Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies Podcast, Series two, Episode four, Fairies and the Environment.
Hello, I'm Faye Hield. And I'm Caroline Larrington. This is the fourth episode in our second Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies podcast series.
And here we're going to be talking about fairies and the environment.
One of the most interesting angles that the artist took on the fiery topic was the connexion between Fairies and the environment.
Fairies and other supernatural beings have long retreated away from human spaces deep into the woods.
But they're now vanishing like various natural species and habitats because of human intervention into the places where they live.
There are still places where the fairy world makes contact with ours. But the sense that the world is permeated with unseen presences is vanishing.
And there's perhaps a call for the reconnection with the supernatural realm to help us in rebuilding the natural environment in the human world.
Ingar wrote a song about fairies whom she calls winged warriors, creatures who are stirring beneath the marsh.
They remember how old they are. And they say, we are old, that the trees are older.
The song shows us how the fairies have been driven deeper down and further away by human activity.
But they all regrouping. They're ready to come back and to fight for the natural world.
Crowds with. He ran there all his life.
Life sustaining sparks fly from pores.
Why? We. Oh, but the trees are old.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Of mankind came to reason.
Drive land her father. Some cast spells to replanning.
Not saying the Kobe.
A gift from God to you. For Reebok, bemuse, receive a filing fee mind.
That's quite a scary song, isn't it? Nature's protectors and not just warning, but actively fighting in their marshy places.
Harnessing other living beings.
Youmans film of being human draws on voices he found through YouTube, discussing the magical world and its importance to human habitation.
His black and white film depicts wild places and cityscapes,
giving a backdrop to the archaic and contemporary calls for action in rebuilding the natural world.
Yes, U.N. uses a whole range of voices talking about ancient beliefs and traditions.
Personal encounters with the fairies or the supernatural. And wonderful images of the wild.
The film persuades us rather like some of the work we talk about it.
So to the very space is right next to ours.
And we can glimpse it if we just look past the corner of our eyes.
Terry wrote a poem about the trees, about how the trees can speak, and that they have spirits in our community that can tell us tales.
Here's Terry reading that at the Sage Gates said show. The thing you need to know, child, is that trees do speak.
They do telltales. They sing when they have a mind to. They are gigglers, gossip's grumblers, cataloguing every ache and pain.
And yet they hold no grudges, claim no debts, speak ill of no creature.
They have the tempers. Yes, tantrums of branches lashed in gusts and gales.
But then they come to rest in stillness. Spent humming contentedly You've heard them, dear.
Just yesterday you thought it was only the wind.
The thing you need to know is that each morning every tree stands tall and chance its name, its history, its kinship, web and lineage.
You've heard them, dear, but thought it was the dawn chorus of the birds.
The thing you need to know is that the trees tell stories older than the oldest tales of humankind.
By dusk, by night, by starlight, you've marked their midnight.
Murmuring You told me so, but thought it was just water rushing through the stream.
The thing you need to know, child, is that trees do speak in their own language.
They mutter in the crackle of autumn leaves. They sighs. Snow settles at their feet.
They utter exquisite Borio poems. As each tender young leaf firms, they laugh and shivers of green and gold when tickled by a summer's breeze.
The thing you need to know, child, is that trees do speak in the tree language.
And yes, you will understand their speech one day they route child sweet sapling.
Ben Nichols did some fascinating research into Air Chief Marshal Hughes,
doubting the man who commanded the RAAF through the Battle of Britain and who was pushed aside after that phase of the war was over,
partly because of disagreements over strategy and General R.A.F. in fighting.
But he was also a keen spiritualist and very much alive to the supernatural.
He claimed that the spirits of dead fighter pilots visited him in his sleep and importantly, he was a member of the Ferry Investigation Society.
Ben decided to mash up the story of doubting with the Somerset folktale called the war between the Pinsky's and the Fairies in this very short tale.
The fairies and the Pinsky's that's the devant name for the equivalent of fairies go to war with one another.
And eventually they agree that the Pinsky's will reign in Devon and the fairies will have ruler for Summerset.
Ben wrote a short play with Tim Darling, using two actors in McGlocklin and Dunwell McBride playing Dowding and the King of the Fairies.
There was a time when the fairies who dwelt in Somerset lands the east of the river part wanted to cross the border and.
They wanted to settle and extend the territory westwood's. However, the Devonian Pinsky's already lived there, refused them entry.
Soon a war began between the two groups and it violently and terribly raged across the landscape.
The conflict pushed to its limits by the fairy king. Our scouts have returned with terrifying reports of new activity from the edges of our rail.
Giant metal beasts large enough to carry a thousand fairies when it goes, feels like swans launching from a lake.
They take the skies climbing to a height where they are almost out of sight.
Suspicion. The biscuit has developed. A new animal war proved to be unfounded.
A far more dire source has been discovered. The humans have found ways to shape and control a metallic bird beast.
We will seek the route to their attentions. They've laid waste to our lands, all of history.
So what new threat is this or faries? You must become the eyes and ears of our people.
The future of us all depends on each and every one of you. May the 10th, 1940.
He spent the day tidying in the garden, a job that's long overdue, thanks to how busy we've all been.
And I think I will have even less time soon. Blackbird has been building a newnes.
Derek has promised to help me with some tidying if he has an hour or two.
This helped to clear my mind, ready for the meeting with Churchill tomorrow.
I will have to make him listen as we simply can't go on like this.
We need the squadrons back for defence. If they stay in France, we will lose them all.
Once we get this out of the way, I shall arrange another social evening.
Good for morale. After Dowden and retired from the RAAF, he went to the United States or more business.
And there he heard about gremlins,
the supernatural figures that fighter pilots of every Air Force glimpsed as they flew at altitude in a life or death situations.
Hanging onto the wings or messing with pipelines bent on damaging the aircraft.
Just so the fairy king explains how the building of air strips in his part of Somerset is degraded habitat.
Driving his people out of their homes. And he begs them to unite behind him, to fight back against the humans as gremlins.
We are inside their sky place. The fight back has begun.
The appearance of strange visions vary creatures.
Some call them Gremillion, our bravest warriors, some risking certainly death,
but wrenching a ripping pieces from the machines pulling out the tubes of burning liquid.
Jeremy got the wild wings of the great iron birds. An American B seventeen pilot heard a strange sound coming from the engine.
Instruments on the panel started going haywire. When he looked outside to his right, he saw a freakish creature latched onto the plane.
It was three feet tall, with abnormally long arms, grey hairless skin, deep red eyes,
a gaping mouth full of teeth and pointed is with tufts of black hair.
At the end, like owl is just staring in at him from the wind and bitter cold beyond the glass.
In the final moments of the drama, Dowding is up on the moors near a stone circle lost in the mist,
where the invisible fairy king speaks to him, taunting him with his failure to see what humans have done and are continuing to do.
Let's hear a bit more from the play. It's all about frequencies.
There are so many signals that are there. But we are not attuned to them.
Quentin Crawford of the Ferry Investigation Society is convinced that it is very similar to a radar projection.
Oh, dear. My on the wrong frequency, commander. We've been trying to contact us.
The presence was almost like electricity. Now I have to confess, I sensed it was not a friendly presence.
You may be right, Commander. You show me you were trying to contact not your dead wife.
I was suddenly filled with thoughts and memories of Clarise.
I could vividly see her holding Derek when he was just a newborn baby.
Yes, your son. You sent him into battle, didn't you?
Well, you said safety by the desk, making all the plans. Were seeing the strategy.
Some warrior commander he survived didn't do. He was is a hero and one of the hundreds of thousands of others who didn't survive.
That you sent through your deaths. My dear, if I doughboys my chicks, I fought to save you, to bring you all back from France.
Strategy. Defence. Not grand offensives. And I have heard your voices from the other side.
Many voices. Hearing voices.
A which are they don't start thinking your mouth, commander. In my sleep.
In my dreams the voices came to me.
My boys have travelled through to a different room and in that place they were still flying as spirits in fighters,
taking off and landing from mountaintop runways made of light.
So there is an afterlife, is there not? You want to believe that so much, don't you?
But you know what, Commander? Yes. Hello.
I can tell you about it. But even if you think you can hear the words I see.
You won't remember. And you human, you can never truly understand.
And finally, we have two poems that bring the fairy world into modern urban spaces.
It's where the fairies become truly modern. First, we're going to hear Sarah Hesketh poem glitches.
Otherwise, flow of morning, the scraps of dreams still stranded in our eyes.
Commuters thrust inwards. Pretend there are other worlds than this on tracks that take us elsewhere from ourselves.
Coffee smoke speaks modest spell's into the air. We plug our ears with tiny incantations, songs that only we can hear.
Here's where the glitches live. And know you tell yourself it's just the tricks of the light as it lifts its way over concrete and glass.
Each day you silently wish for them faces, forcing their way out of the stone,
quick bodies etched in gold and jigging winking their way through the daybreak mass.
Grass gives way to mineral or gazes harden as the city appears we saw.
But we did not see the residents of the Edgerton's made flesh.
Sarah talks about the commuters who are sitting on the train, commuting into town, listening to their music, reading stuff on their phones.
But if you look up and out of the window, you may just see little glitches in reality.
Other things barely glimpsed out of the corner of your eye. Patience's poem.
We Dance to another tempo is a good plan to close this episode with patients takes up the old theme of dancing with
the fairies in the woodland and losing track of time when the speaker in her poem goes down into the fairy club,
the landscape above ground is full of trees. But when that speaker comes back up again, the trees have all gone, replaced by tower blocks.
Paper mache paper, peach patch.
Right. Paper mache keys.
Paper mache. Humans.
I enter ochre. Amber brown. Tribe of trees.
Enter the order elder chant peach.
Words that would spell to each other. Hazel maple.
Beech. Birch fire. Moist earth. Spiky roots.
Metro's. Young. I shall know.
The Retro Human cycle. Berg's youth. Belize birth that tells this human seeks other world where folks dance to choose mixed with heart beats.
Tenth month said Bronwyn's shaped dates. Underworld calls in a voice stiff as drum skins knees.
Earth opens its mouth until yours truly falls under ground, where heads small and tall for the grass green snakey que.
Elves, frisk and giant scans guest list.
In the pitch black Métro. Low pitch Hart Kinks as I enter the crypt.
Drink my drunk's. Music maker makes vinyl Earth Quake.
A dwarf plays piano, then horns honks.
Faery woman takes stage right in white smoke dress.
Plant a grass snake. Sings Three Satti notes and I drown in front vocal.
Eight songs later, we share a drink. She speaks burnt Aspen.
I speak razor sharp, very slender. She is beach, but which.
I'm under her lingo. We twist limbs round retro tunes.
We dance to an other tempo. Today.
First light. Melts dance, blue lines crack.
Very cheak piano notes. More. Earth spews me out like a plant.
QET. Older Aspen elder Rowan Heysel, Maple Beach Birch don't exist.
All the House, elder house. Tower, block of the tower block where trees lived.
Human, human, human, feherty, human, human to human.
Human, giant, human, human for humanity, for any human to human.
Driven giant human feeling for a. Line Lytro human.
Gentle, giant human shields. Size and colour.
Other human nemko trained. Human shields. Size and colour.
Human trained. Human size. Scientifically colour.
Diabelli. Human dental trauma. All these works draw on age old themes of human action affecting the fairy world and causing their retreat.
But there was a palpable call to arms within the artists positivity and a sense of
potential collaboration with fairies to help in the human ecological crisis we're facing.
One of the workshops we talked to, fairy gold turning to leaves when the humans returned to their own world in many interpretations,
this is seen as a trickster behaviour. The fairies pulling one over on the humans.
But as we saw it, the fairies were trying to show us what is of real value rather than the leaves being a worthless dupe.
Perhaps wealth in the form of gold and commerce is of less value than our natural environment.
Maybe we need to sit up and listen.
Don't forget to take a look at the modern ferries Web site, where you can find more of our work with illustrations, a film and the performance.
Sage Gates had a lots of interesting blog posts from our artists in the final episode of the series.
We'll be looking at what the artist did with the theme of fairies and transformational change.