Dr David Bramwell takes us on a tour of watery places from Doncaster to The Ridge.

A wonderful, watery end for the Dear Future festival

The Dear Future festival at the Electric Palace climaxes this Sunday morning, 6 November, with a multi-media event including live music, short films and a time-travelling performance that begins in Doncaster and ends at the lost spring in St Helen’s Woods. Erica Smith takes the plunge and books her ticket.

As I write, wind and rain whip around my bay window. The forecast for Sunday morning promises to be similar – which will make it the perfect weather for a grown-up Sunday Morning at the picture house. The Dear Future festival offers a fantastic programme of films and events throughout this week, but I am particularly looking forward to Sunday’s Dear Water theme.

Short films by Rebecca Marshall and Nichola Bruce

The programme begins with two short films. In I Am Weather (Dir: Rebecca E Marshall & Nichola Bruce, 5 mins, 2019), a woman’s body shifts and moves through water in a process of doing and undoing. This elemental force moving between torrent, boiling rage and steam, suspends performer Clare Whistler in a slackened gravity that allows shifts between existing and becoming. The film shivers with aversion, uncertainty and moves forward with love. Filmed in The Library of Water in Stykkisholmur, Iceland. The building overlooks the ocean and the town, and houses 24 glass columns containing water collected from the major glaciers around Iceland.

The second film, Glitter and Storm (Dir: Rebecca E Marshall, 16mins, 2012), celebrates water, sunlight, breathing and skin – it is a submersion into the joy of sea swimming by night and by day and features several familiar local sea-swimmers.

The Cult of Water

Author David Bramwell has performed in Hastings at the Explorers’ Club and Bavard Bar, but this will be the local premiere of The Cult of Water. Bramwell will take the audience up the river Don and back in time, through the ladybird plague and drought of 1976 to the heavily polluted Don of Sheffield’s steel industry, up into the Pennines and back into a pre-Christian era when rivers and springs were worshipped as living deities.

Along the journey, he battles with his own thalassophobia (the fear of ‘what lurks beneath’); learns about hydromancy from magician Alan Moore, discovers a unique forest of figs growing on the banks of the Don and encounters Jarvis Cocker on his own adventures, sailing down the Don on an inflatable inner tube.

His journey finally brings him face to face with the goddess of primordial waters, Danu, who gave her name to the Don. While using the Don as the focal point for a psycho-geographical journey, at heart this is a meditation on the symbolic power of rivers and inland waterways and the profound ways in which they affect our sense of well-being.

Songs from Chalk Horse Music

Singer and story collector Liz Pearson will intersperse this special event with a small collection of mesmerising songs that she makes as part of Chalk Horse Music. The name comes from the figure of a horse carved into the side of the hill in the Cuckmere Valley.

Tickets for Dear Water are £10 and can be booked via the Electric Palace website. The Dear Future festival has fascinating events every day this week. You can see the full programme here.

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