Being Human Festival 2020
In November, Central staff took part in the 2020 Being Human Festival, the UK’s national festival of the humanities, led by the School of Advanced Study, University of London in partnership with the Arts & Humanities Research Council and the British Academy.
On 18 November Dr Naomi Paxton, Central’s Knowledge Exchange Fellow, held her event ‘Embrace the Base: Living legacies of Greenham Women’. The event, in collaboration with Scary Little Girls and Greenham Women Everywhere, explored what life was life at the Greenham Common Peace Camp between 1982 and 2000 utilising interactive performance, songs, games and virtual history to share the oral histories of Greenham Women.
The event was the culmination of an 18 month project to interview the women who formed the Greenham Common Peace Camp, which was established to protest nuclear weapons being placed at RAF Greenham Commn in Berkshire. Women from all over the world braved every weather and indignity to live together in order to protest peacefully and creatively about the threat to humankind from the nuclear arms race. Amongst these actions was ‘Embrace the Base’ in 1982, in which 30,000 women held hands around the edges of the common.
Although it was the largest demonstration in modern history, relatively little information was held about life on the camp, so oral histories were collected through interviews with the women themselves.
Of the event, Dr Paxton said:
“It was my fourth year of running an event for the Being Human Festival, and I was really excited to be working with Rebecca Mordan from Scary Little Girls and Greenham Women Everywhere to share some of the creative outputs from their project. We had a sneak peek of some new VR, as well as songs, interviews, new research and oral histories. Doing the event online meant that so many more people could take part!”
Then, on 21 and 22 November Central’s Dr Michelle Nicholson-Sanz, Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow, presented the online premier of an international applied arts film about young people implementing climate action. ‘Sustainhoods: Young People’s Visions for Sustainable Neighbourhoods’ was screened online over two nights, together with a Q&A with the creative team.
Dr Nicholson-Sanz said:
“I grew tired of environmental doom and feeling anxious about the climate crisis. So, I decided to create a project that gave young people from around the world a platform to propose positive implementable climate action. I gathered a team of collaborators specialised in applied theatre, sustainable transitions, public policy, and film to deliver the project. Among them, there are three alumni from Central’s MA Applied Theatre programme. We launched a competition called Young Ecovisions, asking people aged between fifteen and twenty-five years old to identify one problem in their neighbourhoods and propose one solution to address that problem. We selected four participants out of twenty entries from Africa, England, India, South America, and the Middle East. In the last two months, we have been delivering online workshops to the selected participants, empowering them to make a case for the feasibility of their visions of environmentally sustainable neighbourhoods.
We also made a film from the video recordings of the workshops, which premiered at the 2020 Being Human festival (and we will continue to show it at other festivals and events). The film’s aim is not only to document the project but also to serve an ambassadorial role, widening the platform for the ecovisions of our young co-collaborators. These are: Ann Reshma Nelson: Plastic reuse in response to waste pollution on Puthenthope beach, India. Arya B.R.: Organic seed banking to achieve local sustainable food chain in Thiruvananthapuram, India. Elisha Fern: Reclaiming a barren plot of land to grow a community garden in Waltham Cross, England. Fanny Chidoola: Tackling waste management and plastic pollution in the Bunda Forest, Malawi.”
To find out more about these and the many other events which featured as a part of this year’s Festival, please visit the Being Human Festival website. You can find out more about Central’s involvement in the 2019 Being Human Festival here or by watching the playlist of videos below, from Dr Naomi Paxton’s Different Stages event for the 2019 Being Human Festival, featuring a number of Central researchers discussing their work.
