Works and Pieces

A solo performance talk by Sue Palmer

When I was a kid I lived on a farm not far from Longleat Safari park in Somerset. And whenever a calf died, my Dad would put it in the back of the Landrover and drive it over to Longleat to feed to the lions and tigers.

An attempt to cope with the possible extinction of the tiger.
Put a tiger in your tank, in your potency pill.
Adopt one, get a certificate.
I love the tiger and the tiger would still eat me, yes.
And it would eat David Attenborough too.

This devised performance, with emphasis on text and visual image, looks closely at our relations with tigers, the wild, our desire to rescue and ‘adopt’, our anthropomorphic corporate behaviour, our love. Thoughtfulness, humour and desire collaborate to imagine the tiger more alive than extinct, more fur-nomenal than digital. Visit www.biggerhouse.co.uk 

Helen Chadwick presents The Bright Field

A concert of songs including settings of texts by poets from England, Wales, Scotland, Chile and Finland including Kathleen Raine, Pablo Neruda, R.S.Thomas, Novalis, the Kalevala and including a new composition (world premiere) specially composed for Desire Lines. Performed by the Helen Chadwick Group.

Propellor 

Over the course of 2 days, members from Propeller performance company will take up residence inside an office space in order to gather and present new research materials. Symposium participants are invited to sign up for an open conversation with the company: this will be a chance to meet and talk about themes connected (but not limited to) the numerous ways in which ecological issues have a bearing on our most basic everyday lives. The conversation will also include some practical tasks and exercises based on perception of the landscape and scale. Elements from the conversations will then become part of an accumulative performance-archive.

Exhibition curated by Alan Boldon (Dartington College of Arts) 

This exhibition will set up a dialogue between five artists, who will take turns to make an intervention into the gallery space. In each case, the previous artist’s work will be available as material for the following intervention; it can be removed, manipulated, destroyed or added to. It will be unclear to the viewer who had the idea, whose work is whose - and does it really matter? 

Grizzly Man 

Director Werner Herzog / Documentary / USA 2005 / Colour / 1hr 43m

For 13 years Timothy Treadwell spent the summer camping with grizzlies in the Alaska but was regarded by park rangers as a dangerous amateur who understood little about the true nature of the beasts he swore to protect. With tragic inevitability, he and his girlfriend were killed in a bear attack. Director Werner Herzog pieces together the remarkable footage Treadwell left behind into a superb portrait of a fractured obsessive living literally on the edge.

The New World 

Director Terrence Malick / Cast Colin Farrell, Q’Orianka Kilcher / USA 2005 / Colour / 2hr 30m

Malik breathes life into the oft-told story of Pocahontas and John Smith, dispensing with traditional narrative to explore the clash between nature and civilisation, the way the earth destroys and regenerates, the wonders of discovery and the mysterious bonds that tie us to people and to places. Ultimately the dialogue becomes superfluous and we are drawn along by what is essentially a contemplative poem on the state of the earth.