We now have all the content in for the Greenham Virtual Reality project!
We are finishing editing it and then it all goes off to the wonderful tech team that is Animorph for the next phase. Here’s how this first phase has gone…
1. We asked Greenham Women to create, donate or give us permission to use their scripts, accounts, poems and songs; we have a mixture of comedy, tragedy, abstract and personal, it’s a heady and highly emotional combination that I’ve felt thrilled and hugely honoured to be collating
2. We asked some feminist artists to take themes, accounts or interviews from the archive (thanks to the Greenham Women Everywhere team for help navigating these) and create responses; these have resulted in fabulous new material such as the Ballad of Freda Geese by Christina Li or the cover of Take the Toys from the Boys by TJ Holmes and Becky Barry
3. I allocated to an amazing cast of feminist actors and singers (many of them Greenham Women themselves) the material we’d collected and watched and listened in awe as their recordings came back; they brought the work to life from under their bed covers as they used what they had in lockdown to create their own mini soundbooths, rehearsing over zoom and addressing pick-ups over email, and I can’t thank them enough. Anyone who knows some of the Scaries back catalogue will recognise the voices of Dracula cast Bec Applebee, Kudzi Chiwawa, Mary Woodvine and Illona Linthwaite (the last two with interviews themselves in the Greenham archive); fans of Cornish theatre will also be delighted to hear Rebecca Hulbert and Jenny and Flo Beare; and if you are joining us from up country or over the border in Wales, you may well be excited to hear the dulcet tones of Deborah Tracey, Lladel Bryant and Terina Talbot.
It’s been elating and exhausting pulling all this together, like the most complicated production week ever. It’s really odd to hand over the production to someone else – it’s all in the hands of Animorph now, and I’m really looking forward to working with them (but from the sidelines, in a non-coding kind of a way…)
Oh and we started a Greenham Mutual Aid group too; so far we’ve had a song night with Claire Ingleheart and Frankie Armstrong, a pub quiz, and the book group is now on it’s 3rd meeting – this time we’ll be discussing Joan Smith’s detective novel set at the peace camp, who knew?!’
