To My Children…

To my children, and for those yet to come, I leave you this.

Collaborative Arts Project at Northern School of Contemporary Dance May 2016

Idea devised and produced by: Charlotte Arnold, Ella Ballard, Ripp Greatbatch, Inari Hulkkonen and Emilie Karlsen

A dystopian environment, where the planet has been destroyed by over consumption and waste. Five inhabitants within their confinement strive to recreate the nature they once knew from the memories inside their heads.

A durational installation created entirely from recycled materials. Created in collaboration with Space Maker Leeds, SCRAP, Meanwood Recycling Centre and poets Marianne Tuckman and Robert Smith.

There is not even – Marianne Tuckman

In a handful of dust cluster

powder pieces, pieces

of powder crowded and

crumbling

nothing’s shadow

(There is not even silence in the mountains)

Fear is in this fist,

eclipsed, knuckled, curved

round while ashy

finger’s stony grumble

locks lips, sticks tongue desperately

into all this

plastic

all this plastic,

weeps and settles

puddled, attempting savage stillness,

actually seeming silly

and sad and rustling

grain by grain

(Not in these mountains)

escaping the clenched hand

softening slowly, grudging a

besito from the

bottle caps, bags and fags

ends, foot

balls and tupperware boxes that

litter solid

and reliably

left,

a handful of flesh

falling to meet its

circumstanced lover.

only lonely

bone is left to cry about the past

In the Garden of My Dreams – Robert Smith

In the garden of my dreams
I eat of summer fruit
And the warm lake water steams
To quench the thirsty root
As the leaves crunch underfoot.

When the sun rises on high
It finds no song too late
To the shelter of the sky
The choruses elate
For no such words have weight

In the garden of my dreams
An endless show of bloom
The divinity of theme
Through nature’s every room
Where all things reign supreme

In the world that we will make
A wasteland changed to spring
Where the beautiful partake
And no known pains can sting
To the land where the dreamers wake.

In the garden of our dreams
We eat of endless fruit
Where the warm lake water steams
Our dreams have taken root.
How the leaves crunch underfoot…