EXODUS DAY highlighted dramatic moments in the film realised as a public event on 30 September. The day opened in Margate’s central shopping precinct with the newly elected Pharoah Mann giving his victory speech to an excitable crowd. Over in the former Dreamland funfair, Antony Gormley‘s massive-scale Waste Man — created in collaboration with a team from Margate and the Isle of Thanet — was almost complete, a 25-metre figure tightly packed with the unwanted detritus of consumer society. At twilight the Waste Man burned…
EXODUS DAY continued in the evening with a cycle of Plague Songs at Margate’s Winter Gardens with Arthur Smith as MC. The free concert featured local singers and musicians performing their own versions of songs written exclusively for Exodus by Brian Eno & Robert Wyatt, Laurie Anderson, Cody ChesnuTT, The Tiger Lillies, Imogen Heap, Scott Walker, Rufus Wainwright, King Creosote, Stephin Merritt / The Magnetic Fields, and Klashnekoff who have each created a song inspired by one of the ten biblical plagues — Blood, Frogs, Lice, Flies, Death of Livestock, Boils, Hailstones, Locusts, Darkness and Death of the Firstborn. Following auditions in Thanet during the summer the chosen performers have been rehearsing with international musician and composer David Coulter and renowned voice coach Mary King. The people of Margate and Thanet are involved not only as performers on Exodus Dayand as actors in the film, but also in the creation of sets and costumes.
Exodus will be screened as both a feature film and a television broadcast on Channel 4 in 2007.
The spirit of Exodus threaded its way across the town with Towards a Promised Land, Wendy Ewald‘s large-scale banner photographs of children newly arrived in Margate. The photographs form an audiovisual trail of the children’s moving stories.