8th May 2025 was marked in the UK as the 80th Anniversary of VE Day–“Victory in Europe”. The plan was to meet that evening at the Soundart Radio studio, and make some noise on behalf of the cause of peace everywhere. As we gathered to cook and eat together beforehand, we accidentally set off the fire alarms and disrupted the peace for everyone around. This set the tone for the improvisation that followed. Featuring Hessel Veldman, Nicole van der Veen, Sam Richards, Phil Harrison, Kerry Priest, Shelly and Otto Love, Lucinda Guy, Chris Booth and probably some others. Produced by Hessel Veldman for Soundart Radio.

Light Hesitates is a text-voice piece and a contemplation on hesitation. [glitch, interval, this way-that way dubiousness, slight delay, sharp intake, split second gap] Hesitancy being present in the body and perhaps a useful tactic to disrupt linear progression and certainty, to notice other ways of seeing. Ideas of partial visibility and translucency (mist, tracing paper, dusk) and of navigation in relation to light (moth, dung beetle, ear) crept into the work from the periphery. The texts stem from a summer artist residency at Hospitalfields Arbroath Scotland in 2023.

As choreographer I was experimenting with writing that emerged from an immediacy of experience and of moving. I am curious how language inhabits and how the body inhabits language, how words resonate from the body and fold back into the body. How certain words organised in score-like structures become dance partners. In writing for radio, as a new way of making a choreographic work, I was working perhaps with how words are held in a voice as an extension of the body, how to bring lightness and spatiality to words spoken aloud and play with what surfaces between writing, reading, speaking, listening.

Written and performed by Katrina Brown
Additional voices Myrte Blanken and Juno Brown
Produced by Lucinda Guy for Soundart Radio

katrinabrown.net
soundartradio.org.uk



Researchers and artists from the Schumacher College Poetics of Imagination group at Dartington Hall, sing us into the forest to meet with ancestors, beasts, to move from individual identity to a collective, merged self. There we confront life, death and rebirth, through multi-ingual mixed modalities.

The Poetics of Imagination course explores orality, story and culture, examining how we have conjured stories from the earliest times to the present day.
The course is centred around oral telling but opens to a broader spectrum of the arts, examining the work of ancient to contemporary storytellers, writers and artists. Students explore the idea that when humans imagine, they tend to imagine in story. What is trying to be told right now?

Created by Cosima von Seefried, Mimi Brown, Annabelle Simmons, Grace Wilshaw Chanter, M, Will Wilson, Isa Schoier, Flo Barshall, Sophie Craven, Lee Morell, Dan Hamner.
Produced by Alice Armstrong and Lucinda Guy at Soundart Radio, South Devon, UK. With thanks to Emma Bush.

“Enoughness” is made up of conversations from “Mug Stories”, an interview project produced in collaboration with the residents of Braziers Park, an intentional community in South Oxfordshire, UK.  The interviews touch on a number of themes, around sharing,  object agency and affect. Starting a conversation about mugs, it turns out, can be a very effective way to talk about our interdependence and the ways in which it is mediated by objects. Through these stories, we learn how these everyday objects offer a locus of communal activity, and a metaphor for many other forms of intimacy and instability. Creating the program has allowed me to explore some of the intangible aspects of the mug as object and collection; personal pre-reflexive actions and perceptions, the affective dimensions associated with sharing and attachment; the agential qualities of objects within a shared domestic setting, and the questions of how relationships are understood, communicated and enacted through metaphor.

Dr Hannah Drayson is an artist-researcher and DJ. Her artist portfolio is here and you can read more about her research here.

The Test Bed was a performance created in response to a critical investigation into Dartington Hall, its history, pedagogical legacy and the landscape and people who live and have lived in and around the estate. The title was taken from a board annual report for the Dartington Trust in which it was stated “Dartington should be a test bed for a just and sustainable future” Indeed, the sigil used ritually in this piece is conceived from this premise. The work is a celebration of craftmanship, egalitarianism, the landscape of Dartington Hall and a call to remember its history as a catalyst for experimentation and exploration of radical ideas.

“It brought to mind fluxus performances from the 60’s and seemed to symbolize a revisiting of Dartington’s history although the involvement of radios in the space and the knowledge that this was being broadcast on Soundart radio brought the focus into the present. An experimental practice-based project which was professional, engaging and displayed a rigorous performative approach and inventive use of research material.”
– Dr Jo Joelson (London Fieldworks)

And you’ve asked me to think about medicine 

a collective sonic collage by Sarah Scaife

In a sympathetic garden, we made a gentle journey to explore wellbeing and medicine with some honesty. The work is created from original sounds, collected and recorded live in the gardens of Dartington Hall, Devon, UK, by contributors who joined Sarah’s workshop at Sentient Performativities: thinking alongside the human, 2022.

a wonderful collage of voices — including some amazingly vulnerably and moving moments      (particpant)

In the spaces between us and the more-than-human, we found sensations, imaginings and understandings. These conversations are ultimately lyrical and optimistic, but other voices and feelings are heard.

Sarah warmly thanks the participants who generously shared their recordings and trusted her to create this collage. The participants are Eleanor Snare, Gemma Collard-Stokes, Jane Mason, Katrina Brown, Rita Leduc, Sabine Kussmaul, Sam Francis, Scott Thurston.

Sarah Scaife is an artist and doctoral research student in the University of Exeter Department of Communications, Drama and Film. She uses practice-based performance research methods to explore “medicines of uncertainty”. The research is supervised at the University of Exeter and the University of Bristol and supported by the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership, UK.

Credits

Image credit: Sarah Scaife using photograph by Katrina Brown 2022
Music: digitally devised by Sarah Scaife remixing ‘Elementary’ by Scott Buckley
Created in partnership with Soundart Radio 102.5FM.

Background and context

https://art-earth.org.uk/symposium-sentient-performativities/

More about Sarah’s work on these platforms

https://cargocollective.com/ragged-robin
http://www.berrybrowngown.uk

KINsequences is a collaborative piece of writing by Molly Allam, Sovay Berriman, Alan Braidford, Tara Casey, Rachael Coward, Joanne Dorothea-Smith, Claire Gladstone, Tina Kutter, Clementine Neild & Frances Staniforth. The text has been built by each participant writing in response to the person that has preceded them. It is both in the Surrealist tradition and a version of the parlour game known as ‘consequences’. Each writer can only see the previous participant’s contribution, with the whole only being revealed at the end. The text contains enough common threads to form a narrative arc but travels in unanticipated directions and represents a chorus of voices, both visually and through language. There are three acts; Act I: A Sculpture That Wants To Get Made, Act II: The Making, and Act III: The Viewing.

Writers’ KIN is a group of artists who regularly meet through CAMP, a member led support and professional development network for artists, curators, producers and arts writers living in Devon and Cornwall.
A group reading of KINsequences was performed from this co-created and illustrated text, recorded and produced by Shelley Hodgson at Soundart Radio.

Three movements, each exploring our location at Dartington Hall as somewhere where time slips between different years, decades, centuries. In August, when musicians gather for the Summer School, as you wander around the medley of medieval and modernist buildings different musics seep out of every door and window. The musicians and audiences bring and share memories of their visits here over the years, and make new ones.

Participants in the Summer School’s Radio Drama course, run by Soundart Radio, walked, listened and collected. Their studio was the whole of the Dartington Estate, their script was words found on gravestones amongst the ancient yew trees, and their scores were signs around the buildings. Many fragments were then pulled together into three movements. Confusion explores the problems of collective music making in a Covid wary environment. Reflection provides space to mourn and remember. Finally, Joy brings together old memories and new music with attempts at happiness.

Dartington Summer School began in 1948 and has only been cancelled once, in 2020. The planned events would have coincided with Beethoven’s 250th anniversary, and a new work, “Joy” was commissioned for choir and string quartet. In 2021, amongst sudden changes, partial closures and socially distanced outdoor music, Joy was rehearsed and performed for the first time. Snippets of Joy, by John Barber and Hazel Gould, pop up here, as well as many other half formed performances, captured whilst wandering around the site.
Special thanks to Sara Mohr-Pietsch.

The Fierce Urgency of Now is named after a speech from Hakeem Jeffries,
Democrat Representive in New York City, who used the phrase to talk about
the need to address inequalities in America at the time of the storming of
the Capitol Building. We’ve since learned the phrase was used by Dr Martin
Luther King Jr. in his ‘I have a dream speech’.

Vic & Gareth Wolf met at Dartington College of Arts at the inaugural
Soundart Radio broadcast 15 years ago.
This commission has given us the platform we were hoping for to move from
theatre into audio.
Our work explores human mortality and environmental decline.