with musician Joshua Green
It’s shortly after dawn at RAF Fylingdales and a cuckoo is having a transmitter strapped to his back. A few weeks later he will have flown thousands of miles across Europe and over the Sahara Desert to equatorial Africa. For millennia, the cuckoo’s call has inspired songs, stories and poems. Does he bring the spring? Tell our fortunes? Was he the shapeshifter that became a hawk? He certainly fools the reed warblers who feed him as a changeling baby. Now the voice of the cuckoo is fading - where has it gone?
‘Musicianship and environmental performance-art meet history and myth…an engaging & beautifully constructed tour de force’.
Dave Pritchard (Chair, UK Arts & Environment Network, and consultant to the Convention on Migratory Species)
'The performance was precise and compelling … such an exciting, multi-layered adventure.'
Linda France (award-winning poet)
'Gone Cuckoo was inspiring and moving… it will fill audiences of all ages with wonder and delight.'
Prof. Nick Davies (author of ‘Cuckoo, Cheating by Nature’)
'Father and son Malcolm and Josh Green have created a tour de force of environmental art. Gone Cuckoo mixes Josh's enchanting voice, hilarious acting and wonderfully improvised music-making with Malcolm Green's spellbinding gift for telling tales. Their shared story blends wonder and humour and joy with a profoundly serious message about the loss of British wildlife. Above all Gone Cuckoo is a love song to the most celebrated bird of the northern summer. '
Mark Cocker, author of: ‘Crow Country’, Birds Britannica’ and Our Place: Can We Save Britain's Wildlife Before It Is Too Late’
resurgence.org/magazine/article5320-the-bird-of-passage.html