began with the words, the music, and later the images, and which are now loosely harnassed in the pages of a book.

A conference cannot avert a crisis. A Festival cannot. A book cannot. We do not, in fact, know whether anything can, not even the accumulation of every great head initiative and every great heart initiative focused right now on the calamity of climate emergency. What I do know is that the courage to make tangible our rightful fear, to acknowledge it, and to launch ourselves into it, will profoundly change us, and liberate us from the tyranny of our dread. And in this, every small creative contribution adds one more small stone to place upon the communal cairns of our courage. Welcome waymarkers on unknown paths.

Darkness - 'Is this not so?' is an image from Jennifer Leach's book, Dancing in the Dark — ‘Is this not so?’
Artist: Jennifer Leach © 2019

Find out more

Dancing in the Dark is available to order for a very limited time — and in a limited edition print run. This Kickstarter campaign — which has already ensured that the 48-page, richly painted story-poem will be printed and delivered to its backers — closes early on the morning of this coming Sunday — 18th August. On the project page, as well as examples of words and images in the book, you can hear Jennifer give a short reading from it.

Jennifer’s recent post, Earth Living — Now, Facing the Storm, explores some of the ‘questioning tales for a world’s ending’ she told at the recent Earth Living Festival in Reading, and the relaunch of her Outrider Anthems enterprise as a sanctuary of creativity.

You can read On Night in the Daytime, my ClimateCultures review of Night Breathes Us In, which was an event from Dark Mountain Project as part of the Festival of the Dark. The Dark Mountain website features two other accounts from members of that organisation’s team who took part: Charlotte du Cann, and ClimateCultures Member Sarah Thomas.

Jennifer Leach

A poet, writer, performer and storyteller whose wild work, forged in the fantastical reaches of deep imagination, brings to life new stories for our strange times.

Earth Living — Now, Facing the Storm

Writer and artist Jennifer Leach shared some of her stories at Reading’s Earth Living Festival. Here, she discusses these questioning tales for a world’s ending — and the relaunch of her Outrider Anthems enterprise as a sanctuary of creativity.

1,700 words: estimated reading time 7 minutes

There is a profound sense of collective bewilderment in the air right now. A disbelief that we are alive at the very time the world as we know it is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, coming to an end. There are theories and queries as to what this actually means — will Life on Earth end, will Homo Sapiens survive in any form, will the elite few succeed in their bid to safeguard an AI-supported future for themselves, will we all have to endure unbearable suffering? We are about to journey as we have never journeyed before. Permanence is already a foreign concept; it always was a delusional one. Already, the status quo is no more. On our internal radar we have seen it, and know it; we are now awaiting the shock waves.

Earth Living

In this context, how does one live? As an artist, how does one engage? Do we simply carry on, for now, until ‘now’ brings with it the storm we are all awaiting? Or do we drop the rhythm of conventional society, and walk out to meet the storm? Is our role to stand our ground, asking the uncomfortable and unanswerable questions?

I do not know the answers. Like many of us, I hear many calls. There is a call to action, which for me is being answered largely through a firm commitment to my local XR group; there is a strong call leading me into both immersive art practice and community ventures; there is the call to live each moment with a light heart and a sense of fun, and there is the call to hold fast to all that is dear, and to spend focused time with those I love. And Time tells me I cannot, in truth, answer all of these calls. At some point, I must choose.

Striving to find the rightful path for my organisation, Outrider Anthems, has provided me with a strong clue as to how I might be moving forward into this time of unknowing. In a remarkable and unexpected branding opportunity offered me by the talented and insightful young graduate, Ed Hendry, we have understood that Outrider Anthems is to declare itself a ‘sanctuary of creativity in the inevitable turbulence of climate breakdown’. We are building a strong team for this work, and paying close attention to what, in practice, it will mean. Following impulse and instinct, we trust that knowing will come when knowing needs to.

As an aside, I wonder how many collective shudders issued forth from that insouciant use of the ‘branding’ word. Used wisely, understood well, I have learnt the value of embracing what the commercial world has to offer, and to teach me. For Outrider Anthems, we worked hard and rigorously to hone a clarity of concept, purpose, mission and values, and in doing so, finally gained an authority that was previously obscured. It is a process I recommend.

In my personal work, I have been exploring these issues through story, as story is one of the most portable, direct and accessible art forms we have. They create a space where fears can be unmasked, held, explored, and honoured. The soundings are the first step in the process, and practical solutions play no role here.

My most abstract exploration of the letting go of fear is Dancing in the Dark, a work that is just ready to make its way out into the larger world through another new venture for Outrider Anthems: a dedicated Kickstarter campaign to create this visual story poem as a limited print first edition. (You can explore Dancing in the Dark, and how to get involved, via the link at the end of this post.)

Jennifer Leach storytelling at the Earth Living Festival, Reading in May 2019 — Storytelling at the Earth Living Festival, Reading
Photograph: Alice McGuigan © 2019

Other questioning stories were written to share at the Earth Living Festival in Reading in May. This festival was a wonderful new venture established by Alice McGuigan to nurture, in Reading, a community learning to live in greater balance with the Earth. In the chill of a spring evening, by a quiet River Thames, and beneath a circle of listener-enclosing yew trees (all upshoots of one Mother Tree), I brought my tales. As the light waned and the day darkened, we explored greed, and need, and pain, and sorrow. Catastrophe and equanimity.

Earth Living - Jennifer Leach's story, The Eyeball — The Eyeball
Art: Jennifer Leach © 2019

The human being sees life from one pair of eyes. Everything from this one pair of eyes. The first story grows from one of these eyeballs, a nascent hairy eyeball whose voracious appetite proves to be insatiable:

After one great turning of time, the eyeball woke one day and its razor gaze fell, like a blade, upon a new land far beyond the known shale ridge, a vision of waving fronds and swaying bands. And the engorged eyeball swivelled impassively towards this new goal, setting its inscrutable sights upon a new paradise. Off it went, scuttling across rocks, and through foam, between boulders, and under stones. Unswerving, unerring, grotesquely unnerving. And from it all creatures cowered and hid.

The eyeball cannot see. The Patterners can. Have you heard of the Patterners?

They are rare beings born engraved with the interconnected patterning of all things. You understand this, it is not something they have chosen? They are carved so. Their skin, their eyes, their tongue, their ears, their hearts, all engraved with the patterning of all things. Each waking moment, each dreaming state, they see the web. They see each knot, each node, see each and all as sacred weights in the integral patterning of holding. Each unique, essential in itself. One knot carelessly broken, is the first small hole in the web. Two knots broken is the first bigger hole in the web. And so it goes. And so it goes.

Earth Living - Jennifer Leach's story, The Patterners — The Patterners
Art: Jennifer Leach © 2019

Who is to say what breaks the web? What ‘should’ we now do? How should we now act? In our daily lives, many of us will have noticed a growing sense of partition, as we judge not only our own actions, but those of others. Why is he saying yes to that plastic bag at the checkout? Why does she even ask if he needs one? Did you know X drove down to Y today to pick up a pair of party shoes from that designer outlet? So-and-So is flying again, off to Magaluf/Vietnam/Cuba, as if there’s no tomorrow. Judgement and separation set in.

Earth Living - Jennifer Leach's story, The Old Man and the Glacier — The Old Man and the Glacier
Art: Jennifer Leach © 2019

And from this space a tale unfolds of an old man who finally meets the majestic icelands of his lifelong yearning, in the twilight of his dwindling years.

I don’t normally use words like magnificent; I don’t feel comfortable with them. But sometimes there is only one word that will do. It was so grand and beautiful that it made me cry. I got frozen tears in my beard, and hanging from my nose as well. I probably looked a sight, but it didn’t matter. I could not stop looking at the, at the magnificence of this sight. I stood there until I was so cold I could take no more…

And in the very same landscape, amidst the rising oceans and the shrinking ice, a woman rows in her boat across the ocean, leaving behind the luxury cruise liners, the activists and the warriors, to arrive in the shadow of the melting glacier:

Quietly I haul in my sodden oars, lay them softly in the rowlocks. Gently I seat myself. I turn up my collar and release my hood. My white hair falls loose. And in my lap I slowly place my hands face up to her glistening face. I bow in her cloudbound shadow. Her diminishing body drip drip drips upon my uncovered head. Quietly I sing to her, a lullaby of passing.

Earth Living - Jennifer Leach's story, In the Shadow of the Melting Glacier — In the Shadow of the Melting Glacier
Art: Jennifer Leach © 2019

It is mystery

These are our viewpoints, those available to the limited frameworks of a human mind and imagination. However, there remains the word beyond. The final story offered the fragile thought that, shifting beyond our limited field of vision, all is as it is meant to be.

Upside out is inside down and here is neither there and thought is energy and matter is light and light is frozen as a waterfall that is placeless and ubiquitous and spaceless and timeless and infinite and eternal. And words that are vessels back down on Planet Earth, are mere echoes of energy, and each is an impartial resonance that holds, in itself, no power. Life and Death and Future and Past and Redemption and Ruin are all absorbed equally and mutually into the blue echo of dark Space. One hears nothing, for there is no means of carrying the words. It is mystery.

Earth Living - Jennifer Leach's story, Space — Space
Art: Jennifer Leach © 2019

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Jennifer performed her stories at the Earth Living Festival in Reading on 11th May 2019, under the title In the Shadow. The festival was organised by Alice McGuigan, Outrider Anthems’ project manager for the earlier, year-long Festival of the Dark, in Reading.

Jennifer at the Earth Living Festival, Reading
Photograph: Alice McGuigan © 2019

Jennifer produced Dancing in the Dark, combining her poem-story and art in a limited edition, high-quality artist’s book, on the Kickstarter platform.

You can find two more of Jennifer’s stories in full on ClimateCultures: What the Bee Sees, and The Gift of the Goddess Tree.

You can find Ed Hendry — the designer who worked with Jennifer to create the new Outrider Anthems logo, branding, website and identity — and other examples of his work on Facebook and Behance.

ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe is pleased to have joined the relaunched Outrider Anthems as freelance creative administrator, organising publications such as Dancing in the Dark and a forthcoming series of Outrider Anthems events.

Jennifer Leach

A poet, writer, performer and storyteller whose wild work, forged in the fantastical reaches of deep imagination, brings to life new stories for our strange times.

On Night in the Daytime

Writer Mark Goldthorpe joined the gathering for The Night Breathes Us In, part of Reading’s year-long Festival of the Dark, and found three simple, unexpected ways that the ‘outside’ – human, more-than-human, solar – came inside the tent.

1,600 words: estimated reading time 6.5 minutes

Saturday 25th March – almost on the Spring Equinox – was the perfect day to be in Reading for the latest instalment of its year-long Festival of the Dark. Blossoms and blue skies and a temperature to match, with a good crowd making use of Forbury Gardens just off the town centre. I’ve never discovered this Reading park before. I’m glad I’ve done so.

It was also my first Dark Mountain experience, although I’ve often explored the digital foothills at their site. Their approach to the complexities of climate change and our uncontrolled planetary experiment has intrigued me, and continues to as I feel myself circling closer into its nuances. The name of the event, The Night Breathes Us in, captures this beautifully, expanding our focus to the more-than-human and its agency over us (even while we disrupt it) but acknowledging the unavoidable centrality of our selves within our own experience.

Sadly, in my case, the night only partially inhaled; I was able to stay for the afternoon but missed out on the evening. So, this is an invitation to someone else to post a blog on the second half!

The black marquee in the middle of the gardens was an intimate space to share stories and experiences under the guidance of Dark Mountain explorers, and the three sessions I took part in there brought quiet reflections and gentle conversations.

The night breathes us in - Hands and Boots, Photograph by Mark Goldthorpe — Hands and Boots
Photographer: Mark Goldthorpe © 2017

Uncivilised Poetics – against demented questions

We began with the launch of Dark Mountain’s new book, with readings from the poems and essays in Uncivilised Poetics, and music and natural sounds from the book’s companion CD. Writer and editor Nick Hunt suggested poetics as a needed counterweight to the dominant language and statistics of technical and policy narratives. Poetics – not just poems, but art as exploration and an open-ended questioning – helps engage us in a world that cannot be captured in the beguiling, make-safe terminologies of ‘management’. Nick quoted from William Stafford’s poem, A Ritual to Read Each Other: “For it is important for awake people to be awake … the darkness around us is deep.”

Everyday language can trick us into unseeing important truths, and even our attempts to see a bit wider can still fence us inside our illusions. One of the passages shared in our dark tent in the middle of a city park was from Robert Bringhurst’s essay The Persistence of Poetry and the Destruction of the World:

“When I was a youngster in school, someone asked me, ‘If a tree falls in the forest with no one there to hear it, does it make a sound or not? The question is demented. If a tree falls in the forest, all the other trees are there to hear it. But if a man cuts down the forest and he cries that he has no food, no firewood, no shade, and that his mind can get no traction, who is going to hear him?” – Robert Bringhurst

This demented quality to a lot of what we tell ourselves about ‘the world’ and ‘ourselves’ is what Dark Mountain, the Festival of the Dark and others are countering. Poetics is part of what can help us overcome this strange collective lack of traction on the depths and connectedness of the world. Bringhurst also quotes Skaay, a Haida poet from America’s north west indigenous cultures, who refers to humans as xhaaydla xitiit ghidaay: “plain, ordinary surface birds.”

“Creatures with more power – killer whales, loons, grebes, sea lions, seals – know how to dive. They pierce the surface, the xhaaydla it is called in Haida.” – Robert Bringhurst

Poetics is one way for us plain, ordinary surface birds to pierce the flatness of our worldviews.

Crossing the Bridge

Art editor and writer Charlotte du Cann guided us in Crossing the Bridge, an exploration of the traditional solar and growing cycles of the year: the solstices and equinoxes, and the seasons of fertility, growth, fruitfulness and latency that they help to parcel out. These are transitions from which we are easily distanced but never truly separated. We need to know how we are creatures in and of time: a deeper one than is surfaced in our phones or clocks. Deep time is not just in the rocks and soils. It’s built into our substance: bones, tissues and cells, and in the bacterial cohabitants inside us. Everything that makes us ‘us’. It’s inside the shallow time of our daily preoccupations, even as these try to hide it from us.

Using stones that the group had brought in pockets or memories – stones from beaches, flint soils and rivers, from ancient glacier beds or the mysterious recesses of ebay – we toured the eight solar and soilar doors of the yearly cycle. We explored the associations, memories and feelings through whatever door we found ourselves placed at on our stone clock. What do the light of summer or the dark of winter do with us, within our minds and bodies?

Making the stone clock, photograph by Mark Goldthorpe — Making the stone clock
Photographer: Mark Goldthorpe © 2017

And we talked about the stones we’d brought to share. I found memories of the shingle of Orford Ness in Suffolk, and how on one scale – the beach itself – it reveals the seeming fragility of places and lives on the edge, constantly subject to the waves and currents eroding matter here, depositing it there. On another scale – the individual pebble – shingle reveals the persistence of matter as it’s shaped and smoothed and swept onwards. Beach and pebble contain deep time in cycles that “it is important for awake people to be awake” to. Sharing a pocketful of stones brought a beach of stories into the tent.

Holding the Fire

My afternoon inside the black tent closed with theatre maker and author Lucy Neal guiding us through Holding the Fire. She shared inspiration from three key character for her: women from history, personal experience and mythology.

Lucia of Syracuse, a Sicilian Christian of the Third Century, used a wooden headtorch to show her a path through the darkness as she took food and comfort to the poor. And Lucy demonstrated her own candle headdress to great effect.

Lucia of Syracuse, photographer by Mark Goldthorpe — Lucia of Syracuse
Photographer: Mark Goldthorpe © 2017

Lucy met Hildegard Kurt at a workshop in Slovenia. Hildegard used moments of quiet reflection and exchange to reveal: how we hold knowledge and creativity inside ourselves; that this can help us recognise our active part and potential within the flux of environmental crises; a shared space can enable us to explore a different possibility.

Hestia, daughter of the Titans Cronus and Rhea, was the ancient Greek Goddess of the Hearth. Her role emphasises the importance of the fire in domestic and public life; Homer’s hymn to her acknowledges that “Without you, mortals hold no banquet.”

With these examples in mind – of the hearth, shared space and light in the dark – we spoke in pairs, sharing stories of times and experiences of seeing and being seen differently and of awakeness.

Taken together, it was a lot of time to spend in the half-dark tent, but refreshing. And the ‘outside world’ was never absent. Early on, for about 30 minutes, a ladybird crawled over my left hand. It paused occasionally as it struggled to stretch the wings from under its red enamelled carapace, testing if they were ready. Eventually, it managed to unstick itself and take off. Later, speeding police sirens tore across our quiet voices inside, momentarily taking our minds back outside. Everyday life was proceeding all around us. Later, when I looked at the photos I’d taken inside the twilight, I saw how the automatic exposure had kept the camera’s aperture open long enough to paint the black fabric walls almost transparent, the unseen sun revealing a shadowy world beyond the veil. Three simple ways that the ‘outside’ – human, more-than-human, solar – had pierced the surface for the xhaaydla xitiit ghidaay.

Find out more

The Night Breathes Us In is part of the Festival of the Dark, a year-long festival in Reading, produced by Outrider Anthems. You can read Jennifer Leach’s blog leading up to The Night Breathes Us In here.

Dark Mountain Project – published Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (“Think of it as a flag raised so that we can find one another. A point of departure, rather than a party line. An invitation to a larger conversation that continues to take us down unexpected paths”) in 2009, and has produced many events and 10 volumes of fiction, poetry, non-fiction and images since then.

Nick Hunt – part of Dark Mountain’s editorial team, Nick is a writer of non-fiction and fiction (including the short story Green Bang, which was one of the commissions from TippingPoint’s Weatherfronts programme). His second book, Where the Wild Winds Are is his account of walking the invisible pathways of four of Europe’s named winds – the Helm, the Bora, the Foehn and the Mistral – to discover how they affect landscapes, peoples and cultures. You can read a series of exclusive excerpts for ClimateCultures, starting here.

Charlotte du Cann – also part of Dark Mountain’s editorial team, Charlotte writes about mythology, metaphysics and cultural change and teaches collaborative writing. She is the author of 52 Flowers That Shook My World: A Radical Return to Earth. T

Theatre maker, writer and community activist, Lucy Neal is interested in the role the arts play to nurture and provoke the changes needed to transition our society to a more ecological age. She is the author of Playing for Time: Making Art as if the World Mattered.

Mark Goldthorpe

An independent researcher, project and events manager, and writer on environmental and climate change issues - investigating, supporting and delivering cultural and creative responses.