Lewis Dark Skies Festival sure to brighten up our lives after the lockdown
Like the cosmos, the fourth Hebridean Dark Skies Festival, taking place on the Isle of Lewis this February, has evolved.
“We started planning the 2021 festival just as lockdown was beginning,” says festival director Andrew Eaton-lewis. “At that point nobody knew how long it was going to last – we had to announce the programme in October 2020, but things were still uncertain.
“So we ended up planning a hybrid festival that we could shift in one direction or the other – either entirely online or some events could go live.”
As it turned out, with Scotland under a second lockdown from Boxing Day, the 2021 festival ended up being stretched – an onlineonly programme in February, exhibitions opening in April and live events in October.
Necessity might well be the mother of invention, but Andrew accepts that adapting to the pandemic “opened up all kinds of new ideas about how to engage people”.
Going ahead in 2021 also helped maintain the festival’s momentum. “If we hadn’t pushed on and said we were going to do something in 2021, we might not now be doing a 2022 festival.”
Andrew says that much has happened, creatively and in spreading the word about the festival, that may not have occurred without Covid.
“There’s a danger in festival programmers rushing back to the old ways of doing things, and forgetting about those people who can’t physically get to events.
“It’s something we’ve been thinking about”
Another thing to come out of lockdown has been a broadening of the festival’s themes. “One podcast interview I did was with American psychologist Kari Leibowitz, about her research into the relationship between mental health and long hours of darkness. She did a year in the north of Norway and found that people who live with almost complete
darkness in winter are quite often really resilient in terms of mental health.
“A lot of people in autumn 2020 were dreading the prospect of a winter lockdown, and were turning to her work to try and find ways of coping. So it was interesting that a Dark Skies Festival can be not just about astronomy, but also our relationship with darkness.”
The Hebridean Dark Skies Festival has always been rooted in Lewis, and this year’s programme includes more focus on people from the island – with an exhibition featuring seven local artists.
With an arts and astronomy programme including the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Catherine Heymans, singer-songwriter Rachel Sermanni, science communicator Roberto Trotta, science-themed comedy and a night swim, Andrew is looking forward to the event.
“It’s a strange time,” he says. “But there’s a great hunger for live events again.”