Friday 27 June 2014

theo brown and the folklore of dartmoor


I'm putting on this Folklore Tapes event in London for my friend Ian Humberstone. It is pretty much like a real event that someone from society might go to. Details are as follows:

Theo Brown and the Folklore of Dartmoor explores the hidden tales of seven Dartmoor villages through experiments in sound and vision. It also celebrates the life of the late folklorist and artist Theo Brown, whose publications, papers and woodcuts have lain dormant in the archives at Exeter University since her death in 1993. Using Brown’s unpublished research, Ian Humberstone and David Chatton Barker have crafted an audio-visual retelling of Dartmoor folklore grounded in the moor’s topography, history and folk-culture.

The project was realised as a box-set of seven-inch records, artwork, essays and manipulated 8mm films (shot on-location on Dartmoor) in spring 2014, and the performance will translate these elements into a live setting. The show will include information on Theo Brown, readings from the tales and a screening of the film accompanied by a live soundtrack. There will also be an opportunity to ask questions and share stories after the event.

Expect an evening of spectral pigs, skeletal horses, salted cadavers, hungry rivers and malevolent sprites.

“But if you decide in middle-life to leave the city and go to live alone at the heart of the moor — because you love it and cannot resist its spell — you soon find that in all those years you have learned little about the essential moor. What has been happening is that she has learned the essentials about you, and has fixed her grappling-irons upon you!”

- Anonymous cutting found in Theo Brown Archive papers.

https://soundcloud.com/folklore-tapes

Weds 30th July | St Mary’s Old Church | Stoke Newington Church Street | 7.30pm


£8 on door | £6 adv. (tickets: http://politerecords.bandcamp.com/merch/theo-brown-and-the-folklore-of-dartmoor-st-marys-old-church-weds-30th-july)

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