Tom Bailey: Can a walk across the Arctic be art?

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1:03Theatre is an odd art form for me because so much of it happens closed off from nature. You go into a black studio under heavy stage lights, there's a sort of certain fabricated artifice that shuts nature out. For me, I'm finding myself that I need that connection with nature more and more.

1:25For Tom Bailey, the journey is the art. He's about to cross the Arctic borderlands of Norway, Russia, Finland and Sweden all 600 kilometres by ski, sled, foot and boat It's deliberately slow He'll be taking photos, recording voice notes and gathering materials, stories and emotions from this rapidly changing landscape This is the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service where we investigate the creative process I'm Jo Morris and today I'm following theatre maker Tom on his icy trek from Cherkines in the far north to Stamson in the Norwegian Lofoten Islands. But before he sets out, he needs to prepare.

2:14Hello, hey. Hey Tom, I'm Jo. Yeah, nice to meet you. Good to meet you. Come in. Thanks for making the journey. We are going up to the top of the house. That's my kit packing room. How many floors are we going up? Going up three floors, just this little garret at the top of the house. And welcome to the... Well, you've got a lot of kit, haven't you? A lot of kit. At some point, I'm going to need to swap out. The winter stuff will be carried in a sled behind me. Where do we start? I mean... Well, big down jacket, waterproof trousers, petrol stove. I've got a camping kettle, survival bag, head torch.

2:51Got some compede, so for those blisters that I know are going to happen, that are going to bring tears to my eyes. These are my super warm mittens. And what are you expecting the temperature to be? Do you know? At the beginning, anywhere between minus 35 and plus 5. Perhaps most days to hover, maybe around minus 15. What are you like in the cold, Tom? Sadly, my circulation in my hands and feet is not great. So it's going to be very difficult to put up the tent. And I guess that brings me to my lovely reindeer skin. What is this? Yeah, you've got a whole reindeer skin. There's a whole reindeer skin.

3:30Up in northern Norway and Finland, reindeer herding is the main source of industry for, say, Sami people. So the reason for taking it is to actually kind of fit in with part of the artwork that we're looking to do. What are you using it for? Potentially wearing it at some points. It's very, very useful to have out to maybe sit on or to keep warm. How are you going to wear it? show me maybe maybe I think this could become some sort of cape or something if I need to keep warm I mean it suits you well I found myself loving this kind of pattern on the inside of the skin it's really quite beautiful and kind of fits into a theme of marking and mapping which is going to be a cool part of this journey so that takes me to trying to find a persona that I feel asked an important artistic question but also allows me to play a bit as a theatre person.

4:25So I guess one of the big questions for me right now is at a time of climate change, how can nature be represented within our democratic system? I'm journeying as me but also exploring as I go this idea that it's a lost reindeer on a migration journey to kind of explore and critique the way that these humans have put geopolitical borders on space. So looking at space and geography from the animal perspective is something that allows license to play, but also a very serious question about how can nature, or reindeer in this case, be represented in human democratic systems. So you're imagining yourself as a lost reindeer?

5:04Yeah, I guess imagining myself as this kind of journeying reindeer that has taken on a human form for a specific purpose. I don't know if you've come across this thing called the Arctic Council. I mean, it's all over the news right now because of what Donald Trump's saying about, you know, claiming Greenland and all of this. And it's brought this whole question of what is the Arctic and who owns it? Currently, we've got this big bit of sea ice, i.e. the Arctic, that is melting quite fast. And that's unclaimed. It's open sea. It's a big, big geopolitical question. What goes on there affects everyone in the world.

5:44How do you feel about being by yourself? Yeah, I, to be honest, I'm a bit of a hermit. I think there's loneliness and there's solitude, isn't there? And solitude is about feeling communion with other things, maybe more than human things. How comfortable is it for you, Tom, not knowing exactly what you're going to be doing? Well, I guess I need to have a plan of where I'm going to go, but ultimately you don't know what's going to happen. And that's almost like an open rehearsal, because I make devised theatre that is about improvisation to develop a script or a show. I'm not the kind of guy that needs a script right from the start and that, right, these are my lines, this is what I'm doing.

6:24I can trust in that openness and playfulness to find something. It's about documenting what happens. There's no right or wrong way for this to go. My own body, the conditions, the landscape, recording that in as faithful a way as possible. But yeah, I'm nervous. You're nervous. Yeah, I think just with an extreme environment as that, having a protocol in place for, you know, what you need to do to make sure you survive. So how many layers are you wearing on the first day? Well, if it's a minus 15 day, then, you know, just a couple of layers. If it swings proper cold, then I'm going to be fully bunkered down in my reindeer outfit and my down jacket and about five layers.

7:21a tuesday morning it's the fourth day into my journey and this is by far and above the most challenging conditions that i'll encounter so i'm actually completely alone in the kind of borderland between Norway and Finland. Just as a bit of context the snow is so rotten because it's so warm here that you just fall through so if you're going to pull a sled across the snow you have to leave early in the morning which is what I did but it was still frozen and you have to yeah make your own tracks kind of go out and back 100 to 200 meters skiing without the sled compress the snow and then back along especially through undulating forest it's desperately back-breaking work but one that requires a kind of yeah a patience i don't have yet but at the same time just giving yourself to this beautiful white sunny mild landscape everything's kind of dusted like sugar on a cake but i found a snowmobile track which in these snow terms means absolute heaven because a snowmobile has compressed the snow on the edge of a lake somewhere which actually looks to be dangerously melting so I don't think I want to cross it I'm just going to follow this and see where it takes me all right

8:57Okay, so I'm on day six, I guess, as may be anticipated on the plane progress. Wow, the conditions are something else. I'm currently wading and pulling my fled through the incredibly unforgiving snow so slow I'm crossing Lake Inari so I'm in these vast stretches of open expanse at one level it's quite clarifying you feel so tiny like your thoughts would just be crushed with a tiny bit of glass you'd just be blown away or swept away by the wind. I haven't seen a person all day. In fact, I haven't seen a person in three days. So, yeah. Right. I'm going to take a break. I felt a bit worried about Tom when I heard that voice note.

10:06So I was keen to catch up with him on a video call. So I'm in a town called, I think it's pronounced Innari. It is right in the north of Finland. The big story is that the temperatures are much warmer than is usual. The snow is melting faster. There just hasn't been a lot of snowfall for March. Everyone's saying it's almost like we're two months ahead of what's usual. So the warmer conditions have actually made the journeying tougher? Yes. tougher from the level of physical exertion to drag the sled through rubbish snow i guess not having to battle minus 10 minus 20 degrees has been a bit easier tell me about your blisters yeah ski boots blisters medium rare shall we say they're really painful on the first couple days break you know we went to a local sami tradition the local reindeer race yesterday everyone was airing like big boots and stuff and i was just airing my sandals like airing my blisters they're like little maps little skin landscapes in themselves i've got a few days here in in re to research and connect with local culture but hopefully heal blisters before the next stage of the journey i didn't realize until i went to the cedar museum today that a lot of the route that I'm following has either been present or historically been part of reindeer herding migration routes.

11:35It feels like that's a really nice find to kind of further give the journey and the route take a bit of meaning from the inland to the sea. Reindeer are so present up here, the landscape and in the life of herders, in pretty much the same way that cows are important and present in Britain. How much has your experience with nature and your interaction informed the process? Yeah, a lot. I think there was a quote by Mike Tyson on boxing, like, every fighter has a plan until they get punched in the face. You can plan all the artwork you want beforehand, but then if the landscape punches you in the face, it's about just reacting to that.

12:18The body's still earning something and learning and being able to respond to that landscape by being in it and not just like looking at it from a window. Even though I feel like I've had no time to try and respond artistically, my body's been kind of forced to in a very beautiful way. I know I'm doing the journey conceptually, but I think there's like a bit of more of an artistic, deeper sense of like needing to find the me. in the...

13:14Get wise. Download the Wise app today. T's and C's apply. Journey. When do I really feel it? A heart to like respond to this place through writing or through voice? A trust will come, but I just have to keep trying ideas. Take it this long. There's deep pleasure in just walking through energylessness into energy, existing like a kind of tiny caterpillar in the middle of the day, crawling across the surface of something huge and big in a kind of timelessness.

14:01I'm standing on top of this river, so I'm kind of hoping that the ice holds out. If you get this recording, it probably will have done. as well as artistic curiosity there's another more personal reason for tom's journey well i was a kid i had a brain tumor and then fortunately was sort of diagnosed with lymphoma so there was a kind of recurrence of cancer it was a different kind of cancer i was 36 at the time and that was a bit of a shock to the system so i pretty much on the tail end of covid was having to isolate because I was going through a very strong form of chemotherapy. It was tough and I got very, very ill because of this pneumonia so I could hardly breathe.

14:41It sucked, absolutely. And added with that sense that you just don't know if you're going to come through it. Maybe there's a sense that actually nature becomes a companion during that illness.

14:59So when you remember when you were going through chemo, Was there a strong desire to connect with nature at that point then? Yeah, very much so. There was nowhere else I could really live because I couldn't be with people. So I rented a little hut and I found actually a market garden that I could volunteer at. It was quite a frosty, cold winter. And so in the mornings, you just see everything covered in this crystallised frost, which was quite beautiful. It got me really thinking about patterns in nature. That almost made me feel quite held in a way. There's something much bigger going on here.

15:36Article 1. A place outside a cabin somewhere. This is an encampment. On the horizon, just fir trees. Pinbricking the air like a tiny bed of nails. How gently the snow river slides. Still.

16:04How trees hold silence on the melt.

16:20This is the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service. I'm Jo Morris and today I'm following environmental theatre maker Tom Bailey.

16:33So I've come to the close of the second stage of the journey between Inari and Enantakio.

16:46I'm camping on a huge wide river before heading on a few kilometres to the Swedish-Finnish border river where I'm going to pause my journey for a few days of work. I feel like my body as an hourglass tipped up for the last few days as I decided to shift my rhythm, journey through the night to avoid the heat in the middle of the day and the melting ice and what light, what light I saw.

17:20I feel like I've been party to every kind of colour on the spectrum and colours that I didn't even know existed the light does that something to you kind of pulls you up by a thread up here this high magic tingling holding listening arctic light It's not just Tom's impressions fueling him creatively as he treks through Arctic landscapes. Although he sometimes doesn't see anyone for days, when he does, he seeks their views. Okay, I'm going to ask a slightly odd question. I'm very interested in the Arctic region as a whole. Maybe in the news, Donald Trump talking about Greenland and all of this.

18:06how does that make you feel when he says that and and what is the arctic region for you that's a lucky thing that usa and donald trump are quite far away i'm not concerned about that but uh what i'm concerned is climate changing and global warming because it's changing our way of living mostly in fishing maybe in hunting and in reindeer herding Tash, can you come out a sec? Let's just say hello to Joe who works at the BBC Hi Joe Hi Tash The majority of this trek is Tom on his own but at different points along his route he's arranged to meet his artistic partner designer Natasha Soonchild How are you?

18:51Good, thank you After like however many weeks of blue skies we've just had some snow come through and even in the shadows it's still so blinding There is this kind of fluorescent quality to being outdoors that is really hard on the eyes. And the fact that we've just had like about 10 days of nothing but sun has made photography actually really hard because you're just dealing with this complete sheer whiteout and horrible shadows the whole day. And you've got these tiny pockets at either end of the day where you're like, right, let's get out and do some photography. So how's the work going? What have you been working on what themes?

19:27I've been working on some masks. We kind of were asking ourselves, what can we anticipate to be meeting up in the Arctic? So we have done ice slash snow. You can even find lingonberries and blueberries under the snow when you're walking through snow landscapes and your footprints can kind of like burst them and you've got these like pink bursts. Night is about the profound relationship to darkness that a place like the Arctic has. We have forest and we will be doing sea as well. Yeah, sea is going to make an appearance, a cameo at the end. A cameo at the end. And you're going to be meeting these characters on their way to the Arctic Council.

20:15Yeah, the way I see it is that they are clothing themselves for this purpose, taking this form as of this moment, but could change. I like that they are kind of on a journey as well. Aurora is based around the image of a fox. I was doing research into different folk stories and beliefs. One of the Sami stories is that the aurora is created by this arctic fox running through the hills and its tail sparks the aurora.

20:46the ice character is loosely based around an owl and we were trying to kind of like create it that it was carrying something it's really fascinating to read about what is being uncovered in the ice as the ice melts here in the arctic being like gases held in permafrost to like old skulls or old mammoths slowly uncovered by the melting ice we actually photographed that on lake anari We both wear the costume, so we both get a chance to take photographs. I've also been experimenting with ice dyeing. Wow. What's that? So this is it in process. With silks, you have to mordant the silk, which creates a bite on the surface of the fabric.

21:30So the dye will take. Yeah. I've been going out to different places to collect snow and ice. You can't predict how it's going to melt, but it pulls the dye through the fabric. It goes on all little journeys, but the lovely thing is that it's completely unpredictable. It's the way that the ice is melting that I feel echo the landscape here. How will you use those pieces? Well, I think I'm going to use some of those pieces in Aurora, the character. A lot of the ice dyeing, when you look at it, looks like an aerial view of what you would imagine the landscape looks like from above. And using the white silk, you've already got the element of snow in there built into the fabric.

22:15But it is also changing. Trees are moving north as the earth heats up. As the ice melts. I walked through the night one night. It didn't even get dark. when we spoke in the early days of this project that you wanted to listen to the landscape what have you heard so far i think in this refreezing process the lake groans and cracks and creaks like this old beast it feels alive like tash thought it was a bear at first took me a while to like work out what it was and you've been recording some of the dripping as well Yeah, I mean, it's a season of melt, seeing how pockets of lands emerge from the snow, all this pine forest around.

23:03It's got the most incredible reverb. You really do hear the most wonderful echo. It's just been very pleasant to call out or whistle out and have the forest speak back to you. Days and days of just walking by myself. Have you been wearing the costume? I have it's like a guilty night secret I've enjoyed having to travel as a human by day and then in the evenings get the reindeer skin out and get the antlers out the antlers on this section took a bit of a battering but I've got myself a new set of antlers and how does the reindeer costume then help you yet access those other things I'm trying not to be like scientific about it I mean I could for instance look up a whole load of biology about reindeers how does a reindeer smell.

23:52I think maybe I'm keen now to like just follow instinct. How does this thing make me feel? It gives a little bit like the silence that I described, an immense sense of readiness and looking. The deer, I feel, has an energy that looks and observes with immense detail. It watches everything and it moves gently and silently through places and through landscape. Tom's been invited to a local Sami gathering and he's keen to hear from members of this indigenous community who say their way of life is under threat OK, let's go into the land I've got a question for you both If you were to have the possibility for one thing in nature to be represented at the Arctic Council nature could turn up what would that be for me I feel like the sea it would be the sea of course I'm coming from an island but also we know too little about the sea and be treating it so bad the last decades and also because we don't see it of course it's easy to not understand or not having a thought or taking care of it the forest you can actually see or you can relate to it in another way or even the mountains with the minds yeah and if c were to take on a human form what would it look like it would be something that would be very attractive and scary at the same time okay but i don't know how to it would look like you blue and beautiful

25:40great okay so thank you guys that's been a total pleasure

25:48I wiggle westwards towards the Lofoten islands and towards the sea somewhere along there in about 10 or so days time I'll meet Tash again and we'll do another few days work there's something about wanting to find a way through to something else it swims inside me wanting to find the beauty of compressed snow

26:21there's so much to take in in this two months the project itself, it's not finished we're going to need a kind of post-production and I think both Tash and I are dreaming into that moment where, you know, we get to sit back and kind of develop this research into a fully-fledged artwork or artworks. So, yeah, looking forward to Stamson. I think Stamson will be very much a kind of raw and rough presentation of the journey itself from the point of view of the deer. I'll have five to seven days to present an interpretation from, you know, hundreds to thousands of shots and pick 60 of the best that maybe articulate the storyboard of the journey and then present that at an international theatre festival in a workshop format which I'm I'm a little bit nervous about and it's obviously a decent festival and I'm very excited and honoured to present what I'm doing there quite how it will be interpreted like an English guy doing a very long journey as a deer across several countries in a changing season you know maybe that will get a thumbs up or a thumbs down but i'm excited just to share see what people's responses to the journey and the themes i'm trying to explore yeah so that's the update on how the artwork is going all right you've been listening to the documentary in the studio with environmental theatre maker Tom Bailey.

27:54It was produced and presented by me, Jo Morris, and the executive producer was Paula McGrath.