JUNE | REVIEW
A
rcadia, best known for
its monster reception at
Glastonbury Festival, has
been doing standalone events for a
while now internationally but, with
the Worthy Farm extravaganza
taking a fallow year, the company
wanted to build on the city centre
Arcadia experience in London for
its 10th anniversary.
“As perhaps the world’s greatest
melting pot, London was the
perfect place to both celebrate the
10 years with people who’d been
on the journey with us from the
start and to reach a whole new
swathe of people – Londoners
who may never go to a camping
festival, and communities from the
same countries we’d visited on our
travels,” Dorian Cameron-Marlow,
Arcadia’s technical production
manager tells Access.
“At Arcadia we believe the
entire event and its dynamics are
important. The audience should
constantly feel involved as the
landscape and its energy fl ow
are ever evolving. We fi nd having
creative input and control over the
overall event dynamics allows us
to play out a narrative much more
clearly and keep audiences on their
toes from start to fi nish.”
Teaming up with LWE, the
company wanted to bring
together all our performances and
installations at one event.
“ Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park
was fantastic – a real grassy oasis
in the middle of East London, and
London Legacy were supportive
throughout. Having mid-city vibes
with the grassy big blue sky and
summer feeling of a festival mixed
with extraordinarily good sound
levels, made it the perfect choice to
see in the summer,” adds Cameron-
Marlow.
One highlight was the second
performance in a century of an
ancient Aboriginal ceremonial
song – the Yallor Keeninyara.
12
Arcadia fi re
Arcadia’s pyrotechnics, robotics and entrancing music
take centre stage as Glastonbury takes a fallow year
“We met the Whadjuk Noongar
tribe in Perth and realised the
synergies between their story of a
Dreamtime Spider, who weaves a
web of unity, and what our Spider
seeks to do in its own cultural
context.
“We began a hugely inspiring
collaboration remixing the music
to fuse ancient and modern while
building on the rhythm of the song
with technology, fl ames and a key
moment where the audience were
invited up onto the stage by the
Whadjuk. It really felt like a part of
history in the making.”
Add to that the launch of the
brand new Reactor arena – a
360 degree indoor immersive
space with lighting, lasers and
performance, inspired by and
mapped to, the geometry of the
tent. “The Reactor gave us the
opportunity to experiment with
the possibilities of an indoor space,
develop some pretty ambitious
laser installations and test out
some experimental performance
pieces. This was an interesting
concept as it allowed us to explore
creatively a lot of the elements that
don’t work on the spider, moving
in diff erent directions as Arcadia’s
theatrical style keeps evolving.”
And, the Metamorphosis show
– billed as the ultimate Arcadia
experience – united all Arcadia’s
most potent theatrical and
technological elements into a story
of transformation. “Before working
closely with the headliners on
key moments we could build tech
sequences and SFX to really take
the musical experience into a