Sondering, an arts festival in the Lake District with a death-themed programme, debuts this weekend, featuring live music, wild swimming, and a communal funeral march. Organised by sisters Sophia and Camilla Minden, the event is designed to explore mortality in a celebratory manner, with the motto “fun is allowed.”
Origins in Childhood and Illness
Raised in the Lake District on “music, moss and macaroni cheese,” the Minden sisters were familiar with death from an early age. As children, they shared a bed and played in the woods, often bringing home injured or dying animals, including birds, frogs, and a rat named Adrian, whom they fed pâté and pork pie. They learned about the animals’ diets from “The Wind in the Willows,” as Sophia admits. Although few creatures survived, each death was honoured with a garden burial, complete with spoken words, singing, and a stone or flower placed on the grave.
Their early experiences took a personal turn when Camilla was diagnosed with late-stage Hodgkin’s lymphoma just after her 20th birthday. Given an 80% chance of survival, she confronted the other 20% by investigating local undertakers, which she found “dated, impersonal and expensive,” and planning her own funeral, which she wanted to include “spag bol and quite a lot of Michael Jackson.” Navigating “shit wigs” and others’ awkwardness about dying, she spent much time “bargaining with God,” promising to live life fully if she recovered.
Creating a Festival for Life and Death
Now aged 37 and 40, the sisters have retained that mindset. After considering setting up their own progressive funeral directors, they settled on creating a death-themed festival that celebrates life as much as it explores mortality. Unlike conference-style or town-based death events, Sondering is an arts festival where “fun is allowed.” The programme includes live music, theatrical performances, creative workshops (from clowning to shroud-making), and guided wild swimming in Rydal Water. “It’s OK to cry and ask for a cup of tea, it’s OK to laugh and dance,” says Sophia.
The festival is held on a working farm with a capacity of 300 to maintain an intimate atmosphere. The location was chosen for its proximity to specific geographical features. “The Lake District is stunning, magical, healing,” says Sophia. “And we want to share it in a way that brings the landscape and local history alive,” adds Camilla. At sunset on Saturday, a cappella group Mouthful will perform and lead a singing session inside Rydal Cave, utilising its natural acoustics.
Funeral March and Musical Tributes
On Sunday, festival-goers can join a slow communal procession with a willow coffin along the old Coffin Route from Rydal to Grasmere. Until the mid-1800s, this two-and-a-half-mile footpath served as the route for carrying the dead to church for burial. The coffin, collectively woven on site over the weekend and filled with personal notes of remembrance, will be taken inside St Oswald’s Church, where kora player John Haycock and Dan Bridgwood-Hill will perform with clarinet, guitar, violin, and fiddle. “This is as close to a funeral as we get at the festival,” says Camilla. “We’re not afraid of ritual.”
The festival’s music spans folk, reggae, opera, electro-punk, and an uplifting DJ set on Saturday night with an “emoshpit” for releasing emotions. Several acts have direct ties to death. Laurel Morgan’s improvised singing draws on the Celtic tradition of keening, using wails and wordless sounds to lament the dead. Sound artist Jack McNeill will perform with disassembled clarinets and words from poems written by his wife in response to losing three close family members in the same year. “It’s so easy to feel isolated in grief because it’s so rarely explored other than through a lens of sympathy,” he says. “I’d love people to feel less alone, more connected, and I think music does that better than most things.”
Addressing Criticism and Aims
Sophia and Camilla acknowledge that some question whether a music and arts festival romanticises or trivialises death. They insist the topic is “too big and too hard” for that. “We’re not saying death isn’t scary or painful or tragic,” says Sophia. “We’re asking if facing up to death together in this way can bring us closer to life and each other?” The festival’s ultimate goal is to encourage people to live as richly and compassionately as possible: “Live like they’re going to die.” Even as children with a garden full of wild animal graves, their house was always full of dancing, laughter, warmth, generosity, and love. “We thought death could do with a bit of that,” says Camilla.
The Sondering takes place at Rydal, Lake District, from 18–21 September.
