Photo of Pippa Evans
05 Nov, 2024

PODCAST Levity, trees and the shape of the festival. A conversation with Pippa Evans

The Realisation Festival is five years old, so how is it shaping up? What ways best describe the gathering? And also, what of its distinctive coupling of music and improvisation with ideas and the challenges of today?

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Photo of Books in a Library
01 Nov, 2024

Introducing the Realisation Podcast

The new Realisation Festival Podcast has been launched!

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19 Jun, 2024

The festival and activist pressure. Tell me more.

Activist groups are attempting to establish a connection between the festival and the ecological plight of Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland. The festival organising team recognises the value of activism when it is grounded in sound understanding and intentionality. However, on reflection, this current campaign is based on a misunderstanding of the festival, a misrepresentation of the predicament of the lough, and it reduces a complex multidimensional predicament to simplistic solutions in a way that risks compounding the problem.

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25 May, 2024

Why do we have small groups at Realisation?

Small groups are the beating heart of the Realisation Festival.  When designing the festival, thinking about how we might help people un-imagine and re-learn, we wanted to create spaces for listening, reflecting and discussing.   The talks and workshops provide varied and stimulating content, there is plenty of unscheduled time for reflection, it is the daily small group meeting that creates the chance to integrate, discuss and play with the ideas that germinate during the festival.

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20 Mar, 2024

You Can’t Be Serious!? by Pippa Evans

The Realisation Festival is something quite special. 150 people, all gathered together to reflect on where we are in the world, personally, collectively, politically and so on and so forth. And it is a deep and reflective time and gosh are we going to end up being all earnest all weekend, wringing our hands and self-flagellating?

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29 Feb, 2024

Mark Vernon on the Soul

This year, 2024, the Realisation Festival is focused on the soul. Most will have an intuition that soulfulness matters. Many will go a step further and actively seek ways of attending to the soul. But what might be meant by this simultaneously crucial but elusive aspect of ourselves and life in all its fullness?

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09 Apr, 2023

More Thoughts on Difference, by Mark Vernon

The overarching theme for Realisation 2023 is Unlearning and Reimagining Difference. So here are a few ideas on types of difference that might seed your thoughts, or prompt an awareness of more types overlooked below.

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28 Jan, 2023

Pippa Evans on Improvising Difference

The scene opened and two improvisers began the show. They hadn’t looked at each other when the lights had come up, and when they did to their horror, one of them was putting X-rays on a Lightbox and the other was frying something in a pan.

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