The Shaking Bog: a festival where art and nature meet

Living in the Glencree Valley, just uphill from the quaint, picturesque village of Enniskerry, I often feel blessed walking among the ever-changing wonders of the natural world. It wasn’t always like this, however.
I grew up on the small Caribbean island of Trinidad but was sent each year, dutifully, to boarding school in Ireland – the birthplace of my mother. Leaving the lush and vibrant colour and balmy heat of the West Indies for the bleak winter skies of Ireland did not appeal to my young soul, although, strangely, my mother sat on our steamy, tropical veranda and dreamt of living in Wicklow with a view of the Sugarloaf from her window. Just as we do now.
In my earlier years, I was drawn to the world of contemporary dance, a largely urban environment, and later became the artistic director of a number of international dance festivals. But it was here, in the Wicklow hills, that my focus shifted to the natural world.
The arts and nature have always been connected, of course. The magic and majesty of the natural world have always served as both symbol and inspiration. Think of the landscapes of Paul Henry, the plays of John Millington Synge, the poems of WB Yeats, the haunting airs of Irish traditional music. And in these thoughts and idle musings, the idea for a new festival emerged, organically, almost despite myself. And so The Shaking Bog – taking its name from a local phenomenon – was born.
The Shaking Bog: Where Art & Nature Meet is a creative initiative, based in the Glencree valley, that seeks to profoundly connect with the natural world. It is an idea that is rooted in a sense of place, heritage and community. It is local in spirit but international in aspiration. Its dreams are big but its offerings are intimate. It invites people to quietly converse and to carefully listen. The Shaking Bog celebrates connection and the consequent possibility for transformation.
It is a modest, if radical, bid to somehow find a different way forward – to ask that we join hands and imagine a different way of being so that we might create a brighter future, together. In recent years, we been graced by the presence of poets like Michael Longley, Alice Oswald, Paul Durcan and Liz Berry, musicians such as Colm Mac Con Iomaire, David Power, Liam Ó Maonlaí, Paddy Glackin and local girl Mary Coughlan as well as stellar nature writers like Melissa Harrison and John Lewis-Stempel among many others.
But I like to imagine that The Shaking Bog is not solely tied to a time or place. It is more of a ‘movement’ towards new possibilities. Fluid and shape-shifting, it is fast evolving into something that can respond to our ever changing world. Whether it takes the form of a festival, or a podcast, a one-off commission or a longer-term project, The Shaking Bog is now seeking to embrace all art forms and cultivate a diverse panoply of creative initiatives, always immersive and experiential, either within or connected to nature.
This year, over the weekend of September 14th-15th, the festival is packed with creative engagement and outdoor adventure designed to ignite conversations, inspire new ideas, move the heart, perhaps even change perspectives, but most of all, offer hope. There will be opportunities to wonder at the beauty of moths, to learn about bryophytes, to converse about biodiversity, to create natural pigments, to hike through the hills in the footsteps of Samuel Beckett, to listen to poetry, to consider the mystery of whales, to contemplate the secrets of the bog and more.
Spanning all the art forms across a range of locations – including even a telephone box – this festival sits squarely on the seam between art and nature and its stellar line up of artist and nature experts reflects this; from poetry with the wonderful Paula Meehan to folk songs and storytelling with the extraordinary Sam Lee, from the world of the whale with renowned writer, Philip Hoare to a sublime concert with internationally acclaimed fiddler Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, from an immersion in the bog-lands with the award winning theatre maker Luke Casserly to the world of sheep farming and art with the remarkable sheep farmer and artist Orla Barry. It’s a programme, I hope, to provoke and to reassure by equal measure.
And peppered amid this array of truly outstanding artists are nature experts who will guide people into the landscape and immerse them in the wonders of the natural world, with the inspiring Prof Jane Stout from Trinity College, Dr Joanne Denyer, an expert in bryophytes, Mark O’Callaghan, a guide with the National Parks and Wildlife Services, and our very own local nature artists Liz Wilson and Yanny Petters, as well as Ciarán Finch – our own moth expert.
The Shaking Bog sits on the seam between nature and art where alchemy happens and light shines in. It is here that, I believe, hope resides. It is a labour of love. It happens because we believe in magic. We believe in the power of the imagination to bring about real change. It is a song to nature and a prayer for the future of all.
As Yeats summoned us in Into The Twilight:
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will.
Catherine Nunes is festival director of The Shaking Bog Where Art & Nature Meet (shakingbog.ie)