What would I alter: Kaye Dunnings, Shangri-La
Kaye Dunnings has been immersed in the world of festivals since he was 18, whether as a steward, building sets or later even as part of the theater company The Laundrettas. She started working at Glastonbury in the early 1990s and co-founded Shangri-La in 2009, which has since gained a reputation as one of the festival's most subversive and experimental venues.
While creative directing in Shangri-La is usually a year-round job, 2020 was a year like no other. When Glastonbury organizers decided to cancel the festival in the depths of the lockdown, Dunnings decided it was time to join the digital world. Just three months later, she helped set up the world's largest VR music and arts festival, Lost Horizon, which drew four million visitors over one weekend.
As she takes the opportunity to follow Lost Horizon, Dunnings discusses the pressures and successes of her virtual experiment and why we should use the embargo to address some of the biggest problems facing the events industry – from accessibility to sustainability.
Kaye Dunnings in avatar form at the VR Festival Lost Horizon
Your experience of locking I think I'm in a good position because I live really cheap. I don't have a lot of expenses, I live in a trailer in an old quarry so I don't need a lot of money to have a good life. That definitely made my experience very different from a lot of people who have to pay really high rents and children and a lot of expenses. I signed up for a (hand embroidery) course in May that I haven't even started. I thought, "I have to start again", this is something I'm desperate for.
I always moderate these big projects and a lot of other artists and of course lead everything creatively, but I don't do more. There is no time because my whole being is captured by the fast-paced, crazy way we work in events. It's like the desperate thing of doing something that is really quiet and very small. The need to create things is not lost, it just has to mutate in order to survive.