Here, Now and Next for Hastings
CAF FEAN considers The Hero’s Journey, an epic tale
Join the crowd under trees adorned with glitzy streamers. Pick up a non-alcoholic cocktail, a box of popcorn, and receive a wristband from a local robot who reminds you that it is now 2124.
A Hero’s Journey: Company and Audience
Through reproduction artefacts called ‘silent disco headphones’, music is playing: a friendly voice welcomes us to the museum, for a celebration of the Hero and to discover what took place 100 years ago…
Brutalist high-rise buildings, starkly posted on to the redbrick façade of Summerfields Gym, served as the backdrop to a factory where signs for large brands are being made – and remade. The fate of those living in 2024, working too long and too hard for too little, struggling to survive… performers wear light pastel shades, working in unity, and then slowly but surely fragmenting.
The music intensifies. Arguments break out and a riot follows. Then, the Hero appears, gives a speech, uses placatory language, speaking in nothings and everythings. The listeners are excited, hopeful for change.
We are led by our friendly guides in pink boiler suits, torch lamps in hand, ushering us as if guiding planes in to land. Now, in front of a hologram exhibit of everyday objects from 2024, the pastel-clad people move to animate household objects in perfect time to the music.
Turn around to the flank of the museum and capture a scene dedicated to ‘home’. Each object is delicately carried and given to a happy recipient. She sits down and tells tales of gratitude for being part of a community, for having a home: a tribute to our wonderful Hastings Give-and-Takery. The great data loss of 2051 is mentioned… the fragments of story had been carefully pieced together in the aftermath – my stomach flips.
Then people are arriving from the airport: smiling. Meandering through us, each of them lays out a piece of fabric from a suitcase. A beautiful tapestry of ribbons and colourful sheets are ceremonially placed on the ground and tied together by the pastel people. To utopian electro music, the completed canopy is raised into the sky, and we run underneath.
The tempo shifts, the Hero runs past.
Following slowly, sedately, to a sealed off courtyard. The doors open, and… welcome to a mash-up of all the wonderful carnivalesque, festival personas that make up Hastings and St Leonards! A beautiful Book Festival nymph, a Morris dancer, a yarr-ing pirate, someone with a pram on their head and a merry Jack-in-the-green spirit. Me: grinning! We are all dancing! The community of onlookers becomes our own community – sharing something special.
Then. Then. Then! Into the Museum. Colourful lights. Beautiful tapestries adorn the ramp that takes us down, down, down to the Durbar Hall.
Pastel people reappear. Holding boxes, different colours – jumbling, shifting them, in cooperation. A completely different movement from the disjointed and angry factory workers of the show opener. This community is in flow. And, the crescendo of the piece! Disco lights. Movement. Dancing. Euphoric music. Glitter falls to the ground as the Hero returns.
Statuesque, the Hero stands at the stairway … and what a sight. SO still, so enigmatic. So strong. I wanted to cheer, shout, dance! HOORAY! The Hero removes her cape, and beneath, is dressed in pastel shades. She happily rejoins the group, in community and co-operation. And then, the pastel people open their boxes. Inside, a light – and the look of PURE JOY on their faces communicates home, hope, togetherness.
I looked around. “The Museum is doing something special here,” I think, “and we – the community – have made it happen.”
I’m so blown away. Thank you, Afri-Co-Lab, Home Live Art, the performers and all those who created and supported this wonderful project. I can’t get over how BRILLIANT things can be when we work together with open hearts.
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