• THE PYRE PARADE - NORTH

• (2018)

Rough Band • Death Walk  • Community • Ritual

THE FIRST PYRE PARADE

The first Pyre Parade was created in Ipswich for the SPILL Festival of Performance in October 2018. In the weeks leading up to the festival, The Rough Band led a programme of Parade Skills workshops for adults and children, inviting participants to make costumes, masks and noisemakers that would become part of the procession. Local architectural practice EDRM translated The Rough Band's design for the central effigy - a tree growing from a boat - into a buildable structure and oversaw its construction. Ipswich Borough Council worked closely with the team on permissions and public safety, while Pacitti Company, producers of the SPILL Festival under the direction of Merry Grey, coordinated the overall production.

The parade began on the opening night of the festival, when the effigy was unveiled on Ipswich Waterfront before being installed at La Tour Cycle Café. Accompanied by the Black Shuck - the outsized hound of East Anglian folklore - it became a public repository for bad news. For the following ten days, visitors were invited to write down their worries, regrets and disappointments before posting them into the structure. Bad debts, health concerns, difficult relationships, colouring outside the lines - whatever form the badness took, it became part of the growing collective offering.

On the final evening of the festival, the effigy was carried north through the centre of Ipswich to Christchurch Park. Around 500 people joined the inaugural procession, led by caller Nathaniel Robin Mann and accompanied by mystical performers carrying burning sage, a brass band, and the core group of gold-clad Death Walkers tethered to O, who struck the ground rhythmically with his stang as the procession advanced.

At Christchurch Park, the crowd gathered as the brass band Robert had spotted busking earlier that year, and subsequently invited to play, struck up The Final Countdown. As the music played, the effigy, along with the accumulated bad news it contained, was ceremonially set alight. As the flames rose into the night sky, the parade enacted its central gesture: a collective act of release, creating space for hope, renewal and the possibility of a better future.