Gather in the National Forest for a unique festival
When: 6th – 8th July 2018
Where: The National Forest, Rawdon Road, Moira, Swadlincote, Derbyshire DE12 6DQ
£: Tickets cost £10 – £40 for a day ticket and £45 – £130 for a weekend ticket. Children under three years go free
What is it?
Timber, a new festival weaving together the forest with arts and ideas, will take place this weekend in the heart of the National Forest in Derbyshire. Visitors to the festival will be able to experience the transformative impact of forests with artists, musicians, scientists and thinkers.
Timber aims to encourage us to explore what woodlands can mean to us and to re-imagine our relationship with our environment.
Music will play an important part in the festival, promising an adventure into sound that will be rooted in the forest across three bespoke wooden stages (including the enchanting Eyrie Stage, raised between the trees) and around the campfire.
This Is The Kit, one of the festival headliners
It will offer visitors the chance to see live music in an intimate woodland setting. Headliners will include Jane Weaver, This Is The Kit and Hope & Social. Festival-goers will also be able to take part in singing the Dawn Chorus, a Secret Midnight Gig and the Great Timber Sound Quiz.
Other arts events will include the opportunity to take a journey into the heart of the forest at dusk in Tree and Wood, an interactive performance exploring our relationship to trees and forests, with a team of international artists, musicians, performers and foresters.
Explore all the sides of the moon with Luke Jerram’s Museum of the Moon, a seven metre moon sculpture featuring detailed NASA imagery of the lunar surface. Discover what it’s like to be an animal in the forest, through the eyes of four woodland species, in Marshmallow Laser Feast’s immersive virtual reality experience In The Eyes of the Animal.
Experience Comedy In The Dark with Leicester Comedy Festival, take part in a spoken word workshop with Polarbear, one of the most versatile spoken word artists in Britain, and watch forest films when the night falls, including Moonrise Kingdom, Into the Woods and Hunt for the Wilderpeople.
Witness spectacular performance Cosmocular from Leicester’s Cosmopolitan Arts, taking festival-goers on a journey of life, through the perspective of a person of mixed heritage living in the UK. The story features contemporary dance, and traditional and world instruments, with digital sound, spoken word, rap and vocals.
Join composer and sound-artist Jason Singh on a listening walk, exploring voice and technology to mimic nature and birdsong. Gather sounds and create instruments from ‘found’ nature such as stones, twigs, leaves and soil.
Enjoy outdoor performances at Timber Festival (Image: Teneight)
Witness an enthralling fire-garden, created especially for Timber Festival by leading artists, sculptors, designers and technicians pa-BOOM; and take part in a special Masked Ball.
Enjoy Seek, Find, Speak: A Conjuring Told In Gold; the outdoor theatre companion to the enchanting, illustrated book of acrostic poems, The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris. Experience this forest theatre trail, both self-guided and led by a charm of Goldfinch performers, with 3D installations of Jackie Morris’s golden illustrations and Macfarlane’s words.
Expect spells wrapped in gold lettering around trees, animals to be discovered in the woodland and lines of spells perched on branches like starlings. Together with sound recordings of the spell poems from some of Britain’s famous voices, including athletes, naturalists, actors, poets, musicians and scientists, The Lost Words will come alive in the forest.
Look out for aerial acrobatics in the trees, bringing ancient tales to life from Whispering Woods, and magical Dream Antelopes who will be roaming the site. Take part in The Coppice Maze, by helping to create a beautiful collaborative maze, then get yourself lost in it.
Wild play rules at Hammer & Chisel, a unique woodland playground. Create your own world using pallets and tyres, ladders and ropes, help put together a myriad of walkways, dens and secret spaces. Take part in tree climbing, slacklining, leaf art and mask making workshops.
There’ll be huge adventures for smaller festival-goers at The Bewonderment Machine, a magical cycle-powered ride-on carousel, and a miniature theatrical flight of the imagination from A Bird In The Hand Theatre.
Luke Jerram’s Museum of the Moon (Photo: @edsimmons_ @visitgreenwich)
Stuart Maconie, broadcaster, writer and president of the Ramblers, will deliver the inaugural keynote session at Timber. Having walked the woods and byways of this country for decades Stuart will muse on the changing nature of the landscape in a post-industrial Britain and the great pull of the natural world.
Take a walk in the forest with poet and BBC Radio 4 presenter Paul Farley as he explores how 19th century transcendentalist authors and social reformers Thoreau and Emerson revolutionised our relationship with woodlands and can help us to ‘live deliberately’ today. Alternatively, take a quiet Digital Bird Spotting stroll with eminent nature publisher Myles Archibald and put the new Collins Bird Guide App to the test.
Join evening Charcoal Sessions where writers, artists, academics, politicians and scientists, along with those working in woodlands, will come together around the charcoal burner to contemplate new ways of living and working in forests. Or take part in guided runs through the forest at dusk.
Finally, relax and soak in the landscape all around with a book from the woodland library installation, from the eco-spa, and from tree tents suspended up high between the boughs.
More info: timberfestival.org.uk