Without fuss, there is a very public experience that always brings to life our needs for connection, and says as much about what we want from where we live as how we fit with those around us.

Expo – review and retrospective

Oct 01, 2024

Whether you’re tasked with leading or you’re just trying to survive, the world in your head and the one all around you might be a privately difficult place to be at the moment – but that’s exactly why little encounters of unexpected creativity can cut through, changing the moment you find yourself in. Outdoor art experiences, like Arts By The Sea festival, can help us feel suddenly seen.

Distance. We learned a new perspective on it four years ago together, by being so not together. I watched my friends all across events and venues spaces face the end of their living during the pandemic, in every sense. That we are four and a half years past the global outbreak of Covid 19 already is just another weird timey-wimey head trip of our impossible feeling times.

But distance and even connection sound a bit impersonal as problems go, don’t they? Sort of demotivating when you say them. Like community funding or any crime statistics.

What if we instead talked about flavours?

What flavours of life do you enjoy? Which are missing? What makes you feel like trying a few new ones? After all, when we were toddlers we navigated the world mostly by tongue.

If you’re on an emotional front line right now, I want to say this isn’t whimsical time-wasting, it’s likely even more relevant to you. Because you need this, mate. We all need this.

Is this why everyone seemed to leave the Poetry Takeaway weeping?

I wept at someone else’s poem.

The theme of this year’s Arts By The Sea festival was Taste, and it was designed to deliberately contrast some different flavours.

As a board member for the festival over the last year or so, I have nothing to do with the programming or running of it, but I do get to join other much more qualified minds than me in supporting and listening to the core team working miracles to realise it every year, Festival Director Andrea Francis, along with Leigh Hayler, Nuala Clarke and Creative Director Tor Byrnes. The simple idea of Arts By The Sea in Bournemouth town centre is to be as open an experience as possible.

There it all is in the public realm, outdoors, no ticket prices for anything, and there you are just wandering past when you can’t help stopping to wonder why some performers with different learning abilities seem to be enacting a Terry Gilliam film in front of the Wetherspoons.

That Hijinx’s piece with Ramshacklicious Truth! made me cry with laughter right there on the street but moves me close to tears again now at the thought of it is just one example. It connected me to the players, the sensory physicality of their storytelling and a different glimpse of their worldview. And it connected me to my father, who I could picture reacting exactly like me to their show. It was delightful; his heart would have been as full as mine, laughing and weeping. It had been a while since I felt memory of my Dad like that.

Most of us don’t talk about “needing art”. But then we see a burger van handing out personally written poems to a long queue of passers by and we find ourselves joining the queue and leaving half an hour later in tears feeling seen. Feeling a tiny turning point of something.

I can tell you that’s just art, in the hands of well practiced artists. Connecting you back to yourself and your aliveness in our trudging and frightening world.

That teams of poets were hand-scribing for people for two days straight in that burger van, like an emotional gig economy, only shows how practical and practiced is the business of reflecting emotional truth, even when every writer there had to combine creative flare with empathy and intuition and talent and soul and a sense of community service like priests running a soup kitchen or recovery hostel. Like overlooked legends.

The Poetry Takeaway should be prescribed on the NHS, of course. I’ve said it before about poetry evenings generally, half a dozen of which were represented at the festival in various ways. We need experiences to testify and figure out our inner life out loud. To truly live wherever we find ourselves, we need to feel more connected to ourselves there as much as with any found family. Holding safe spaces and making regular opportunities to do this is generational work that makes where we live a real place in everyone’s mind. A real home.

Only sometimes does art have to actually set fire to it.

Gateway experiences.

Thankyou, yesterday – hello, tomorrow.

I wrote it on the inside of one of the Honey Pot’s honeycomb hexagon panels. Not sure why I had the instinct to, exactly, but Arts By The Sea always heralds the proper start of autumn to me, which is my favourite time of year – the time of change. Ordinarily in the diurnal rhythm a back to school, new pencil cases and a fresh ventures mindset season, after the slow-downs of summer.

Impermanence can be joyful, not just about grief. And creative director Tor Byrnes said as much to me in a little interview recorded for Hope FM last week.

“We want to offer people lots of different tasters of things at the festival,” she said. “Some people like their art to be political, some like it to just be playful. We have a real range of experiences to compare and have a go with.”

“Like the festival is a gateway drug to art” I think I might have said. It sounds like something I might have said.

The Honey Pot was Pyrite Creative’s response to a co-commission by Shambala festival, a five meter bowl structure formed with honeycomb panels designed to exist just for the days of the event before being set alight in the night, taking people’s sweet memories with it, scribbled onto the inside of the panels. Forecast gale force winds on the Sunday forced the team to reschedule the torchlight parade and firework send-off of The Honey Pot to the Saturday night, but it still attracted a beach front full of people after a day of wonderfully playful happenings all over Bournemouth’s ornamental Lower Gardens and Pier Approach and Square. As I said last year, leadership of all possible kinds should at some point sit at the feet of those creating outdoor arts events; you might arrive a girl and leave a woman.

Staring into flames at the start of a new season is a momentarily solitary experience, even surrounded by a chattering throng. So, what about when we don’t feel included or reflected in an event? Even with the most inclusive of spirits, your own private moment at a festival might have you slipping out of shared time, everyone else seeming to be connecting with the fun, perhaps you’ve found yourself wandering around a public gathering feeling your own need for connection in an ironically stronger way. But this is as much a feeling we all understand as whooping at a giant street bubble show. It is so often the very creators of events themselves who can feel the least caught up in the experience they’re making and defending against weather and politics. The artistic instinct to have made it and become the person on the other side of making it is partly why they endure, I think.

I always feel joyful at what my friends turn our town into every year. They show it at its best, at its most possible. This year, that spirit of taste, putting together our different tastes as Tor so envisioned it, seemed even more intentional than ever, and seeing the spread of flavours from so many local artists woven into every corner of the programme was inspiring.

But if you find yourself in a public moment, that’s meant to be inclusive, trying to wrestle the sad fortune of feeling out of place in it with whatever self possession you can muster, this could be an experience trying to make your own creative expressions find a new home. It might even be the very event you don’t feel at home in this time, for it will be a different event next time, or maybe it’s about using the sting to make a whole new something.

You’ll have heard art’s call, if so, and I can only wish you all the flow in the world. Like every leader and artist and volunteer and visitor who could get involved with Arts By The Sea this year, you might be helping someone else feel seen later on. Or holding the door into a new season for them.

Or maybe just helping them taste something altogether new, just when they need it.

Explore all the work, artists and community events of Arts By The Sea right here >

Four years ago, I was commissioned by Arts By The Sea festival to devise a lockdown podcast, and it’s still one of my favourite pieces of work. One of these guests is now the creative director of the festival, another hosted the main stage this year, I walked to the launch chatting to another and all of them are still making marks and events and experiences all over the place they love to call home as artists. Between their testimonies, they paint a gently wonderful picture of Bournemouth and why they live and work here.

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