This year's DM festival

[Dougald]

I posted this a few days ago on the Dark Mountain blog - but I thought I'd repost it here. Please fire away with ideas for this year's festival - especially venue suggestions, as we're hoping to get a date and place pinned down in the next week or so.

Thanks!

Dougald

So, 2011 is underway – and already it’s proving a full and exciting time in our corners of the world.

The next issue of Dark Mountain is coming together – although our editorial deliberations earlier this month were interrupted by the arrival of Paul’s new son! If you sent us something for consideration, thanks again for your patience. You will hear from us very soon, now.

Meanwhile, it’s time to talk about this year’s Dark Mountain festival.

Uncivilisation 2010 was intense, exhausting, inspiring, frustrating and uplifting. We know how much it meant to many of you – and it’s been obvious, more or less ever since, that you wouldn’t let us get away with not doing another festival in 2011. (Some people couldn’t wait! Like Dougie Strang, who organised a four-day Scottish DM mini-festival in October.)

We’ve also given a lot of thought to the things that could be done differently, second time around.

For one thing, we want to move away from a format which involves an audience in rows of seats and speakers sitting under spotlights. The conversations which take place around the edges of events like this are, in many ways, the heart of the matter, and we need more space for them to happen in. We also want to avoid the separation between venue and campsite which somewhat broke up the flow of the weekend. Of course, we do want to bring together another amazing mixture of performers and speakers to match those who brought such spirit and stimulation to last year’s event, although we won’t try to cram quite so much into every minute of the programme this time. And we’re keen to make more room for getting dirt under our fingernails, with practical activities to get involved in, bridging between the craft of stories and songs and the crafts of the hands.

Another thing – anyone who’s read Paul’s books, or gone to the pub with either of us, will know that the range of beers available at last year’s bar wouldn’t have been our first choice! Locally-sourced food and drink will be essential to the event this time around.

So – those are some of our hopes! To make them real, we’re going to need your help. Last year, the whole festival was organised by four of us, supported over the weekend itself by the fantastic venue staff and local volunteers. This year, we want to widen things out – and to open up the process to your ideas and suggestions.

There are plenty of people who would be far more competent than Paul or me at bringing an event like this to fruition – and we’ve already had several offers from those who are willing and able to take responsibility for parts of Uncivilisation 2011. But we’re still looking for a few more of you who would like to join the core gang to help us make this happen and give it the kind of attention to detail which will make it special.

Whether your skills and passion are for programming bands, organising finances, coordinating volunteers or arranging logistics, we want to talk to you! Please send us an email at [e-mail], telling us what part of the process you’re interested in helping with.

Finally, there’s one big question which we need to answer very soon – where should Unciv 2011 happen? Our first festival would never have come about without Michael Hughes’s invitation to Llangollen – and we couldn’t be more grateful for that spark, and for all the incredible hard work which he and his team put in. Somewhat miraculously, he’s already signed up to be part of the team for year two. We’re really proud of last year’s event, but we think we can improve upon it, and one way of doing that will be to find a venue with less of a tension between the space and the conversations we’re there to be part of. In short, somewhere more Uncivilised.

This year, then, we’re looking for a rural, outdoor venue with capacity for at least 300 people and (hopefully) some experience of hosting this scale of event. Its environmental impact should be as low as possible. If you have information about a possible site – or suggestions for which part of the country it should be in – please post them in the comments here, or email us.

We also need to firm up a date for the festival soon. We’re thinking of holding it later in the summer, this year – probably in August.

They say your second marathon is more terrifying than your first, because you know just what you’re letting yourself in for. That’s pretty much how we feel right now. But we also know how much last year’s festival meant to those who took part – not to mention how many people have told us they wished they had been there. So we feel honour-bound to create something which builds on that and deepens everything that made it special.

[Dougald]

Hi David & Keith -

Interesting! I'm a bit cautious about "clarifying" like this - as one of the writers of the original manifesto, I certainly don't believe there is a "clear" definition of what "Uncivilisation" is about. I'm interested in it as a suggestive term, in the space which it opens up, the different interpretations and directions in which people take it.

So, while I certainly don't think Dark Mountain or Uncivilisation are defined by being "about Collapse", it's evidently one of the themes that weaves in and out of the conversation. (Think of the piece I did with Vinay Gupta in DM Issue 1.)

I'm in a rush now - so sorry if I've picked up the wrong end of the stick from either of your posts, but I just wanted to reassert the (uncivilised) value of not being too clear!

Dougald

David Rose said:

Many thanks Keith for that clarification.! I had always assumed that Unciv was about collapse.  

The locations that come to mind in the UK for  "imagining a world without civilisation / where it had never happened" would have to be remote in some way: eg: islands off Scotland, Ireland ?  

Keith Farnish said:

For clarification, David, Uncivilisation isn't about collapse, but imagining a world without civilisation / where it had never happened. There is a place for alternative societies here, but although it may be trite to say that urban areas are a defining feature of civilisation and therefore are not actually that relevant, it's true to a greater extent. Vis a vis, it's bloody hard to imagine uncivilised life in the context of a highly civilised location. That's what made even Llangollen a distracting environment: there was too much civilisation for clarity of thought and expression.

K.

[Keith Farnish]

Hi Dougald - thanks for unclarifying that :-)

To be honest, like you I don't actually *know* what Uncivilisation is, that's only the best interpretation I can give. Though I'm a bit surprised you aren't that clear either - and given that, how do you choose what's to go in the book or who to choose in the lineup?

K.

[David Rose]

On reflection, the suggestion of a combined urban/rural location for the festival still makes sense. If we are going to un-civilise (or imagine a life as if civilization had never existed) most of us will do this in the ruins of our present civilization ... in the collapsing structures of suburban sprawl/consumer society and not on a remote island off Scotland?

[Dougald]

Hi Keith -

That's a fair question. I'd say we feel our way forward, one step at a time, with an openness to being surprised. I guess this relates to my "Remember the Future?" talk - and, in particular, the emphasis on "walking backwards" in improvisation and in the Epimethean attitude which I talk about there. You don't have to be clear or have hard boundaries in order to know what feels right.

I really think one of the greatest challenges in stepping away from the damaged and damaging assumptions bound up with our "civilised" sense of ourselves is to let go of the urge to define things in black-and-white binary terms. (Ran Prieur says something similar in his 'How to Drop Out' essay, I think, and Anthony McCann also talks about the subtleties of this in ways I find helpful.)

D.

[Dougald]

David -

I think there's probably value in both?

David Abram writes about the Asian sorcerors he lived with and how they tend to live on the edge or outside of the village. If we can get away from the New Age kitsch which has gathered around the notion of "shamanism", there's something in the sense that there is a shamanic boundary-crossing role, trafficking between the human and the non-human worlds. (Equally, trafficking between past, present and future.)

As part of this, time spent well outside of the civilised world and its illusions (of human centrality, etc) is a vital source to draw on. But, equally, envisioning possible futures within the urban, suburban or ex-urban contexts in which many of us find ourselves can also have a part to play.

I'm not trying to sit on the fence here! I just don't see that these questions need to be framed in either/or terms. (Obviously we'll only have one venue for this year's festival - but even then, I'm hoping we'll seed more self-organised mini-festivals, like the ones in London and at Laurieston Hall last year.)

D.

[Paul Kingsnorth]

Ha ha - the old question of what we're actually about! We ought to write a paragraph to keep everyone quiet.

 

Oh, hang on - we already write a manifesto :-)

 

It's clear enough where we started, and what arguments we were making. Dark Mountain as a movement has shifted some way from our original, admittedly vague, conception of it, which in my mind was a writers' movement. I think we're both very happy about this. 

 

I would define Unciv, at the present time, in these terms:

 

1. A recognition that our way of life - industrial privilege in the liberal democracies - is coming to an end. You could call this 'collapse', though that word suggests a sudden event rather than a process which is already underway, which looks to me like the reality at this time.

 

2. A recognition that this way of life was always unreal - cut off from nature, from the rhythms of the world outside the oil-fuelled bubble. A recognition also that it was brief.

 

3. A recognition that many of the stories on which this civilisation has been based are false - human centrality, our separation from 'nature' the inevitability of 'progress' etc.

 

4. A drive to see things differently - to create new stories, or rediscover old ones, that allow us to live through this change, and ground ourselves again. This drive may come through writing, through thinking, through practical creativity, making things and the like. But it is focused on getting real about who we are and what we are facing.

 

That's my take anyway. but one of the great things about DM is how fluid it is. :-)

 

[Bembo Davies]

here is my explorative push for DM2:

The Dark Mountain Dances

The Society for Promotion of Human Rites has a few accumulated tricks, but the essence of Human Rites is participation.  We would therefore always prefer to start from scratch.  Our project for this year's festival is to compose an 'ancient tradition' of the Dark Mount itself .  Somewhere within the festival framework, we wish to gather fellow innovative traditionalists to design one or more essential rituals of the Dark Mountain Communities that reflects and contains our deepest needs.  Shall we balance words and actions, actions and song, being and community?  Perhaps, be it in dance or understandings, we shall distill a gift from the past to the future to better feed the core of the human meeting.

That's today's bit... but the extended scheme is brewing...

[Martin Porter]

Or put another way, I see Dark Mountain as what we used to believe in when we lived in protest camps.

[Keith Farnish]

I liked the bit where you mentioned "brewing". It's got to fit in somewhere :-)

Bembo Davies said:

here is my explorative push for DM2:

The Dark Mountain Dances

The Society for Promotion of Human Rites has a few accumulated tricks, but the essence of Human Rites is participation.  We would therefore always prefer to start from scratch.  Our project for this year's festival is to compose an 'ancient tradition' of the Dark Mount itself .  Somewhere within the festival framework, we wish to gather fellow innovative traditionalists to design one or more essential rituals of the Dark Mountain Communities that reflects and contains our deepest needs.  Shall we balance words and actions, actions and song, being and community?  Perhaps, be it in dance or understandings, we shall distill a gift from the past to the future to better feed the core of the human meeting.

That's today's bit... but the extended scheme is brewing...

[Bembo Davies]

I said distill too.  i wonder if I'm on to something.

Keith Farnish said:

I liked the bit where you mentioned "brewing". It's got to fit in somewhere :-)

Bembo Davies said:

here is my explorative push for DM2:

The Dark Mountain Dances

The Society for Promotion of Human Rites has a few accumulated tricks, but the essence of Human Rites is participation.  We would therefore always prefer to start from scratch.  Our project for this year's festival is to compose an 'ancient tradition' of the Dark Mount itself .  Somewhere within the festival framework, we wish to gather fellow innovative traditionalists to design one or more essential rituals of the Dark Mountain Communities that reflects and contains our deepest needs.  Shall we balance words and actions, actions and song, being and community?  Perhaps, be it in dance or understandings, we shall distill a gift from the past to the future to better feed the core of the human meeting.

That's today's bit... but the extended scheme is brewing...

[Paul Kingsnorth]

Martin - Yes, though you'll notice I didn't mention D-locks or sugar in petrol tanks or how to dig a tunnel with only a broken spade. This is because I am getting old and that stuff is now best left to the young 'uns ;-)

[Chris Dumont]

As a suggestion for a participatory activity, how about a "deep ecology workshop" (council of nature).  With mask making etc.  It could be good and I think would fit in with the ethos.