Enclosure: Hambledon Hill, Dorset 2007
A corridor through time. A meeting with the ancestors.
A performance journey across a landscape resonating with history and memory shaped by over five thousand years of human occupation. Horns, bronze percussion, fire, pyrotechnics and an unforgettable performance from Atsushi Takenouchi.
On Hambledon Hill prehistory is still visible despite thousands of years of elemental and human erosion. Beneath the Iron Age earthworks lie the vast remains of the largest neolithic enclosure in Europe, established over five thousand years ago.
On the autumn equinox 2007 Red Earth created a unique event, a powerful and highly charged journey that weaved between the past and the present, the living and the dead. A ritual mapping of a neolithic landscape shrouded in mist and steeped in atmosphere.
The equinox is a moment of balance and equilibrium, a fragile stillness before the pendulum of the year swings again. Enclosure marked this point of convergence: day with night, summer with winter, life with death.
Red Earth joined with horn players, flag bearers and seven hundred people on a symbolic journey that walked a boundary between time and space, reconnecting with both the land and the people who shaped it.
ENCLOSURE was informed and inspired by recent archaeological insights into neolithic ceremony and ritual, including Lewis-Williams and Pearce's 'Inside the Neolithic Mind' and RJ Mercer's detailed excavation of Hambledon Hill.