March was a fairly quiet month for Blake news, with the big splash being the release by space-folk duo, Astralingua, of their new album, Safe Passage. A beautiful piece of work which has already garnered very favourable reviews, you can read my thoughts about the album in the Zoamorphosis review, in particular of their first single, an adaptation of Blake's "A Poison Tree".
Other musical news for March included the thirteenth year for Outside the Box, an annual music festival at Southern Illinois University. This year's event included a virtual reality exhibit, "Fool's Paradise", combining music, poetry and art. According to festival organiser, Christopher Walczak, the Digital Museum of Digital Art "commissioned a number of visual artists and composers to create a virtual world full of art based on the works of William Blake", with the event running from 27-30 March.
The stage performance of David Almond's classic for children, Skellig, at the Nottingham playhouse was reviewed by a number of newspapers. Blake's poetry appears throughout the novel and the stage play, adapted by Trevor Nunn, manages to retain some of the Romantic poet's work in its depiction of the encounter between two children, Michael and Mina, and the creature that is part human, owl and angel. The Times described it as capturing "a spirit of adventure and magical realism", while LeftLion called it a "soaring production".
The Blake-Parry hymn "Jerusalem" features in Arcadia, a film by Paul Wright stitched together from BFI footage and which was first shown on BBC4 on 7 March. According to a review in The Financial Times, it mingled lush pastures, clopping horses and country churches mingled with inevitable weirdness and occult hints. Arcadia doesn't "trace a simplistic journey from innocence to corruption", and while much of the English countryside may have been lost, so also the sense to retain what many people have has also grown.