Putting Body & Soul into arts festival
It returns on Friday week for a solstice weekend beside the lake at Ballinlough Castle, Co Westmeath.
The festival, which grew out of a residency at Electric Picnic and has been a sell-out since its debut, in 2010, is the brainchild of Avril Stanley. The ethos owes much to ideas Stanley gathered while globetrotting in her 20s, to the Burning Man festival’s art installations and community living, in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, and to the two worlds of her childhood.
Stanley grew up in Oughterard, Co Galway, but decamped to the wilds of her father’s native Ontario, Canada, for idyllic summer holidays in a log cabin.
“A lot of what’s behind Body & Soul is that people get to leave behind their daily rituals and the oppressive demands of life, and they have a chance of freedom — where time doesn’t matter, and your environment is an adventure. There are happy accidents and surprises around every corner,” she says.
“There’s something about that, where people get time-out for themselves, and have space to do nothing but explore and enjoy what it is that they meet along the way, whether that’s people, experiences, music, food, an amazing art installation, a moment by themselves where, all of a sudden, they have a chance conversation with someone who, perhaps, changes how they look at life. It can be the tiniest things; it can be the biggest things. There’s something about that, which I find incredibly powerful.”
Live music is a cornerstone of Body & Soul. This year, it hosts Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Public Image Ltd, Kurt Vile & The Violators, Kid Karate, and the inimitable Charles Bradley & His Extraordinaires, among other headline acts. Perhaps more than other festivals on the Irish circuit, though, the venue, the 15th century walled gardens of Ballinlough Castle, and its cornucopia of unusual, art-inspired surprises, plays a special part. The festival caters for the unexpected.
“Come because you can’t wait to see Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds,” says Stanley. “Or come because you’ve heard that there’s an arts trail in the woodlands that’s really inspirational, and that’s your bag, and you can’t wait to check something like that out. But I love that sense of leaving your expectations at the door, where you think you’re going to the main stage, or to get through it, but, before you know it, you’ve been drawn into a nook or cranny in the forest or a small reggae sound system that’s behind a stone wall, or a 1980s throwback DJ session.
“There’s this whole world that’s been created behind the scenes at Body & Soul, that’s outside the main stages. That’s really where the magic lies, for me. One of them is ‘my house’. It’s a throwback to the best house party you and your friends ever had. It’s a familiar feeling of home in the middle of a forest.
“I can’t wait to see how people respond to this. It’s a whole series of structures that have been built specifically for the festival. There’s a sitting room, a kitchen, a bathroom with an old bath. There are lampshades and couches dotted around the place. There’s fantastic funk and disco music and a couple of great bands playing there. You can’t buy those kinds of memories.”
*The Body & Soul Festival is at Ballinlough Castle, Co Westmeath, Friday, Jun 21 — Sunday, Jun 23. Further information: http://bodyandsoul.ie.
— Richard Fitzpatrick
