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For The Birds

An immersive night-time journey into a wild avian landscape

For the Birds returns to Durham Lumiere 2019

Back by popular demand, For the Birds returns to the beautiful Botanic Gardens at Durham University as part of Durham Lumiere’s 10th anniversary year. Running from 14 to 17 November 2019 — come and see over 20 captivating installations in celebration of our feathered friends. We are a ‘Festival Flashback’ no less !

Milton Keynes International Festival 2018

For the Birds will be staged at the Milton Keynes International Festival 2018 20th-28 July 2019, Linford Manor Park from 9.15pm.

We have an amazing and beautiful location for the show this year through ancient historical parkland and wild dark woods. One of the many hidden gems of the landscape of Milton Keynes a true garden city. Milton Keynes boasts over 5000 acres of parkland, rivers, lakes and woodland including over 22 million trees.

 

For the Birds is a group show with artists Jony Easterby, Kathy HindeMark AndersonUlf Pedersen and Pippa Taylor.

Brighton Festival 2017

It is rare you see work that changes the way you live, I mean, I see things that amaze and impress and inspire, but this changed the way I looked at things noticed the detail, the simple beauty all around me. Thank you for gifting us that!

Beth Burgess Brighton Festival Director

For the Birds took flight to the Brighton Festival 2017 and invited a visiting public on a meditative and immersive journey through a secret South Downs woodland location. A self-guided journey through a wild landscape after the onset of darkness, whilst transformed by a series of up to thirty bespoke light and sound installations produced by some of the most dynamic sound artists currently working in the UK.

For the Birds was staged over four weeks with 17 shows attended by up to 1300 people each night. The show broke the box office record at the Brighton Festival attracting over 15,000 people to marvel at the beauties and poignancy of the installations, immersed in the forest at night

Originally staged at RSPB Ynys-hir reserve in Wales as part of an NT Wales /ACW development project, For the Birds also went on to become the audience highlight of the New Zealand Festival 2016, where it attracted more than 13,000 people over the festival.

As transient and light as the birds themselves, the installations have been created using a mixture of low tech, low power equipment suitable for remote places, using low energy lighting, small scale multi-speaker systems, low volt micro processors, electro-acoustic instruments, performances, projections and kinetic sculptures the artists celebrate the birds in song, movement and light.

For The Birds is an original and richly enjoyable experience and reminded this writer that such free-form art can be glorious. This kind of beauty is not generated in golf clubs by Tories, by those who think material wealth is the game of life. It blossoms on the fringes, away from the endless pursuit of money, created by the kind of people Daily Mailers might regard as excess to purpose. It is a small oasis of strange, contemplative, other-worldly loveliness in a land increasingly ruled by banal norms.’

   The Arts Desk

I cannot think of another art experience that has bettered it”

Jay Griffiths, author

Mind-blowingly brilliant. An unforgettably beautiful and resonant experience”

George Monbiot, Guardian journalist

Beautiful, unexpected and alive!”

RSPB

Everyone should experience this woodland walk, which stimulates the mind and senses equally, before the festival is over.

Brighton Argus