ENCLOSURE September 23rd 2007
Installation • Performance • Ritual
A performance journey across a landscape resonating with history and memory shaped by over five thousand years of human occupation. A corridor through time between our ancestors and ourselves, reawakening Hambledon Hill as a space for meeting, celebration and ritual.
On Hambledon Hill prehistory is still visible despite thousands of years of elemental and human erosion. Beneath the Iron Age earthworks lie the vast remains of the largest neolithic enclosure in Europe, established over five thousand years ago.
On the autumn equinox Red Earth created a unique event, a ritual mapping of a neolithic landscape shrouded in mist and steeped in atmosphere. Horns, bronze percussion, fire, pyrotechnics and an unforgettable performance from Atsushi Takenouchi - a powerful and highly charged journey that weaved between the past and the present, the living and the dead.
The equinox is a moment of balance and equilibrium, a fragile stillness before the pendulum of the year swings again. Enclosure marked this point of convergence: day with night, summer with winter, life with death. More a ritual than performance Red Earth joined with twenty five horn players, ten flag bearers and nearly seven hundred people on a symbolic journey that walked a boundary between time and space, reactivating this landscape, reconnecting with both the land and with the people who shaped it. A meeting with the ancestors.
ENCLOSURE was informed and inspired by recent archaeological insights into neolithic ceremony and ritual, including Lewis-Williams and Pearce’s ‘Inside the Neolithic Mind’ and RJ Mercer’s detailed excavation of Hambledon Hill.