Live stream: mobile_wanstead_park_micro_ecologies.ogg
Wanstead Flats, London, E7 0EF, UK
Detta Danford
Latitude: +51.5582°
Longitude: +0.0281°
Wanstead Flats is a large area of open grassland in the south of Epping forest in North East London. It is a popular place for picnics, playing sports and enjoying nature. It is also a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and home to Jubilee Pond. In the last year or so I've been developing an improvisation approach with two collaborators, Grant Smith and Natasha Zielazinski whereby we listen acutely and attentively to the sonic environment of the location we are in and through tuning into that environment we begin to respond in small 'micro' ways through attuned instrumental and object/activity based interventions. This stream will be a further attempt at this kind of sonic 'micro-ecology'.
My dad grew up in Manor Park down the road from Wanstead in the late 1950s. It was a rough and also very free childhood. He has many memories of playing in the Flats where he said he would often see huge rats running along ditches and along the edges of the hedgerows. Having grown up in Bristol in the West of England and now living in East London with my young family, I'm interested in family stories like these and how they connect you to a space and place. I visit Wanstead fairly regularly with my family, and I often think about how I am now walking and running in the place where my dad used to play. Wanstead Flats and the adjacent park is a wild place on the edge of our part of London. I love being there and feeling the sense of space, openness and possibility which is so rare to come by in the city. The area is full of birds and wildlife. Also urban life surrounds it. The space is not designed or tended very much. It has a rough wildness to it. Grasses, scrubland, clumps of trees, ponds, streams and pathways formed by many feet walking over time.
I'm hoping to interact and join this landscape of sound and activity through sound making on my instrument, the shakuhachi. The shakuhachi is an end blown bamboo flute from Japan. Breath and air are integral to how it produces sound and the sound it creates. This stream will also consider air and breath as materials in the environment which are shared and can be paid attention to and considered.