In 2023, YLC created The Stage of Possibility – a vibrant, democratic space designed, built and curated to showcase stories and voices from the National Forest at Timber Festival. In this episode they share their experiences of the National Forest, through the songs they made and performed.
Youth Landscapers Collective is a youth arts organisation based in the National Forest area of England. We’re a collective of young people, artists and technicians who collaborate with our local community to explore this landscape’s industrial past and forest future.
In this episode we want to give you a sense of how we work together. YLC member Kris Kirkwood has built a sound narrative of our 2024 song-making project, using audio recordings from our sessions – from the seeds of our ideas through to performance. Here’s a bit of context about the project, to help set the scene:
In 2023, YLC created The Stage of Possibility – a vibrant, democratic space designed, built and curated by YLC to showcase stories and voices from the National Forest at Timber Festival. The project connected us back to the creative and resourceful communities that grew from the former coalpits and pipe works of this area.
In 2024 we wanted to strengthen that connection and also perform together on the stage too! We created a set of locally inspired songs, in a project we called: WAYANNAEYINANYONNIT (A Big Story).
Working with artists Rebecca Lee and Jesscia Harby and our community we sought out the hidden stories of our local area, finding them in discussions with former mining engineer, pipe worker, and co-founder of Moira Replan Graham Knight, research visits to Moira Furnace Museum and The Magic Attic Community Archive, and sharing our own personal experiences.
From Graham we learned stories of injustices small and large in the mine – the disappearance of cakes sent down for overtime workers and the tragic death of a young co-worker in an accident. From Clyde at Magic Attic we learnt local dialect and the definition and pronunciation of our title: WAYANNAEYINANYONNIT.
More than anything we responded with heart to what it must have felt like to take part in each of these stories and what it’s like to be living here today, many of our houses built over the unfilled mining tunnels.
The songs we made and performed share our experience of the National Forest, as the past, present and future overlap, canaries sing, children climb on the lime kilns, new words are shouted, and we make sure we’re all alright.