There are all sorts of ways to benefit from the wonders of Wunderbar, as David Whetstone reports.
ALL festivals crave our attendance as audience members but Wunderbar is a bit different. Our participation is what makes it possible.
The first Wunderbar in 2009 involved guided tours of people’s homes and salon haircuts by children, both major talking points at the time.
This time around there’s the chance to be a human library book or contribute to a bespoke musical. Perhaps most appealing of all, a “desk chair disco”, providing a fun use for office furniture, is in the offing.
Wunderbar, explains festival creative director Ilana Mitchell, “is aimed at nurturing a culture of curiosity”.
The festival is due to take place in Newcastle and Gateshead from October 31 to November 6 but it’s possible to get in the spirit of it now.
A festival tie-in between three cities – Newcastle, London and Riga, capital of Latvia – has resulted in an artwork called Distance which can be accessed via the festival website, www.wunderbarfestival.co.uk.
By downloading a bit of dedicated software, you can sign up to receive 30-second performances from either of the three locations at random intervals. Ilana says: “The people in Latvia are asking people on the streets to sing lullabies or traditional Latvian songs so you’ll see someone singing a song to you. The others are a bit more abstract.
“There will be a couple of these a week and it’s almost like spam – unsolicited and usually unwanted email traffic – except it’ll be something you’ve agreed to receive.
“It’ll be like a little 30-second performance, something to take you away from routine.”
The spirit of Wunderbar, it seems, lies in identifying needs we didn’t even know we had.
That Human Library, for instance. With a conventional library, you wander in, browse the shelves and borrow a book that can inform or entertain. But what if you could do the same with people?
“What we are looking for is people from all walks of life who might be characterised by a stereotype or something that could be construed as negative,” explains Ilana.
The Human Library project is being put together in association with Newcastle and Gateshead library services and BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking Festival which is taking place at The Sage Gateshead.
The Human Library, in which the ‘books’ are people, will be available at a range of locations during the festival. A mobile Human Library will also be available.
The Wunderbar people are looking to recruit 25 ‘books’ with about 10 or a dozen to be available at each session. As a library user, you will get a special card and choose your ‘book’. Instead of a good read – since clearly you can’t read a person unless they are wearing one of those garments with writing all over them – you will get a 30-minute conversation.
Volunteers are also being sought for a project called Anniversary: An Act of Memory which Ilana says will be “a really fascinating project to be involved in”.
The brainchild of artist Monica Ross, it was conceived as a series of solo, collective and multi-lingual recitations from memory of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948.
Apparently it is available in 380 languages, from Abkhaz to Zulu, but not in British Sign Language. The Wunderbar performance will be the first in the series to be signed rather than spoken.