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Some 35,000 Womad devotees are expected at Charlton Park over the weekend, with day tickets still available for the Friday, Saturday and Sunday PICTURE: CLARE GREEN
Tens of thousands of world music fans from across Britain are preparing to descend on the ancestral home of the Earl of Suffolk later this week as the Womad Festival gets under way in Wiltshire.
And this year’s extravaganza at Charlton Park will include explosions and fire – albeit in films shown to audiences in shipping containers.
It’s part of the weird and wonderful fabric of Womad, the festival founded in Somerset by Peter Gabriel and now run from his recording studio base at Box, near Bath.
The festival opens on Thursday night with a performance by Middle Eastern band Farah, who have teamed up with 100 local schoolchildren for an exotic performance they showcased last week in Malmesbury Abbey.
Some 35,000 festival-goers are expected at Charlton Park over the weekend, with day tickets still available for the Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The line-up includes the best native music from all four corners of the globe, including here in the West of England, as well as the west of Africa and the Far East.
Music and dance on more than half a dozen huge stages form two of the three letters of the acronym, but the World of Art is being provided by a contemporary art installation at the north Wiltshire site for the fourth year running.
This year’s art is entitled Rumble, Rattle and Spark: Fire and Explosives in Artists’ Film, and will see those viewing the art put into shipping-container viewing stations and subjected to booms and bangs of fire and explosions.
“This year we look at the way artists use fire and explosives and explore our fascination with these elements that we find terrifying and spectacular in equal measure,” explained curator Jeni Walwin. “Flames, smoke and sonic booms are linked to both good and evil: Hell fire in contrast to the comforting flicker of flames in the home hearth; a bringer of death and destruction but also used joyfully in festive celebrations. We are all simultaneously seduced and repelled by fire and our artists, compelled by this paradox, have a unique way of harnessing these responses.”
While Womad takes place at the northern end of the county, down in the south west, Wiltshire will be hosting another sort of festival, with the Trowbridge Village Pump Festival opening on Friday.
More than 50 acts will fill the festival site in the shadow of Westbury’s White Horse, and already almost 2,000 tickets have been sold in advance for the event.
Scottish duo The Proclaimers, Steeleye Span and Steve Knightley are all among the headliners in a festival of folk, acoustic and roots music, which successfully moved to the White Horse Country Park for the first time last year.
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Article source: http://www.westburypeople.co.uk/Flags-unfurled-worldwide-favourite/story-19555111-detail/story.html