Celtic Women Festival 2012

I think I have been a little tardy in posting about my commitment to co-ordinate a sound sculpture at the close of CW12 at 6.45pm this coming Monday. I will also be doing a poem or two between music sets.

Here is the interview Cheryl and I did about it:
http://celticwomenfest.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/cw12-at-radio-tircoed.html

I have had the most life changing weekend of my life so far. I am cautious about my enthusiasm and optimism because I have tried so many things and been so disappointed so many times but I do believe that it is possible that I might have found a healing that will work for me at last. I have spent the weekend learning how to Throat Sing with Dr Vladislav Matrenitsky, http://www.un-hun.com/un-hun_en.html , a Ukrainian medical doctor who learned from a Tuvan Shaman in Siberia. I keep getting told there are no coincidences but I don't know what other word to use. Four years ago while I was visiting Mum in hospital every day, I saw a concert advertised near St Andrews. It was a three hour drive but I knew it was important to give myself a treat. The singer who I went to see, had come to one of my mask workshops many years ago and I had always wanted to see her live - she sang celtic ballads and Indian music from her dual heritage and she was brilliant. However that night she shared the bill with Hun Hur Tu, a band of Tuvan throat singers. I sat on the floor at the front of a barn by the sea and balled my eyes out silently as their music washed through me and I saw the land and spirits where the music came from. I am not sure if anyone saw or was embarrassed or discomforted by my tears - I felt quite private - aware of a full auditorium behind me but feeling completely alone with the music and my grieving heart.

Then last week I saw a flyer about a workshop teaching Tuvan throat singing and I woke up far earlier than usual on Saturday, in time to make it for a 10am start. Anyone who knows mw knows that this is a miracle in itself. Vladislav is a methodical teacher with a warm heart. He was completely confident that we could all do everything he asked of us and showed no surprise at all as each one of us managed each of the three types of singing, producing sounds that I imagine is something like the sounds angels make.

I still cannot quite believe that my voice, which can barely hold a tune, can make the sound of angels singing in the cavities of my head and body and that these sounds can dissolve chronic pain that I have had for years. The owner of the house we worked in kindly gave me huge clumps of Mombrisia, a flower that my mother loved, which needed to be planted the next morning. I was up at the crack of dawn, wide awake, but needing a bath to ease aching and tense muscles, and after some singing was miraculously able to start planting. However, I was too enthusiastic, as is my wont, and got very hot and sore and unable to move long before all the planting was done. I was so upset that I swore and beat myself up and envisioned a load of dead plants lying in my garden. My guest heard me and offered to help after her yoga and I suddenly realised I could sit down and throat sing. Within a few minutes I was able to finish planting in the back of my cottage and after another rest and throat singing, my guest and I planted the rest and got some serious weeding done into the bargain. Later that morning, a local crow called to me and I replied in throat growls with overtones.

Potential

Summer Solstice, 

the standing still of the sun
after expansion
before contraction
uncomfortable uncertainty
emptiness
chaos
potential

anything can happen
in the heat of the longest day
in my dance with our fiery star

nothing could happen
my dreams,
plans,
creativity,
I
would not exist
without the sun

illusions of solitary stardom dissolve

I console myself with my solar soul mate

anything
more than I could ever dream on my own
is possible

Life is getting more and more surreal :) I am now watching this clip of a talk that I was in the front row of the audience for. I was still shell shocked from seeing myself on the big screen so I did not contribute from the floor as it were but I wish there had been more time to hear more from the contributers...

And here is the link to the bbciplayer where you can watch the film again:http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/p00kqz5p/

Britain In A Day - an aftermath

SLOW DANCE by Bríd Wyldearth 2006 slow down, slow down, slow down, and listen, really listen to the land lie down on her soft belly and feel her breathe she is a wild old woman who will not be rushed and if we can slow down and listen long enough we might also gain the courage not to rush the courage to dance with her our hearts beating time with the timeless heart of this wise old woman who will not be rushed we might hear the secrets that she holds the thousand daily miracles that she unfolds in every cell of her magnificent body slow down, slow down, slow down, and listen, really listen to the land In my effort to upload my footage to youtube in order to take part in Britain In a Day, I did find I had uploaded this, my first ever clip. Youtube had told me I had been unsuccessful and so I eventually submitted my footage by dvds and snail mail. However, now that I have watched Britain In A Day for a second time, this time on the small screen for which it was originally intended, and because at least three of my friends have said that they wished the editor and director had included more of me, I am attempting to embed the video in this blog along with the version of my poem Slow Dance that I use in the clip by way of subtitles. This is how I started Saturday 12 November 2011. I am faerie sound dreaming, channeling the voices and song of our pre historic faerie ancestors. My dear friend and musician Elf pointed this out to me last night after she had watched the film. She insists that I am not, as I have been told, singing out of tune. She says I am singing in quarter or inter tones. Sounds and intervals that sound foreign to ears more used to western and classical music. Ever since, in 1999, the original words to Slow Dance were given to me, I have been slowing down and listening to the land and her sacred places and now I am singing with her too. In my next blog I will show some of the journey we made via sacred places on our way to watch the premier of Britain In A Day in London. - see previous post. Meanwhile, I can understand why the director did not use this clip in his film, which was for the most part fast paced and city based. He did however use the clip where I said that I knew that I, like every being on the planet, am unique. I feel that that statement encompassed a through theme of the film and I also think that the film asks us to listen to Britain in all her multi faceted eccentricity. Being part of the film has helped me to accept my eccentric Britishness which is a healing effect that I never expected when I first sat down at my webcam at midnight on November 12 2011

At midnight on Saturday November 12 2011, I turned on my webcam and recorded myself speaking for the first time. I then went to bed and got up to film myself next day. I recorded my thoughts and feelings and spiritual practice of sound dreaming at Pentre Ifan.

I ended my days filming saying that I felt it might have been one of the happiest of my life. What was best about it and most fulfilling was that on watching the footage, I had not cringed once. I thought I looked and sounded good which was very unusual for me.

I then spent a very frustrating few months trying to upload the footage first to youtube, then a nasty iphoto library eating Filezilla. Britain In A Day team must have really wanted my footage because they kept trying to get it uploaded too. Finally last week I heard that they had used some of my footage and I made a pilgrimage with my friend Mandi and canine companion, Sputnik to the NFT to watch the first public screening of the film. Mandi, myself and my cousins went to The Blue Room for drinks before hand and I was immediately recognised. A number of the production team came up to me to introduce themselves and I tried not to let this go to my head and assume it meant there would be lots of my footage in the film. After all I knew I was only one of three hundred contributors chosen from thousands.

We sat front row centre and listened to an introduction which emphasised that this was our film no matter how small a contribution of footage had been used. The film was beautiful and quirky and very British. There was a lot of footage of the St Paul's protest which I was surprised and pleased about. If I hadn't known that the director and editor were men, the juxtaposition of a human mother breast feeding with a milking parlour would have told me. There was some very brave footage of self injury scars and a young man visiting his mother after a long break. There was touching footage of weddings, proposals, and a meditating man interrupted by his children. None of my morning footage appeared and I was almost lulled into watching a film in a cinema that had nothing to do with me, when I was physically shocked by seeing my face filling the huge screen. They used two clips of me sound dreaming and two spoken sentences, one of which was : "I am aware that I am wyrd" That got a laugh, presumably interpreting wyrd as weird. I cringed and regressed instantly to the self conscious teenager who everyone laughed at and bullied for being different. Then there was a tiny clip of Pentre Ifan with the dancing faerie light of the setting sun. It was over in a matter of seconds. None of my musings about spirituality or quotes from my poem Slow Dance were used.

I could not enjoy the rest of the film much and I was furious that for all the big wigs saying it was our film, the credits for the big wigs were big and prominent and first and the contributors flashed past in a text box without time to even read all our names. In the Q and A that followed, by far the most interesting contributions were from a few contributors given a meagre fifteen minutes at the end.

The first person who came up to me outside was another contributor who seemed genuinely to have enjoyed my contribution and my mood lifted somewhat. My cousin's neighbours said "Oh she was good. She got a good laugh." The further I got from that embarrassing moment of seeing myself magnified in all my weirdness, the more the film has grown on me. It is an unusual and beautiful picture of the place I have made my home. Next morning, I realised that they had managed to edit my hour long footage into a few seconds of it's essence. I am wyrd and weird. I sound dream. This is probably the most original and unique thing about me. I drum and sing in communion with the land and sacred places. The sound is not necessarily beautiful or tuneful, not by conventional western standards, but in a picture of Britain the director made room for unconventional and completely unique music.

It was as I listened to the dawn chorus under Uffington white horse, that I remembered the last time I captured dancing light on film. It was by the sea near where I live. I was lead to understand at that time, that the dancing light was faeries. Now I know that I can never prove this and that there is probably a perfectly logical scientific explanation but I choose to believe that the faeries and angels of Carn Ingli were dancing with me that afternoon in November at Pentre Ifan and that they are to be seen by those who choose to see them in the dancing light at that sacred ancestral pile of stones in a film about Britain that thousands of people will watch. Alternatively, I will now forever be known as "that weird woman on Britain In A Day who is away with the faeries".