Big Day Out

For five year Big Day Out was one of the highlight of the cultural calendar in Bracknell. In 2011 it will be replaced with the smaller scale Park Life.

Performance we've loved over five years at Big Day Out Festival have been often implausible, irreverent and worth remembering for all time... It's worth saying as an introduction that Big Day Out is a very, very small festival that always offers a few big ideas.

The first year, 2005, was a tiny affair but still we had a few moments. Spoke In The Wheel & Demonstrate Theatre's Burning Ambition finale is still remembered as a brilliant cosmic joke. It featured a live theremin solo, a man with gigantic hands, with direct quotes to surrealism and huge luminescent lanterns. It was also quite bonkers!

To many who came in 2006, we appeared to be just a side-show as the festival found itself putting on an entertainment for sorry England football supporters as we lost to Portugal! Still, there was much to enjoy despite the admittedly depressed, beery atmosphere.

There was one of four more controversial shows, Spiral Flight's Caravan of Desire, which for some was more than a little explicit, as well as being utterly beguiling and ingenious. There was also several explorations of live arts with incredible ideas coming from Richard Kingdom's Fresh Festival, including a man (Eitan) sitting on a tree stump staring threateningly at all who entered the Acoustic Tent. The finale featured Abram Wilson soothing the brows on a baking hot day with some mellow grooves followed by The World Famous with their eerie experimental community pyrotechnic production Squib.

In 2007 Big Day Out went, quite accidentally, to Eastern Europe. It seemed we were inundated with artists reminiscing about their comrades! There was Radio Gargarin's Kronstadt Rebellion, pretty much the ultimate Russian club night involving 20 foot puppets of Stalin, Lenin, Dostoyevsky and Mischka. Just in case you thought we couldn't get any more ex-Communist, we had Mimbre's The Bridge, a show about a bridge you couldn't traverse (which features in just about every Eastern European spy film you can think of pre-1989). The suspicion that something vogue-ish was going on was only re-inforced by Strangelings short-lived but wonderful show Dive Dive Dive! about a group of tourists taken into deepest East Germany by a renegade sub crew! Oh and no forgetting Ska Cubano to take us a revolutionary Cuba!

In 2008, Big Day Out's world went in a totally different direction: into a deeply mythic and English/European folk-related world. Again there seemed to be something in the air, reflected by a fresh crop of alt-folk songwriters, primal electronica and new classical composers revealing themselves that year. We reflected that artistic shift with the impossibily good Efterklang on their first tour, the discover of Stornoway's very, very lovely songs, the extraordinary North Sea Radio Orchestra, an explosive set from Destroyers vs the Dhol Blasters and Lusterous Chemistry with Sleeps in Oysters creating the most wonderful post-consumerist installation in the Recital Room. Just to top it all, we also got involved in building a mythic beast, The Beast of Bracknell, developed in collaboration with the wonderful Rag'n'Bone group. The idea to re-kindle a folk story for Bracknell seemed to get tongues stirring rapidly and created a stirring piece of temporary sculpture. But if folk arts of all sorts was the medium of the festival in 2008, it was still a group from Mali, Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba who played the set of the festival, in the rain. Mali 2, England 1.

If 2009 was anything, it was the year of Brass. I had been to a wonderful festival in Bescancon, France with Jo Ross of Oxford Contempory Music in late 2008 and we were all suitably inspired. I had also seen the growth of the fantastic Durham Brass Festival and thought we'd have some fun! So we invited a few street bands over, including France's finest, La Fanfare En Petard, New Orleans' The Hot 8 Brass Band and involved some local ones, Oxford's The Horns of Plenty and Basingstoke's Drumrunners. This again was a completely new experience in festival arts for many who came. With bands wandering through the crowd, killing all pretension to being stars or being too big for their audience, every band had it's own individual flavour and they all wanted the audience to be part of it. It was utterly light-hearted.

In 2010, due to great popularity, major changes were afoot as Big Day Out ran for the first time as a pay event. This caused some controversy, with a group campaigning over the other side of the road.

While inside, the pace of the festival went up a notch. Themed very loosely around a world under water, musical highlights included the rousing The Baghdaddies who played the part of headliners (and troubadours) on a day of many special performances. Other loved and craved the jazzy afrobeat sound of Yabbafunk or indeed The Lani Singers from Papua New Guinea raising awareness of their international cause with striking and sublime folk songs. To those more interested in the noise from the street, Guildford's rip-roaring dub-step crew Coda got the vote. Whilst Zimbabwe's Limpopo won over all with their Pizza dance!

In Performing Arts we presented a now quite traditional Children's Parade, which rounded off a hectic day of children's creativity. Children and adults had been immensely busy making a sublime, 20 foot Preying Mantis with Alec Evans and his 5 strong crew, while the Global Cafe contributed a marvellous automotion created by Nick Garnet. There was also Charleston flash mob, the watery ridiculousness of AirQuarium and the very beautiful Adrift from Sound Intervention, a polytechnic finale that offered an utterly enthralling closer to all that came before it. As crowds moved away to go home, Adrift returned to its daytime incarnation as an installation. The fire pots roared on and on with the central mast and guy ropes glowing in the near-complete darkness. What Adrift was about exactly, only a few were sure. But it was very beautiful.

The festival in 2010 once again felt like a summary of everything you've imagined but never heard. Take the astonishing Kamikazee Test Pilots, a thrilling melding of metal and African grooves that stole the show from many on The Global Cafe Stage. With numerous wild and energised ideas, that stage contributed so much to making Big Day Out in 2010 something extra special.

William Trevelyan
Programmer