becoming fungi, becoming forest is a guided tour of performance, poetry, moving image, mycelial and wild yeast experiences, choreography and singing at a series of secret locations across Coventry’s city centre.
We invite you to travel in small groups across the city to experience a performance celebrating the magic and beauty of being alive and part of the living world – even in a city. Inspired by Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life, we will imagine Coventry as a place of invisible connections and interacting ecosystems including humans, fungi, trees, microbes and other life.
We’ll take note of the nature around us – and even within us – from the fungi sprawling through and under city surfaces, to the yeasts living inside our body, to the fungi that link together with plants in complex networks known as the ‘Wood Wide Web’. We’ll experience how the human voice can replicate the complexity of these mycelial networks through polyphonic singing. We’ll listen to local stories from the Coventry Tree Wardens about saving Coventry’s urban trees and advocating the city as a forest.
We hope that through this experience you will transform your perception of who you are in relation to the city and natural world around you. And at such a critical time for climate change, with commitments from COP26 to reduce global warming, we ask how can Coventry be the best city for our planet?
