Pearson/Brookes : the first five miles

 

Between 9.00pm and 10.15pm on Sunday 23rd August 1998, Mike Brookes and Mike Pearson performed 'the first five miles' across the hill top and high ground of Mynydd Bach above the village of Trefenter in West Wales. The event - the structure of which marked key shifts within both the intentions and formal propositions of Brookes' recent performance work - was realised in collaboration with local inhabitants and land owners, the local independent radio station Radio Ceredigion, and BBC Resources.

Pearson and Brookes walked a specifically linear five miles journey among peat bog, high pasture and wind-farm turbines carrying portable two way radio equipment. The texts performed by Mike Pearson were combined, via a live satellite link, with pre-recorded material simultaneously broadcast by Radio Ceredigion; to create a complex bilingual stereo radio work transmitted and openly available over an area up to fifty miles in radius from Mynydd Bach.

The broadcast, a layered bilingual docu-drama subtitled 'Rhyfel y Sais Bach [ the war of the little Englishman ]', explored the story of Augustus Brackenbury, his purchase of 850 acres of common moorland from the Enclosure Commissioners in 1820, the subsequent enclosure riots, and the frustration by local inhabitants of his repeated attempts to build houses on the land; a critical and resonant period in the history of the landscape and community of Mynydd Bach.

'the first five miles' attracted a transient community of some two hundred individuals to vantage points along the route; either out in the open with radios pressed to their ears, or gridlocked in cars: and a wider radio audience of over fifteen thousand.

 

* for related material please try the performance chronology of the archive and the Pearson/Brookes category of the blog