Section:GDN 1N PaGe:8 Edition Date:190803 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 2/8/2019 17:48 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
- The Guardian Saturday 3 August 2019
(^8) News
Fe st iv a l-go er s s w ap
drink and drugs for
wellness highs
Sarah Marsh
Shanti Giovannetti-Singh
Festivals are traditionally a mecca for
music and hedonism, but a new focus
on wellbeing is emerging as young
people swap drink and drugs for mind-
fulness and yoga.
In recent years there has been an
explosion in festivals with well being at
their heart. This weekend the TV pre-
senter Fearne Cotton will host Happy
Place, which is dedicated to “simple
joy” and helping people “unlock that
inner happiness”. Other festivals are
merging music and wellness, such as
RunFestRun in Wiltshire, Love Trails
on the Gower peninsula, Meadows in
the Mountains in Bulgaria, and Soul
Circus, a wellness festival with a focus
on yoga in the Cotswolds.
It’s a movement being refl ected in
huge festivals such as Glastonbury,
which introduced a wellness area this
year. Latitude, a music festival in Suf-
folk, also made a big push on wellbeing
this summer, off ering yoga workshops,
art installations, and swimming.
Alex Holbrook, founder of the spir-
itual wellbeing platform Otherness,
said: “Glastonbury had the Humble
Well area this year and they also did
lots of spiritual and wellbeing stuff ,
so things such as 12 indigenous spir-
itual elders who had come across on
a pilgrimage. They did workshops on
the misuse of ayahuasca [a hallucino-
genic plant cocktail] and how to look
after your spiritual as well as men-
tal health .”
She attributes the change to the
wellbeing movement. “Ten years ago
meditation and yoga were not main-
stream but now there are dedicated
areas for them at Glastonbury, which
is amazing. When I was at Glastonbury
this year there were a few people who
I saw jogging on the Saturday morning
... Culturally, we are becoming more
wellbeing-focused,” she said.
Another music festival embracing
wellness is Meadows in the Moun-
tains, set in the Rhodope mountains
near Bulgaria’s Greek border. It started
out with 50 people attending, rising
to 3,500 guests this summer in the
event’s ninth year. It off ers yoga, med-
itation and even cacao ceremonies ,
which is a type of shamanic healing.
Elena Byers, the curator of Mesa,
the wellbeing space at Meadows in
the Mountains, said there had been
a rise in music festivals adding a well-
ness element. “Absolutely. I fi nd as a
teacher as well you’ve got more and
more people who come to festivals
now than ever before and they are
much more curious and open-minded
about things like wellbeing ... They feel
more inclined to try stuff that they
haven’t before.”
She said what was on off er had also
changed. “It used to be that there were
just yoga classes but now you’ve got
more interesting things, like you’ve
got chanting circles and cacao cere-
monies or breath work.”
The change has come as young
people turn their backs on alcohol.
Research published in BMC Public
Health found more than 25% of young
people classed themselves as non-
drinkers , and that abstaining from
alcohol was becoming more main-
stream among people aged 16 to 24.
Holbrook said: “The sober move-
ment is also a huge part of what is
happening with festivals ... It’s becom-
ing more socially acceptable not to
drink so people at festivals don’t have
the same peer pressure .”
Theo Larn-Jones, the co-founder
and director of Love Trails, which
started in 2016, agrees. “ The crux of
it is that it is tapping into the desire
from, especially younger people – in
their 20s and 30s – to live fuller and
healthier lives and feel good.
“I am part of that group: we still
want to go to festivals and want to
party but don’t necessarily want to get
off our faces and get drunk in the pro-
cess ... It’s like the runners’ high, that
endorphin hit from a run is replacing
other kinds of highs you might get at
festivals .”
He said that 30 people attended the
2016 event, whereas this year nearly
2,000 people came along. “It has
grown really quickly,” he said.
Byers said the practices had a posi-
tive impact. “ We can see the tangible
eff ects ... not just in terms of our men-
tal wellbeing and our ability to be calm
and connect and recalibrate in a fast-
paced technological world. But they
also help us reconnect with people and
I think ultimately that’s why people
come to them and I think often when
they fi nd those things they tend not to
leave. They love it.”
▼ Now in its ninth year, the Meadows
in the Mountains festival in Bulgaria
off ers wellness techniques
PHOTOGRAPH: JACK PASCO
▲ Vin Diesel and Dwayne ‘The Rock’
Johnson in a scene from the fi fth
instalment of the Fast and Furious
franchise PHOTOGRAPH: JAIMIE TRUEBLOOD
▲ Love Trails on the Gower peninsula
off ers a mix of running and music
Stars of Fast
and Furious
fi lms ‘refuse
to lose fi ghts
with rivals’
Lanre Bakare
Arts and culture correspondent
Egocentric demands are nothing new
on Hollywood sets but producers of
the Fast and Furious franchise have
revealed its stars have gone so far as
to refuse to lose fi ghts against one
another.
Members of the team behind
the long-running movie series told
the Wall Street Journal that actors
including Jason Statham , Dwayne
“The Rock ” Johnson and Vin Diesel
have contract demands that limit the
amount of punishment their charac-
ters take in fi ghts.
Diesel, who has been with the fran-
chise from the beginning, reportedly
devised a complicated rating system,
tallying how many times each actor
was kicked, punched or headbutted,
to ensure violence was being doled
out equally. It was eventually deemed
unworkable, but Michael Fottrell , a
producer on fi ve of the movies , con-
fi rmed to the WSJ that fi ghts were
choreographed so that no one came
out looking like the defi nitive loser.
Diesel’s sister is reported to have
been present on set asking whether her
brother was “going to get his licks back
in ” after a fi ght scene during rehearsal.
Johnson, who had a career as a
WWE wrestler before moving into fi lm ,
is also reported to have requested his
character sit down rather than lie on
his back after a beating in a scene from
2017’s The Fate of the Furious.
Some of the demands have been
attributed to tensions between John-
son and Diesel. “It’s not always easy
being an alpha. And it’s two alphas,”
Johnson told USA Today. Diesel does
not feature in the latest release, Hobbs
& Shaw , in which Johnson stars along-
side Statham and Idris Elba.
The fi lm producer Jezz Vernon,
who has worked on films includ-
ing 2014’s football ho oligans drama
The Guvnors, sa id that even when
dealing with smaller budgets, direc-
tors and crews needed to be aware of
ego and potential problems.
“On some of these films we’ve
worked with people who have fi rst-
hand experience of the very violent
worlds of hooliganism or door secu-
rity work, but they tend to be very good
natured,” he said.
“Hooligans who are now in their
50s are good friends with each other
because they’ve had a shared expe-
rience. That air of mutual respect is
crucial and there’s the sense that if
someone was a bit arsey or bellig erent,
things could kick off .”
That fragile atmosphere mean t
that many former-hooligans avoided
on-screen violence altogether or ha d
certain demands if they d id partici-
pate, Vernon said. “People who have
a profi le don’t usually engage with any
fi ghting on screen or they want to be
seen as dominant if they do.”
‘We still want to party
but not necessarily to
get off our faces’
Theo Larn-Jones
Love Trails festival
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