- Venue
- Rowen
- Location
- Wales
Locator is a project by dancers and performers set up in 1995 as “an active and ongoing exploration of ecology and landscape through a process of moving, walking and wandering, getting lost, becoming located, drawing, fasting and performance-making”
This 20th edition brings the project back to Wales to the uplands of Rowen in the Conwy valley. The event today came out of an intensive residency hosted in 2007 by dawns i bawb and Migrations with Simon Whitehead.
As director Karine Decorne says “In these tough economic times, I believe the arts can play a very important role in inspiring, inventing, suggesting alternative avenues and possibilities and also in bringing us back to the fundamental of things. Perhaps it is time to reconnect with what makes us human and experience again a sense of belonging: to a place, to a community, to a culture. We are privileged to live in inspirational surroundings that we so often take for granted. There is so much to be gained from a respectful engagement with our environment.”
We arrived in the village of Rowen not really sure what to expect. We found our way to the village hall and signed in before taking a minibus up to the start of the walk. There were two groups of 22 about half an hour apart. The day was glorious, perhaps the warmest day in the mountains since July. The minibus wound it’s way up the increasingly narrow lanes, higher and higher, having to stop every now and then to let walkers squeeze along the side, bagfulls a blackberries clutched to their bosoms.
We arrived at the top of the track with little awareness of where we were. This is part of the excitement of this kind of event, you are in someone elses hands, our guides led us over a stile and onto a patch of field with incredible views down towards the river, Llandudno and the sea beyond. The wind was cool inspite of the sun, above us, on a craggy outcrop, a murmer of crows surf the upcurrent, their melancholy conversation circling. Slowly I became aware of a boulder man. His slow movement, crablike as he emerges from the ancient dry stone wall. This is what it is like to live in these remote places. You become a part of the landscape, you do not merely live here you are here, you are part of the landscape, integral. The slow, precise movements of boulder man fascinate and hypnotic as he leaves the wall and moves into the sun before returning to the earth and once more we can no longer see him, we just sit, aware of the presence of other being,s in this now long deserted community.
We follow the guides around to the circular enclosed churchyard, here an inn and houses would have been, children would have played, stories would have been swapped, memories would have been made, all are now reclaimed by the mountain, who holds there secrets softly but firmly. A woman slowly describes the jagged top of the wall that embraces the church. She is barefoot and her movement defies the sharpness of her route.
We pass beneath her through the lynchgate, her movements responding to the movements of the wind as a loving couple of garments wave in a berryladen hawthorn, bent like an aged being.
This was my favourite part of the experience. Behind us the clouds were racing in, threatening to engulf us in what could be days of damp, driving mist, or would the sun manage to keep the depression at bay. The woman continues along the wall and is joined in a while by a man. There is a beautiful tension explored and we witness their connectivity before they are torn apart, divided by the wall, a plaintive howl developing into a beautiful love song that is carried on the wind, fading, further and further until it returns.
We walk steeply uphill through spongy moss, spiky gorse, threatening cloud and a boulder ridden landscape. We are joined by a hovering falcon, and sheep. People are out of breath as we reach the top and take in the arc of the river, and the mountains of the carneddau.
We scramble down to another spot and witness a figure as red as the berries moving in the space between mountain and wall.
Up higher still we walk, coming eventually to a place where a man is standing on the precipice, the sun is behind him, he is a silouette on our horizon. He disappears and two legs appear from under a boulder below, he is like water as he passes over and through the progression of stone blocks down to our level. He changes as he moves closer, we are not sure is this the passing of time, is this the same man?
We continue to another spot where two figures are part of the wall. They are hard to see against the sun, but they move over and around one another tight into the wall.
We come to a gate. It has been set up with found objects from the mountain, hung on strings, and has four windmills on top, a reminder of the seaside not far away, and yet a million miles. Microphones are attached to the gate and as we arrive a gust of wind sets the piece in motion. Visually I find this piece relatively weak, however the sound is an aural version of much of the performance we have seen. It becomes mesmeric and contemplative and although I feel a sense of disappointment that our experience is over I am also glad to have had the journey. We all seem lighter as we make our way steeply down back to the valley below. People strike up conversations as we make our way back through the village and to the hall for a Welsh tea.
The day has been blessed by the most wonderful weather, it could have been so different in the relentless rain that we have had for much of the summer.
I really enjoyed the experience, thankyou to all the artists and performers. I would love to be involved in this kind of collaboration.