Unkindest Cut: an exploration of the mind's inner workings - at 11am, 1pm and 3pm
Saturday 6th October 2018 11:00 AM
Location/Venue: The Ham Sidmouth EX10 8XR
Outside it seems to be a shipping container much like any other. Inside though, it’s a fortress of ideas – intimate and intense, alluring but alarming, contained yet spilling over.
Unkindest Cut confines and entwines dance, performance, text, film and an intricate light installation to explore how our own minds cope – and sometimes don’t – with modern life, confronting audiences at close quarters with complex issues around young people and mental health.
Unkindest Cut explores the mind's workings, through expressive dance. Picture: Kathy Hinde
Students take part in creative workshops before the show, to explore emotions and record words and phrases for the soundtrack
Experiences and emotions of local young people will be woven into the soundtrack of an expressive dance performance, to be staged during the Sidmouth Science Festival.
While much of the festival is all about the outside world, the show Unkindest Cut focuses on the human mind and explores how it copes, or sometimes fails to cope, with modern life.
The show is touring science festivals around the UK, starting with Sidmouth. Before each festival, its producers invite young people from the area to take part in creative workshops, exploring how to express emotions through movement, using a traditional Indian dance technique called Bharata Natyam.
Artistic director and choreographer Subathra Subramaniam said:
“I teach some Bharata Natyam gestures and basic movements. We then have a discussion about what it is like to be a young person in the world today. We pick out words and phrases, and think about how we could express them through creative movement, also using music, rhythm and words if they would like to.”
Recordings of some of those words and phrases are then digitally altered and used as part of the soundtrack of the dance performance, played through special speakers giving the effect of words whispered in the ear.
As well as providing dramatic sound effects for the dance performances, different for each festival, the workshops aim to give young people the freedom to explore their feelings, including negative or frightening ones, in a creative and safe environment. Students from Sidmouth College were among those invited to take part in the sessions leading up to the science festival performances, which take place on Thursday, October 4 until Sunday 7th.
Unkindest Cut aims to raise awareness of some of the issues troubling young people. But fittingly, the performances themselves are also part of a scientific project. Subathra Subramaniam believes that dance can help people understand scientific concepts. The reactions of audiences, particularly their emotional responses to the show, is being researched by a senior fellow in science communication from the University of the West of England, who will publish her paper on it next year.
The Science Festival preview started this weekend - and takes off in earnest on Friday 5th October:
Sidmouth Science Festival: Thursday 27 September to Sunday 14 October 2018 inclusive
The 2018 Festival will run from Thursday 27 September to Sunday 14 October 2018 with over 100 events including walks, talks, hands-on activities and exhibitions.
For an At-A-Glance downloadable version of the programme follow the link in this sentence.
Our 2017 photo albums are available for you to view by clicking on the link and any videos will be available on our Youtube Channel.
See our Festival Reports page for an overview of the 2017 Science Festival, plus event reports and videos on what happened.
Our Festivals depend on the generosity of donors and on grants. We make every effort not to charge for events so that they are accessible to all. If you wish to donate please click on our Virgin Money Giving link. If you enjoy and support the Festival you can also become a Friend of the Sidmouth Science Festival. Follow the link to find out more.
The Festival theme will continue as “Science in our Lives” to reflect how important the STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Maths and Engineering) are to everything we do nowadays. We aim to promote curiosity in the young, to inspire them to consider a STEM career in a rapidly changing employment market, in addition to encouraging self-confessed nonscientists to engage with science in fun ways, including art, drama and music and hands-on activities. We also provide talks by experts in their fields for those looking for something more technically challenging.
Sidmouth Science Festival- October 5th - 14th 2018
The seventh Sidmouth Science Festival runs from Friday 4th to Sunday 14th October 2018 with the theme of “Science in our Lives”.
The events during the week will cater for all ages and abilities with projects and demonstrations taking place in schools and colleges and throughout the town. Serious science talks and fun hands-on events take place on Super Science Saturday13th and at the Family Fun Day on Sunday 14th at the Norman Lockyer Observatory.
Ada Lovelace Day on Tuesday 9th October, an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, will feature eminent female scientists.
Various community groups will contribute events during the week, too.
In 2017 guest speakers included Dame Julia Slingo FRS and Prof Julian Dowdeswell from the Scott Polar Research Institute, as well as TV personalities Adam Hart Davis and Dallas Campbell. There was a dedicated Earth Science Hall, visit to a brewery and bat identification. The Family Fun Day included two model jet car races as well as many other activities for young people. Two weather balloons were launched and tracked with data being relayed back to the Observatory. The interactive Science trail along the seafront proved popular with families, too.
How much of our lives do we spend indoors? 80 per cent? 90? More? Sure, there are farmers and gardeners and road builders but for most of us, our lives are lived inside buildings; the homes where we sleep but also schools, offices, airports and the rest. So the question of whether architecture can affect our lives, our health, our wellbeing, is idiotic. The question is not if, but how much it affects us. It’s a subject London’s Wellcome Collection is looking at in its new exhibition Living with Buildings. It’s also one which is increasingly preoccupying not only architects but managers and doctors alongside hygge quacks and lifestyle gurus.
From the Victorian slums via the modernist health centres of the inter-war years to new ideas about what constitutes wellbeing, the Wellcome show spans a transformation in ideas, science and the popular imagination; it leavens architecture and urbanism with artworks from Andreas Gursky to Rachel Whiteread.
It shows how we have historically navigated successive waves of hysteria about the health of our cities, the condition of our homes, the future of buildings. From panics about plagues and fire through the moral repulsion against the Victorian slums, the history of architecture can seem like a series of reactions to health crises embodied in buildings. The most recent of these, the awful black tombstone of Grenfell Tower, is still fomenting reactions. Yet Grenfell Tower was itself a manifestation of another reaction, the modernist tower set in green space, a reaction to the dark slums of Victorian London.
We believe that we are increasingly aware of a healthy environment, of the problems of pollution, obesity, global warming, loneliness, the destruction of species and the emergence of superbugs. We are aware of the need for exercise, sunlight, vitamins, contact with nature and social bonds. Even governments are shifting from their two-dimensional measuring of national life from GDP to wellbeing, the notoriously vague “happiness index”. Health has been commodified, commercialised, personalised and politicised.
But are our buildings responding to this new consciousness? The Ancient Greeks were well in advance of where are now. Epidaurus was a total landscape of wellbeing, built around a health centre dating from the third or fourth century BC. It embraced temples, clinics, houses for sleeping and dream cures as well as an athletics stadium and, of course, a theatre for cultural, spiritual and physical catharsis. The views out to sea and the awe-inspiring landscape were as much a part of the healing process as were the surgeries.
The Roman architect Vitruvius wrote of the importance of site, light, the winds and the waters; a house was not an object to be imposed on the landscape but a dwelling working with it. From Hindu traditions of vastu shastra and Chinese feng shui, every civilisation treasured foundational texts on how to build for health and wealth, some of which was superstitious nonsense but much of which was common sense that has been forgotten.
With the medicalisation of the pivotal moments of life — birth, old age and death, the idea of an architecture for health was extracted from the mainstream of construction and ghettoised into the modern hospital, a sterile environment which accommodates an ever larger portion of our lives. But has this ghettoisation of the architecture of health led to a wholesale forgetting of the importance of wellbeing in the architecture of the everyday?
The modern movement was a kind of revival of those classical ideals of a healthy city. A visceral reaction to the slums, the confinement, the miasma and the treeless darkness of the dense city centre, the early modernists created an architecture of clinical precision, light and air, in which the interior merged into an exterior framed by trees and greenery. Health was at the heart of the project. A curious parallel evolved between the architecture of the clinic and the domestic, a hygiene fetishism which led to some of the key monuments of early modernism adopting the white-tiled, white enamel, chrome and glass aesthetic of the hospital. Or, perhaps more precisely, the sanatorium.
Josef Hoffmann may be best known for his delicate, decorative designs for the Wiener Werkstätte but his first major architectural work was the Purkersdorf Sanatorium, built in 1904-05 to soothe the jangling nerves of the Viennese intelligentsia who feared the edge of the precipice. Patients included Mahler, Schnitzler, Schoenberg and Hofmannsthal. Otto Wagner’s incredible chapel for the Hospital am Steinhof just outside the city, meanwhile, managed to combine obsessive, minimalist hygiene with a fantastical domed and subtly-decorated building.
Alvar Aalto’s 1933 Paimio Sanatorium in Finland (featuring in the Wellcome show and currently for sale) developed the aesthetic, the white cruiser in the woods, and kitted it out with fittings and furniture that remain unsurpassed, including a bent plywood chair, easy to wipe down and wonderfully comfortable, a metaphor for the bigger idea. In the UK it was Berthold Lubetkin’s Finsbury Health Centre that achieved something similar, not in the woods but in the city slums, a white-tiled, elevated spaceship of a structure that embodied an idea of freely accessible healthcare.
Those ideas also seeped into the domestic. Even in its name, Richard Neutra’s “Lovell Health House” (1929) embodies those contemporary concerns but this was an émigré Austrian architect exporting Viennese neuroses to the world’s new cultural and quack capital, Los Angeles. This remarkable house was dedicated to the health benefits of West Coast living with the pool and panoramic terraces, the warm ocean air an antidote to central Europe’s history-burdened, smoke-clogged atmosphere. It had terraces for sunbathing and outdoor sleeping, an outdoor gym and rooms dedicated to diet and therapies. Contemporary to this was Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre, one of Modernism’s pivotal spaces, stuffed into a Parisian courtyard. Built for a gynaecologist, it is a truly odd mix of consulting room and private apartment in which the technics of obstetrics, the machines and chairs, the shiny tools, speculums and surgical lights begin to dictate an interior language in which architecture’s relation to the (female) body is made eerily manifest.
Both these houses illustrate the blurring between health, hearth and home. What has happened in recent years is, perhaps, a reversal of this fetishisation of the language of hygiene and surgical precision. The High Tech pioneered by Chareau has become the language of the non-space, the anonymous airport or data centre and both domestic and healthcare architecture have reacted to that anonymity through a reassertion of the language of home.
The clearest illustration of the phenomenon are Maggie’s Centres, which are neither quite medical nor domestic but a hybrid space of wellbeing framed by ambitious architecture. Instigated by Charles and Maggie Jencks and exhibited at the Wellcome Collection, the centres are focused around a kitchen table and are intended to facilitate conversation over a mug of tea. Yet their architecture is often radical, surprising and theatrical, challenging those with cancer and their families to think about architecture and engage with it rather than providing a neutral or clinical space.
Architects from Frank Gehry to Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas have designed sometimes strange, sometimes brilliant, sometimes soothing spaces that attempt to redefine what an architecture addressing health might be. They use everything from light and art to gardens and library nooks to experiment with some of the most difficult physical and psychological states humans encounter.
You might also look to De Vylder Vinck Taillieu’s Caritas psychiatric centre in Melle near Ghent. Here the architects revivified a ruined building and inhabited it with smaller structures — greenhouses, seating areas, courtyards, a protected but outdoor space like an adventure playground for the mind. It is complex, intriguing and full of traces of history and ideas about architecture. A place for the mind as well as the body.
Understanding of health has progressed into an appreciation of “wellbeing”. In architecture this transition could not be more pronounced; it is the move away from the functionalist fetishisation of an aesthetic of hygiene — effectively the medicalisation of the domestic, to a contemporary situation in which it is the overtly domestic that is celebrated as an architecture of comfort and conviviality. Interiors now emulate cosy boutique hotels, huddling around wood-burning stoves. Contemporary furniture is a throwback to a familiar mid-century modernity, as if we were scared of envisaging a future too different from our present. At the same time, the distinction between spaces is collapsing. Workplaces become something between industrial lifestyle lofts and kindergartens while homes are being condensed and becoming more like hotels. Architects are attempting to deinstitutionalise space just as, a century ago, they were moving towards institutionalising it.
The understanding of what makes a healthy architecture has changed radically. What used to be about hygiene and health is now more about psychological wellbeing. But it is also difficult to measure and is driven very much by fashion. Apart from a few vague studies about the health benefits of being able to see a tree from your window, there is little research or solid information of what exactly makes a healthy home and, until there is, we have to use our intuition and common sense. We are steadily and surely ruining our planet so what we have left are the interiors to which we can retreat, which now need to be about so much more than mere shelter.
The Chief Executive presented this report which set out the business case for setting up a Local Housing Company to be wholly owned by the Council with the purpose, amongst others, of providing housing in the general market (so outside of the Housing Revenue Account) and to generate a profit to provide income to the Council’s general fund.
Cabinet members backed the creation of East Devon Homes last week and officers will now prepare an initial business plan, identify the first projects and report back to the council.
If approved, the company will be financed by EDDC and any profits would come back to the authority. It could sell land to the company at market value – or potentially gift it – and then borrow money to finance projects.
If local authorities can outbid almost all other participants in the commercial property market, it is because they have access to cheap and flexible funding from the Public Works Loan Board, an arm of the Treasury that has been helping finance capital spending by local government since 1793.
Desperate councils risk being plunged into an Icelandic-style financial crisis after investing £1.5bn in the commercial property market Bankruptcy risk as ‘desperate’ councils play the property market | Society | The Guardian “Local authorities have a long and inglorious history of gambling in the financial and property markets,” the former business secretary Vince Cable told The Guardian. For example, in the 1980s Hammersmith & Fulham, a local authority in west London, was one of several councils that landed in financial chaos after getting involved in complex bets on interest rates. “In some cases they may succeed,” reckons Cable, “but there is a very high risk of bankrupting their local authorities” if the property market turns and the investments turn sour. That, in turn, could threaten a serious systemic risk to the property market and UK financial stability.
How best to describe Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree? The custodians of the 3,500-acre Knepp Estate in West Sussex, home to the UK’s largest lowland rewilding project, are certainly landowners — although they consider themselves primarily environmentalists — but they are also educators, entrepreneurs and, perhaps increasingly, impresarios.
In 2000, the couple took the radical decision to give up on Knepp’s arable and dairy farm, which they had tried and failed for years to keep profitable, to pursue an experimental process of habitat creation. They laid off 11 staff, removed 70 miles of internal fences and introduced English Longhorn cattle, Tamworth pigs, Exmoor ponies and fallow and red deer to roam freely. Cultivation of the land was stopped over a period of six years and the transformation was dramatic — the landscape changed from monotonous fields to grass plains, copses and scrubland, harbouring a rich diversity of plant, insect and bird life — and public interest bloomed.
While Tree prepares me a glass of homemade elderflower cordial in the kitchen at Knepp Castle she lists the stream of farmers, environmentalists, government advisers and NGOs that have been knocking at their door this summer. Then there are the tourists booking into Knepp’s glamping site and others who go on “safari” tours of the estate. “We’ve sold over £100,000 worth of safaris,” Burrell explains later, “and the season’s not even over.”
There are good reasons for this summer’s crowd. As the UK hurtles towards Brexit, the environment secretary Michael Gove and his policymakers are racing to replace the EU’s common agricultural policy (CAP), while farmers and landowners — aware that support payments are likely to be reduced — are looking at alternative uses for farmland. There is also the recent publication of Tree’s book, Wilding: The return of nature to a British farm. But perhaps, above all, amid the seemingly relentless bad news Knepp offers something positive: the flourishing of imperilled species such as turtle doves, nightingales and purple emperor butterflies.
From the kitchen, where an open doorway frames views towards an enormous lake, Tree leads the way through a dining room and into the central hallway of the house. “This is where it gets a bit like the Pitt Rivers,” she says, pointing to displays of arrows, each with different heads — for catching fish, birds, pigs, humans — that the couple collected in Papua New Guinea, where they were married in 1993. We duck into the library, a relaxed space decorated with 20th-century art, and meet Burrell in his office, where huge maps of the estate are arranged across dusty-green walls.
Knepp Castle, designed by John Nash in the early 19th century, has been in Burrell’s family for more than 200 years and he took over the estate in 1987. Selling was not an option, but the couple’s decision to cease farming coincided with the English publication of Grazing Ecology and Forest History by the Dutch ecologist Frans Vera, in which he argues that Europe was not historically a closed-canopy forest but a dynamic landscape shaped by roaming megafauna including oryx and wild boar. It inspired them to recreate the grazing effects of these animals — which in turn encourage plant and insect life — by releasing semi-wild animals. “If you release free-roaming animals into an area, give them enough space and freedom on a big enough scale, you can generate habitat that will be of benefit — rocket fuel, in fact — to biodiversity,” Tree explains.
Although lynx and wolves have been discussed as possible introductions elsewhere in the UK, no predators have been brought into Knepp. The populations of the new introductions are managed artificially; ponies are neutered and pigs, cattle and deer are slaughtered to produce 75 tonnes of meat (at a value of £120,000) a year.
I ask if the experiment has caused the unintended decline of any species. “We don’t think we’ve lost anything,” Burrell replies. “We may have lost biomass of stuff, so there may not be as many bluebells but we haven’t lost them, [they’re] now in the fields, they’re in the scrubland, they’re in the hedges.”
Knepp has always received the CAP Basic Payment, but the rewilding project was given a kick-start with a Countryside Stewardship Scheme grant and more latterly the whole estate has benefited from CAP Higher Level Stewardship funding. So why haven’t more landowners followed their example?
“I think what we’ve both learnt is the level of knowledge actually out there, both in rural and urban populations, is so low. So, when you’re describing loose ideas to people, how it’s going to happen or what the changes will mean, they have no ability to visualise any of it,” Burrell says. “I think we were also surprised by people’s reluctance to consider change when it seemed to us there was this huge opportunity,” Tree adds. “We just assumed that our neighbours would be interested. We had visions initially of a 10,000-acre block that would be naturally bordered by rivers and roads, and that our neighbours would join in.”
Although certain farming practices have been destructive to wildlife, Burrell says many farmers are too distracted by the challenge of making a living to consider alternatives. “When I was farming, all you ever thought about was your margin per hectare, and nature was irrelevant; it was just trying to struggle through, trying to keep the show on the road.” Yet there is no question that Knepp is unusually well-suited to this sort of project. Unlike many farms that are sprawling or fragmented, the estate is a block of land, and its location just 40 miles from central London means there is a strong rental market for converted farm buildings, providing another income stream.
To see the rewilding in action, we jump into a 1960s Austrian troop carrier and roar off across the old park. This was the first section of Knepp to be rewilded (the arable ground was reseeded with grasses before the animals were introduced) and we pass herds of red and fallow deer grazing among ancient oaks.
Burrell continues to the largest and wildest part of the estate, known as the Southern Block, which was simply left to revert after the final harvests. This area is now a patchwork of sallow (hybridised willow) groves, thorny scrub (protecting oak and other saplings), water meadows, ephemeral ponds, woodland and floodplain.
We disembark to inspect a dry patch of earth under a thicket where pigs have nested, and then watch as Longhorns emerge from the undergrowth and amble around a pond. “You’re playing with all these different species of animals and the effects of their nutrient transference,” Burrell explains, “the way they carry seeds within their guts, on their fur, on their body. Seed transference for cattle is 230 different plants, whereas a roe deer is 23 . . . ” He is interrupted by the piercing “peep-peep” of a kingfisher as it darts across the water.
Fourteen years ago, the dense vegetation around us was a wheat field. Today, there is a rich carpet of grasses under our feet and speckled wood butterflies drift between the sallow leaves that provide the perfect habit for purple emperor butterflies. “We had no idea we would become the greatest site for purple emperor butterflies in the country,” Burrell says. “The record last year was 143, and that was the biggest [number] anyone has ever recorded in a day in Britain. This year it was 388.”
The regeneration that started with the soil has worked upwards: as well as 19 species of earthworm, Knepp now attracts all five species of UK owls, 13 out of 18 species of UK bats and growing (and breeding) populations of migratory nightingales and turtle doves. These are uplifting figures but, according to Burrell and Tree, it is the speed of transformation that offers real hope for the future of the British countryside.
“I’m not saying this is going to be a solution to a lot of situations but it’s an option that has bubbled to the surface,” Burrell says. “It now holds a position of strength and interest, because you can have a very positive story after 10, 20 years, for nature — and that was believed to be impossible.”
‘Wilding: The return of nature to a British farm’ by Isabella Tree, Picador, £20
The latest newsletter from the NEF is dominated by their ideas on company ownership, which has been very much part of the political agenda this week:
Inclusive ownership funds will build better businesses
Labour has announced plans for worker ownership based on our proposals, writes Andrew Pendleton. Will other parties rise to the challenge? Read more
Workers with a stake in their companies The Labour Party has announced proposals for new ownership funds, which we first proposed in our Cooperatives Unleashed report. Our contributions towards this policy were covered in New Statesman and Left Foot Forward.
“If you give workers a greater stake, it makes for better business” Our Chief Exec, Miatta Fahnbulleh, appeared on Sky News to discuss inclusive ownership funds.
