From Personal to Collective

Performance of song for The Reasons in the Fens, practice-led research project. The Reasons in the Fens was a public storytelling performance event with a focus on local water management issues. It was inspired by La Rasgioni, a traditional form of community conflict resolution from the Gallura region of Sardinia and takes the form of a ‘mock’ court, complete with judge, jury and storytelling witnesses, drawn from the local community. A key part of the event is the sharing of a meal by the audience, whilst the jury considers its ‘verdict’. La Rasgioni was witnessed by Wilson in Sardinia in October 2015 and was reimagined and adapted for use in the Cambridgeshire Fens as part of the DRY (Drought Risk and You) Project, part of the UKRI Drought and Water Scarcity Programme. The Reasons was performed twice: at Ramsey Rural Museum on 7th June 2016 and at Peterborough Museum on 1st December 2016. As part of the event the singer/songwriter Sharron Kraus performed a specially commissioned song at both events, which took the personal stories from the area that had been collected by the researchers on the DRY Project and turned them into an expression of collective community experience. This file is a studio recording of the song, incorporating community voices and images of the area, collected as part of the research.