It is undoubtedly not what Jacob Rees-Mogg had in mind. For the artists and innovators behind the event formerly known as the Festival of Brexit, one suspects that’s exactly the way they like it.
Over the next seven months, the British public will be invited to take part in hundreds of free events that promise to lift spirits and expand minds in unexpected locations across the country.
There will be pop-up forests, inflatable playgrounds and space-themed sculpture trails. There will be light shows projected onto buildings and after-dark processions through our national parks. A decommissioned oil rig will be transformed into an art installation, sprouting with trees, in Weston-Super-Mare.
A good use of £120 million? Opinions are still divided, with a scathing report from the Commons digital, culture, media and sport committee sounding the alarm this week over its “vague aims” and the “irresponsible use of public money”.
Some might say that spending a lot of money on a vague concept that means different things to different people is the perfect tribute to Brexit.
Advertisement
However, Martin Green is upbeat. He is the supremo behind the opening and closing ceremonies of London 2012 Olympic Games who has stepped up to the challenge of leading Unboxed, as the festival is now known. Its mantra is “open, original, optimistic”.
“The great thing is that we’re now in a period where people can judge for themselves,” Green told The Times.
The showcase of creativity in post-Brexit Britain that was first announced by Theresa May in 2018 to “mark this moment of national renewal with a once-in-a-generation celebration” launched its first event this month, a spectacular light show projecting the 13.8 billion-year history of the universe on to Paisley Abbey, attended by about 50,000 people. The show will now go on tour to Derry-Londonderry, Caernarfon, Luton and Hull.
“We could have done a load of fireworks in London, absolutely,” Green said. “It would have been really easy to get a load of the usual suspects to do a load of big stuff in big cities. That’s exactly what we didn’t want to do.”
In other words, if you can’t try new things in a festival of creativity, when can you?
Advertisement
“We should never be in the position where we’re just xeroxing successful formats of the past. We have to try new things.”
Does it concern him that, beyond Paisley, mention of Unboxed is still being met with blank faces?
Not at all, he says. “This is a slow-burner. This is no single blockbuster. The impact will be cumulative. I’m absolutely convinced that by the time we’re done, people will be talking about that time they took their kids to watch a dinosaur walk across Paisley Abbey or visit an amazing oil rig or had their mind blown in a Dreamachine.”
The Unboxed programme features ten projects, six of which will tour the UK, plus one each for each of the four nations.
What connects them all is an invitation to the public to get out of their comfort zone and try something different — and a total transcendence of politics.
Advertisement
“If you start from a political agenda, one way or the other, then you’re not trying to bring people together,” Green said.
“One of the things that creators can do in dark times is try and bring some joy in life. They have always tried to find ways to operate above or below the current situation and show that there are other ways to live, that there might be better times ahead.”
Jude Kelly, director of the Wow Foundation, said the funding was already benefiting hundreds of organisations like hers, which reached the research and development phase but did not make the final ten. Those ideas are still happening “but will flower elsewhere”, she said.
She believes the festival will “resuscitate joy and marvel and fun”. She added: “We really need it. It will be great for mental health and it will level up people’s sense of joy. It’s a million miles from the Festival of Brexit, whatever that was.
“I can’t think it’s a waste of money because all these ideas will spawn fresh ideas, new concepts, new possibilities across the British Isles in a way that recognises that great things happen in many places.”
Advertisement
That kind of legacy may be invisible, she says, “but it will be immense. I have great faith in it actually.”
Natalie Adams, the creative producer leading PoliNations, the urban “forests” that will pop up in Birmingham and Edinburgh in September, sees the festival “as a beacon of light in the bleak cultural funding landscape”. The funding enabled her project to employ about 220 artists and a further 250 freelance workers.
“Over the last two years, we’ve seen theatre on its knees, shows cancelled. We’ve seen freelancers quietly disappearing. I know one very experienced lighting engineer who had to quit and take full time work as a delivery driver for Iceland. So this has definitely been the lifeblood of our freelancer workforce.”
It’s an opportunity “to be reclaimed”, she said.
For Liz Pugh, it’s a chance “to try things that haven’t been done before.” She is working on the Green Space, Dark Skies project that will take around two thousand people at a time into 21 places of natural beauty, at dusk. They will carry lights, specially designed for the event by Siemens, and wear earpieces, transmitting music and poetry written for the occasion. The intended effect is to turn the people into pixels that light up the mountains and beaches, using the volunteers to create “a powerful moment of digital choreography” which will be recorded on camera and turned into a film. The first test event, involving 200 people on the Welsh coast, happens this weekend. The first four events are already fully booked.
Advertisement
“Let’s be clear, the weather could be cold, wet, windy and really quite miserable,” she said. “But I hope that there is a moment when we turn the lights off, the voice in their ear or the music goes quiet and suddenly there is a sense that this is all we have. We have a sense of community and adventure and stepping out into the unknown and we have this opportunity to reset. I want people to come out of this experience and feel that they could be better guardians of the environment.”
The local communities are excited, she insists. “People say to me, nothing like that ever happens here!”
No festival could ever connect a nation in the way some are expecting, said Lord Vaizey of Didcot, the former culture minister.
“It’s almost impossible to pull off a big national event where the whole country rises up and says isn’t this amazing. These things can only ever be a series of random events,” he said.
“There will always be the cynics, the ones who believe money for hospital art should be spent on defibrillators, but the question shouldn’t be either or. People are being quite Eeyorish about it, but I think a celebration of Britain’s creativity is a great thing.”
Rhona Ferrier was certainly among the sceptics at first. As a biomedical scientist who worked in the NHS until her retirement, “I know how far £120 million can go.”
As president of the Paisley Philharmonic Choir, she had also seen the choir membership drop from 90 people to 35 during the pandemic, with many older members staying at home. They are used to singing classical operas and West Side Story medleys, so when they were approached to sing music composed by Nitin Sawhney as part of the live performance at Paisley Abbey they hesitated. “It seemed pretty wacky.”
“But it was a great experience, really fabulous. It helped pull the choir together again and lifted the spirits.”
They have since received new offers of collaboration.
“It was so good for us. We all had our set ways of doing things, but this got us thinking, let’s just try it and see what happens. It helped us broaden our horizons.”
She is now a convert. “Get out of your comfort zone. Do something that’s completely different. It has definitely given us a new lease of life.”
