Blue Pearl is a ground-breaking new oratorio for choir, four solo singers and orchestra. It conveys a contemporary view of spirituality which transcends individual religious traditions, embracing humanity, and the earth, as a whole. ‘Blue Pearl’ is the earth, as seen from space: a unity; our precious home.
...A new role in a large complementary health and education centre in Letchworth opened my understanding further. I learned about energy medicine, experienced every type of therapy from homeopathy to hypnotherapy, medical herbalism to Ayurvedic medicine – and did training in some modalities myself. It was an amazing time of learning through experience. During this mind and spirit-expanding time, I was growing away from my evangelical church. I still loved the community it gave me, but my growing understanding wasn’t fitting comfortably with the theology of my church.
This film is about the life of this incredible man, his personal journey and how it profoundly changed him. Early in his life, he had a bad car accident which propelled him towards swimming and diving to help relieve pressure on some of his bones. And this led to a life long passion for the sea and all of its ecosystems.
From an early age I pencil-sketched reams of pictures whenever I could, quite naturally discovered ‘art as meditation’, cherished quiet moments in my parents’ east end council house garden, ran energetically around with friends and my family’s dog in local grassland parks and nearby exquisite densely wooded regions of Epping Forest, and enjoyed family outings to the sea or countryside. I would lose myself for hours drawing, being in amazing and magical green spaces, creating, playing music when I took up bass guitar at 13, or simply staring wondrously at the shapes of mesmerising morphing clouds and the gyrating activity of bees hopping from flower to flower while they made intriguing buzzsaw-like sounds.
Starring Johnny Depp and Bill Nighy, Minamata is essentially two bittersweet true stories that become intertwined. Depp plays Life magazine’s photojournalist William Eugene Smith in his twilight years in 1971, who has become a risk for the magazine as he didn't complete his previous assignment and drinks heavily. He is reluctantly persuaded by two people from Minamata to take on what was to become his last photo assignment in Japan to document a largely fishing community fighting for justice against a chemical manufacturer polluting local seawater.
This film is about a large asteroid heading for the Earth which would devastate much of life on the planet. The story is about a small group of scientists and helpers trying to alert the world about this impending catastrophe. They find so many obstacles in their way and are exasperated to find that a simple, clear, scientific truth gets distorted, manipulated or dismissed by vested interests.
As a young child, I lived in the city. And in WW2 my city, Plymouth, was one of the most heavily-bombed in the UK. So my early experiences were almost totally shaped by war – as I chronicled for the BBC WW2 History Archive. But the one thing that for me was not affected by the war in any way was my fascination with the natural world. I used to spend hours in our little garden, watching the birds and the beetles. I scooped up frog spawn from a pond in the park and put it in an enamel dish that I made into a mini-pond with stones and moss so that I could watch the eggs hatch into tadpoles and slowly become frogs.
I was brought up in the Evangelical Christian tradition. Whilst I felt the loving energy of a divine essence, most of the rest of the religion felt like a lot of rules and constraints. And so, during my adolescence, I questioned and challenged. I really wanted to find answers but to some, I was too much, and one person described me (in a prayer meeting) as “an attack from the devil” – which got a loud round of “amens” from others. And so, I left the safe shores of my upbringing and began a long quest for a spiritual home.
The performance of this piece of music in October 2021 in London was inspired by the book "The Universe is a Green Dragon" by Brian Swimme. Therefore, it’s all about the amazing unfolding of the universe from the big bang to the present day.
Whilst the basic plot of this film is fairly simple (a burnt out lawyer falls in love with a chaotic singer), the story is told with humour, understanding and with the occasional unexpected twist and turn.
