For The Birds, Brighton Festival review - 'night walk into exquisite sensory thrills'

For The Birds is art as event, described in the Brighton Festival programme as “an immersive night-time adventure into a wild avian landscape”. It takes place throughout the Festival and, judging from its opening weekend, looks likely to prove very popular.

To attend, you take a bus from one of two spots in Brighton (one central, one outlying) and are shipped to a “secret woodland location”, then asked to follow lights strung overhead on a mile long trek during which a wide selection of pieces boggle the eye, ear and mind.

The installation artist-cum-landscape architect Jony Easterby has made it his life’s work to draw attention to our wild habitats. He does so with a clear ecological agenda, with woodland, its history and its future, a particular passion. For The Birds, which Easterby put together and coordinated, working with a collective of artists expert in sound and light manipulation - Mark Anderson, Kathy Hinde, Ulf Pedersen and Pippa Taylor - was originally staged at RSPB Ynys-hir reserve in Wales, and then travelled last year to New Zealand, where it was an enormous success.

It would be churlish to reveal too much about exactly what it entails, akin to a reviewer giving away vital film plot resolution or revealing the punchlines to a comedian’s best jokes. Surprise is part of For The Birds’ appeal. In the forested dark – and, if you attend, do go later rather than earlier so the sun has fully set - it relies on combining sound and light in hugely imaginative ways. These range from glowing red miniature bird-like UFOs whizzing close over the walker’s head, to a live human cellist hauntingly playing in a lamp-lit grove, to an extraordinary, mesmerising piece where a piano’s innards have been mechanized to sonically respond to the flitting-by of sparrow-like silhouettes. Occasional clearings then reveal the lights of east Brighton, lively and lustrous below, a show in its own right.

As striking is the manner in which individual trees have been lit in varying hues, or their branches cast as projected shadows, drawing attention to their living nature and unique physicality in an eerie way that couldn’t happen in daylight. Many of the combined sound and light effects recall the outlying areas of a good festival or rave (Easterby has form, long ago, in this area). Clattering, echoing, percussion, synched with flashes of fluorescent green amid the trunks and bark made me think of Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo’s early 20^th Century experiments with intonarumori, orchestral sound machines for the industrial age that rustled and thundered, while at other points, disorientated by psychedelic sensory overload all about, I could only think of Ken Kesey’s original Acid Tests, out in the wooded hills of Palo Alto.

For The Birds is an original and richly enjoyable experience and reminded this writer that such free-form art can be glorious. This kind of beauty is not generated in golf clubs by Tories, by those who think material wealth is the game of life. It blossoms on the fringes, away from the endless pursuit of money, created by the kind of people Daily Mailers might regard as excess to purpose. It is a small oasis of strange, contemplative, other-worldly loveliness in a land increasingly ruled by banal norms.

• Find out more about Brighton Festival 2017

Watch trailer for For The Birds at Brighton Festival 2017