The simple act of gathering
Greenbelt is no longer alone. Precisely whether the festival is a parent, a midwife or a sibling is not easy to tell, but the reality is, we’re now part of an extended family. Martin Wroe sketches out the family tree.
“For a few fleeting moments”, wrote Mike Yaconelli in The Wittenburg Door, “I got a glimpse of what heaven will be like and I’ll never forget it.” From their first visits to Greenbelt in the 1980s Mike and Karla Yaconelli had dreamed about something like Greenbelt happening in somewhere like the US. It was the wrong time, they were told. It took a quarter of a century, but times changed. Karla, Brian McClaren and Joy Carrol visited Greenbelt over several summers, sitting with festival volunteers and staff to develop a long list of all the mistakes they shouldn’t make. They made very few in imagining Wild Goose Festival.
Most people who might get Greenbelt, won’t ever get to Cheltenham. They may live in North Carolina. Or Bethlehem. Or Perth. A festival conversation in 2007 with Church of Scotland minister Ewan Aitken – lamenting Scotland’s absence of an August Bank Holiday, and the arduous journey south to a foreign land – led to a Scots-only session in the following year’s programme. By the summer of 2009 a creative crowd around Dot Reid, Doug Gay and Graham Maule had dreamed upSolas Festival, a northern light sparked with seed funding from Trust Greenbelt, the “wee Woodstock”, now in its fourth year.
Sometimes, Greenbelt has been able to support kindred spirits, sometimes it can incubate new ideas. After noticing that a visit is worth a thousand talks, for five years Greenbelt has joined with Amos Trust in alternative pilgrimages to Palestine. A 2012 trip included playwrights, novelists, painters and singers.
One balmy Bethlehem evening, sharing a hookah, Sami Awad explained to Paul Northup and Andy Turner how Palestinian artists had a dream of their own festival. What about a creative collision to call up the Greenbelt spirit behind the apartheid wall? Fourteen months later, with seed funding from Greenbelt and others, the brass bands marched and the trumpets were blown at the inauguralBet Lahem Live. At the time of writing the wall has not come down. It may need to happen again.
At its best, a festival won’t simply hint at another way of seeing the world, but will drop clues about another way of making it. It won’t simply make you feel something, but make you want to do something. Mike Riddell dubs the divine realm “godzone”, musing that in post-Christian times the Church’s role might transfer to “sporadic religious festivals”. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally Greenbelt is recognising this.
“Godzoners”, writes Mike, “need their times of celebration as well; times when they meet with other travellers at the side of the road to rejoice in the Zone and its maker; times to sing and dance and tell stories long into the night. Where they meet, the world rolls back and the Zone is established on earth. The simple act of gathering transforms everything. Each traveller brings something of God and the combination somehow draws God out of the shadows and into the light.”
Or as someone once said, “Go ye into all the world and make festivals.”
