The wind was adding a fresh feel to the summer late afternoon, as Tom (my PhD student and Myth and Voice student intern) and I went past the gates. We were at Cheney school at East Oxford for our second open air nature festival with Myth and Voice. It’s becoming a habit I am looking forward to. Not yet sure what Lorna has in mind and yet I am secretly making plans for next time…

We were shown our spot and we started setting up. The wind picked up further, and I was glad I had just brought more sticky tape. Students were setting up stalls around us. This was the biggest ever Nature community festival the Rumble Museum at Cheney school has organised to date: Nature Late. We were part of the Ecology Festival, after a plenary talk on the wonders of insects and before Moth Night. Stalls were set up in many hubs around the school. The community responded in numbers; I loved the buzz and would have also loved to wander around the whole site and talk to people, if I was not a stall holder!

Our Myth and Voice participation was arranged in three parts: street theatre, light craft and collective creative writing. A brief pop-up show lured with dance and movement our spectators into the imaginary grove of Goddess Demeter; it invited them to join those reading, chatting, resting under the thick shade of Demeter’s sacred grove. The light craft stall offered the opportunity for those passing to make a tree offering: a hope, a wish, a fear, a thought, a memory they would like to let the tree (the ancient one and/or the one in the thicket right next to them) know. The creative writing stall waited for those intrigued, in their own pace, to join in and help steer an evolving collective poem: ‘Under the Green Wood Tree’.

Street Theatre

A small group of Y10  students and drama enthusiasts, who had performed last year as well, were keen to resume their pop up theatre act and I was very pleased they wanted to relive that experience. The story arc of King Erisychthon and Goddess Demeter’s beloved tree has many layers and for the Ecology Festival of this year (and the more modest Nature trail that Lorna and the Rumble museum organised last year) we branched out with a celebration of a group of ancient tree ‘huggers’, inviting our audience to experience a brief but powerful segment of the myth that often gets overshadowed by the conflict and destruction in its heart.

Pop up theatre is always a ‘delight’ of improvisation and unpredictability and that evening even more so than any other time as the place was teeming with people and activity. I admired our student actors: as well as acting, they had their own stalls and so much to organise. At any given time we had Kirsty, or Izzy, or Martha busy somewhere else. And when we had them all together, our patiently waiting gathered audience seemed to have moved on to other stalls!

And yet, we were undeterred and, in the end, resourcefully, we moved the acting to a bigger hub with a captive audience. What’s more, because we did not have an actual tree accessible in that area, Lorna joined this impromptu performance acting out the ancient beloved tree. I was round the corner attending the stalls, but I would have loved to see students and their teacher enmeshed together in this make belief world, beyond the boundaries of their everyday relationship. I love these unpredictable strokes and the way they produce unplanned fun and, I hope, memorable ties!

Tree offerings

Before and after the act out, people mingled round the tree offerings stall and chatted, whilst thinking about their gift. There was palpable curiosity for this unusual invitation to ‘talk to a tree’. A man with his son spoke to us about coins he has seen being pinned on trees as offerings – we all agreed this was maybe a little hurtful for the tree and so he drew a coin to wish for wealth. We also had messages about love, flowers, the hamadryads (ancient female spirits that lived in or near trees), climate change, world peace, and more.

One of our early offerings was a sketch of animal life around the tree: a badger, a fox, an owl were all huddling round the tree. The child who drew the offering wanted it to be a representation of an animal sanctuary under the protection of the tall oak. Interestingly, the accompanying dad saw the gathering as a step before a ‘face-off’ between the creatures. It seemed to me they were replaying, in their way, the ancient story: safety and joy closely followed/threatened by destruction.

A lady meticulously drew on the tag her own school tree of many years ago, with red marks on the branches up to where they were allowed to climb. Our ancient snippet of human togetherness with the sacred trees must have triggered memories of a happy symbiosis with nature in her old school environment. She said she felt happy to have been jolted back to some jolly, carefree moments of her early youth – and how pleasing for us to hear such a reaction!

Several children stopped by with their mums and/or dads. One of them approached the stall both intrigued and unsure. He merrily sat down to make his gift – and wanted to chat. His mum arrived and they looked at each other quizzically for a moment. She encouraged him to give the tall tree under whose shade we were standing a hug: ‘was the tree whispering anything to him?’ she asked. In the end he came up with a number of thoughtful questions he himself wanted to ask the tree – inviting the tree to share its knowledge and some of its feelings; a lovely gesture which has given me inspiration to amend some of the workshop materials! He also promised to come back and check the renewed activities for himself, if we ran the stalls again in school or in the community nearby, as we hope.

Collective poetry

The collective poem stall continues to preoccupy and fascinate me. It is a precious and fragile thing. Our visitors want to be a part, but often they are not sure they have words. They seem to experience this as a call to a magic place that they can see and yet wonder whether they can reach. I can sense excitement and hesitation – exactly as I also feel when attempting creative writing. And the Ecology Festival attendees were no different – enticed and tentative. I overheard Tom getting involved in conversations about writer’s block and vocab lists. I would like to find a bit of time to chat with him about ways we can support further this ‘impromptu leap to the magic world of writing’ maybe blending the ancient and the modern more imaginatively together. After all, as well as a Myth and Voice intern, Tom is also working on a PhD by creative practice and he knows a thing or two about coming to writing and its challenges.

As in previous times, it is the collective element in this creative opportunity though that mattered the most. Once lines started appearing on the long scroll of paper, more lines became forthcoming – words brought more words; people felt comfortable being part of an ongoing ‘conversation’ and the collective poem embarked on its unpredictable, wandering life. I was really excited when a few of the co-authors started talking about last year’s poem. They noticed how the story kept changing perspectives and remembered that last year it took a dark turn. So they made the decision to keep it positive this year. It was a bit as if the spectre of last year’s poem was somehow lurking over this year’s occasion, with two fleeting communities briefly brushing each other across time, joined by the memory of something unfinished and ongoing; the kind of a temporary get together that lingers in the memory and resists closure that Myth and Voice aspires to support…