Creative Composting: initiating Rituals for Earthly Survival

We gathered in Treadgolds on June 15^th to initiate the Rituals for Earthly Survival project to begin the process of Creative Composting our ACE-funded We Shine Portsmouth offer for 2024. Our intention was to share with the participants the vision for the project and to stage an improvised performance to introduce a creative approach to the project. There was a good turnout of local creatives, movers and shakers, and we all had plenty of opportunity to do some much-needed networking.

Originally the project was supposed to happen in 2023 but with We Shine, the umbrella festival of which this project is part of, being rescheduled we put it on hold. The project had already been initiated with an event at Portsfest in July 2023, but we wanted to restart the project with a flourish, so we scheduled this initiation event.

An improvised performance featuring a collaboration between our Butoh artist Yumino Seki, sonic artist Rusty Sheriff and video artist Kim Balouch was a definite high point of the event. For many of the audience, this may have been the first time they had seen a Butoh performance, and I know many of them found it very moving. Butoh has this raw power to generate empathy between the artist and the audience, it is quite extraordinary.

After the performance, there was an opportunity for the audience to workshop the experience and to explore together the themes of the project. We used the opportunity to share our manifesto for the project and to get a conversation going about how to achieve the project’s aims and objectives.

There was a definite buzz among the participants at the end of the day. It flet like we had started something good. At the event, we introduced the concept of Composting as a creative process to the audience. The first stage of this five-part process is to make a heap. That is what we did, we made a creative and collective heap. The next stage is to layer-in organic and non-organic materials to get the composting process going. You can follow this blog to find out how we get on with that layering-in.