Sunrise Celebration 2007

The dawn of a new festival culture

United Kingdom | 04 June 2007

Yet despite its new professionalism it has remained true to its sustainable, green ethos, lack of commercialism and peaceful, love-drenched atmosphere. Hippies, crusties, gypsies, trendies, fashionistas, families, dogs, cockerels and horses, all come together in the depths of the west country, for this 3 day celebration.

The festival is held at Bearley Farm, just across the fields from Glastonbury Festival, on the same spiritual axis as Glastonbury Tour and the Big Green Stone Circle, for the hippies among you.  For everyone else, it is just off the A303.  This makes access simple and easy, creating barely any congestion on the area, hidden a few miles down a country lane in an idyllic setting of richly coloured crops, meandering steams and lush greenery.  This, together with the horse and cart system of transportation, could mistake one into believing you’re in feudal England, many a day journey away from anything resembling civilisation. But alas, no.

On entering the site your first challenge is to track down the campsite.  Not as easy as it sounds due to the lack of signposting and in our case the bizarre inability of numerous people being able to inform us of its whereabouts.  Once you’ve managed this however, and have set up your home, its time to head into the festival and check out all the treats in store for you.

Organised by a man called Sunbird, it comes as little surprise to be faced with topless, tie-dye clad women, men with plaited beards and dream catcher earrings and children dressed as fairies, but interestingly, mixed among them is the gypsy caravan community, burlesque bohemians and us average folk who like to escape from mundanity to flirt with an alternative lifestyle every so often.

Walking around the site, it is reminiscent of a stroll around the green fields at Glastonbury.  It has a very organic appearance to it with painted signs, natural material art works, lots of organic food, pretty cafes, many alternative workshops to get involved in and not one commercial logo in sight.  People genuinely smile at one another and there is a tremendous feeling of being reconnected to the world.  There is a refreshing lack of ‘coolness’, self-consciousness and irony, and as you get into the festival flow you begin to reclaim the meanings in all those slogans that have been eaten up, devoured of their meaning and spat out by the corporate meglomaniacs of the world.  You begin to ‘think different’.   It feels like the ‘real thing’, ‘life tastes good’ and we begin to ‘imagine a touchable world’.

With music, stalls, food, art galleries, workshops and lectures, there is much to amuse yourself with.  If you’re in the mood for some off-the-wall philosophical gobbledygook be sure to dip into the Avalon Rising for a lecture on geopathic stress, galactic consciousness, magalifts, astro-archeology, or the second copernician revolution.  Or similarly just go to see one of John Allen’s story telling workshops, which basically equates to the same experience.

Personal festival highlights include hanging out at 6am in Sam’s naked sauna, with five old men and a girl with dreads with  a pet snake nestled within them, listening to stories of the 70’s and theories of the world.  Also the experience of finding myself carrying a paper mache sun above my head heading a congo of 30 shakra chanting free wheelers.  And lastly, the natural, mind blowing, intensity of walking in a big chain around a maze of fire on the Saturday night. 

The music line-up mainly comprised of ska and dated psytrance, but unfortunately I can tell you little of particular sets due to spending my Friday night maturely throwing up on my next door neighbours tent, and Saturday evening/night being spent obsessively following the 90’s trash rehashers Django Spears around from set to set like a teenie bop, boy obsessed groupie.  A band well worth seeing I must note, but perhaps three times in one evening, not utterly essential. 

The actual design of the festival is based on sacred geometric principles’, which basically entail 12 mini circular areas including the tipi village, the horse drawn encampment, the hanging spiral, dance/chill-out arena, Healing area and circus and games field, in a giant circle surrounding a central fire pit.  This simple design makes it easy, or at least when you’re not severely hammered, for you to navigate around.

Although in the main part the design worked well, the tipi village and the horse drawn carriage camp seemed a little exclusive and hostile.  It wasn’t clear whether you were allowed to actually go inside the tipi’s and without a programme, trying to find out what activities the different spaces had on offer was near impossible.  These different cultures side by side evoked notable clashes with humorous scenes such as a hippy praying to a plant in the permaculture area that moments before a yappy stray jack Russell had just pissed on.

Last year the festival won the impressive Shelter award for the 'Most Socially Responsible Festival' at the UK Festival Awards. This aspect stands out as a real strength of the festival.  There are many inspiring workshops and lectures that give you the chance to find out about the latest alternative technologies and how you can make your life more green and sustainable.  The aim of the organisers is for the festival to be 100% sustainable. There is a no-glass policy, unwanted items can be deposited in re-use bags and everything else is recycled or decomposed.  Impressively all the food and drink disposables on site are compostable.  The compost produced is then used on the fields of the farm giving a lovely renewable, cyclical feel where the festival sprouts from the land before being returned to the land.  And, by in large, the system seems to work.  It's very rare to spot a piece of litter and there is a careful, responsible attitude that persists to create a nice sense that you are helping make this sustainable culture work.  But it is worth noting that at times this is made far from easy for you.  Often you’ll find yourself in the position of gormlessly standing in front of a collection of bins desperately trying to work out whether your bottle should go in a plastic or mixed plastic bin, or whereabouts you should put your banana skin, only to find out that that particular bin is situated at another point.  Overall the ‘more-bins’ recycling initiative could have done with living up to their names, and the black and white, text only, information sheet, given on arrival, needs to be more mind-compostable for an over excited festival-arrivee to digest quickly.

As a whole, the festival seems to work well together. With a weaning out of the psychedelic drug-fuelled artwork, dated music acts like Ozric Tentacles and with a little more overall coherence and unity, this festival has the makings for being very popular.  Sunrise has proved itself to be a fine blue print of sustainability which hopefully will inspire other festivals, including all those commercial festivals who have jumped on the fashionable band wagon, to do the same.
 
Whether it lives up to its aim of creating ‘a united force for personal and planetary transformation’ is contestable.  But one thing’s for sure, this festival can be enjoyed and explored on so many different levels, from the deeply spiritual to a more removed anthropological intrigue, but anyone attending will definitely have a weird and wonderful time.

Comments

Related Events

Related Articles