William Blake’s Bognor Birthday Celebrations

Spokeswoman Rachel Searle said: “The Picturedrome have agreed to screen the films we worked hard creating with Arts Council funding over lockdown last year. There will also be live acoustic performances from singer songwriter Duncan McKenzie and musical performer, lecturer and artist Mikey Georgeson.”

Tickets on https://bit.ly/3wY3QyL or the Picturedrome

“William Blake was one of the first multimedia artists combining image, word and, although lost to time, song. The Songs of Innocence and Experience are a broad and varied collection of deceptively simple poems showing, as Blake described it, ‘the two contrasting states of the human soul.’ Blake, was relatively unknown in his lifetime, but his influence and the appreciation for his work has grown so much that he is now ingrained in our modern culture.

“Blakefest used the life-pause caused by the Covid-19 virus to reflect and produced lockdown readings of all the song poems, read by local residents and poets from the Southdowns Poetry Festival, and passed them to modern multimedia artist, Nick Hogarth. Nick has fused these poems with Blake’s images and his original music bringing them to life as voices of hope in a challenging time.”

“The performance begins as the audience is enveloped by the eternal sounds of the city. Urban sounds are transformed into insect clicks and rustling leaves depicted through the viola, flute clicks and drumming in the piano. Working in isolation imposed by lockdown restrictions, dancers adopt yogic postures to echo movement of insects and rustling undergrowth. Eerie moonlight reveals the canopy of Blake’s fiery ‘forest of the night’ evoked by the exotic tones of an eastern wooden flute, slithering viola textures, luminous piano licks and the dancers angular raw-boned shapes embody danger and winding spirals signify foreboding