• Share on Facebook
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Linkedin
  • Share by email
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Linkedin
  • Share by email

A few weeks ago one Friday evening I sat in an empty, disused quarry, now a nature reserve. One hour previously, the site had been full of noise and movement ? young people playing taiko rhythms on dustbins, children operating an 18-foot dinosaur skeleton puppet, adults making the rocks ring with words and song, two hundred people of all ages watching, laughing, dogs barking at the giant puppets, reflects Jane George.

And then it was gone and the quarry was empty again. In my mind, I could see the 150 million year old rocks of the quarry laughing at us as they watched the stream of people enter, swirl and leave, like a film played at high speed. The totally transient nature of our activities against the backdrop of the unimpressionable permanence of the rock face was humbling, reassuring and challenging. But, of course, the rocks are no more permanent than we are. The quarry, like much of our landscape, was formed by human activity, but having been allowed to settle quietly for twenty years, the quarry has gained an air of unchanging stillness as if it had always been there.

What will happen to our experience of the event we have just created in the quarry, if allowed to settle for twenty years and then revisited? The children who danced with the dinosaur ? will that experience become part of their own inner landscape? How may it affect them ? being there, creating and experiencing those moments, in that place ? not tomorrow, not next week when we do our evaluation ? but as they grow up, and the world around them reveals that it is not permanent, not unimpressionable, not disconnected from human activity. Far from it.

I believe it is vitally important for us as humans, as well as for the future of the living world, that we find such a sense of connection. This idea underpins the work of Coral Arts. We specialise in developing cross-artform, site-specific projects involving local participants of all ages, working alongside professional artists. Our current project ?Walks around a coral reef ? is inspired by the feature that gave us our name: the remains of a coral reef lying beneath the fields, streets and villages of Oxfordshire, laid down millions of years ago, when a warm tropical sea covered this land. The project consists of three linked performances in three disused quarries which take the audience on a journey through landscape and time:

? ?The Professor and the Dinosaur? in Kirtlington Quarry: A professor steeped in knowledge and surrounded by fossils pieces together a dinosaur from fragments found in the quarry.

? ?The Sandman? in Dry Sandford Quarry: A retired quarry worker makes an unexpected discovery.

? ?The Mermaid in the Sink? in Wheatley: A woman on a housing estate at her sink finds a mermaid in her washing up.

Jane George is Director of Coral Arts. t: 01865 875376; e: coral@coralarts.co.uk; w: http://www.coralarts.co.uk