TRANSCRIPT

Part 1:
You will hear an interview with Maria Stefanovich co-founder of a creativity group which
organises workshops for executives.
Interviewer: Not long ago stressed-out executives at embattled Marks & Spencers were packed
off on a training course. There’s nothing unusual in that. But the team was in for a surprise.
There was no time management seminar, no flashy flip-charts. Instead they were faced with
cardboard, paint and glue. With us here is Maria Stefanovich, co-founder of Droll, the creativity
group which ran the creative workshop for those executives. What exactly did the team do with
these art supplies?
Maria: During the particular day-long session, each delegate was required to create a mask to
show the face they presented at work. You see. mask-making is a very effective corporate tool.
Often people create faces that are anxious and alienated. The process of looking inwards and
transforming difficult issues helps them access their intuitive, imaginative skills.
Interviewer: Why do you believe such an unconventional approach to seminars has caught on?
Maria: Creativity has become a prized commodity, even in such professions as accountancy.
Whereas once we could drag ourselves into work, safe in the expectation of doing nothing more
taxing than, work, now bosses have other ideas. They have begun to see that if you sit in a boring
meeting in a boring conference room, you will emerge with boring ideas. All companies are
hungry for new ideas, but if you push and pull in a pressured atmosphere, there's creative
bankruptcy. As companies become desperate to harness creativity and lateral thinking, they are
being forced to look at new ways of fostering those talents.
Interviewer: Where did such programmes originate from?
Maria: The roots of the play industry lie on the other side of the Atlantic. Ten years ago. the
marketing firm, Play, pioneered the techniques now taking off here in Britain Staff at Play invent
their own superheroes and costumes. They have an office playroom and a company dog which is
picked up for work even when its owner is away, and there are no conventional job titles.
Instead, employees have business cards printed with peculiar slogans such as ‘What if?' and
‘Voice of reason’. When you turn work into a place that encourages people to be themselves,
have fun and take risks, you unleash their creativity. It all comes down to employers having at
last realised that a happy team is a creative one. Funnily enough, excuse the pun. most of the
companies that sign up are the ones that have least need for it; young, gung-ho firms in new
media and advertising. They do a lot of presentations, but their workers do them in a linear way.
Creativity programmes make them think laterally. Some companies send people on adventure
excursions. Creativity groups are another way of getting people focused and excited.
Interviewer: The Humberside Training and Enterprise Council found that storytelling workshops
breed confidence. How so?
Maria: Storytelling workshops are particularly beneficial in confidence building. There was one
woman who presented a story about how nervous she felt giving a presentation to the board. She
said she felt like a rabbit caught in the headlights and her teeth felt too big for her mouth. So, we
acted out a story with her as the rabbit. The humour of it allowed her to overcome that fear.
These days, we are seeing everything from mime, circus skills and comedy to finger-painting. It
all sounds worryingly New Age. but our company has been called in by such conservative and
long- established corporations such as Smith-Kline Beecham. Hedron, Chesterton Property and
government agencies. It has also worked with staff at the Industrial Society. We asked them to
describe the society as if it were a landscape. At first, everyone talked about how it was a
beautiful, serene place. Then someone described a bog. another a volcano about to erupt. It's all
about encouraging better communication. The benefits are tangible. We've had lots of feedback
about how staff bring more passion and ideas to their work. They take more risks and are more
honest.

Part 2:
Lecturer: Franz Marc is one of the lesser known artists of the group known as the German
Expressionists, but he was instrumental in pointing the way towards abstract art. In 1998 several
of Marc's paintings fetched record prices at auction in London, and today he is recognised as one
of the most significant artists of the twentieth century.
Born in Munich in 1880, Marc was profoundly influenced by the work of the Post-
impressionists, in particular Van Gogh and Gauguin, which led him to experiment with bright
primary colours. His subject matter consisted mainly of animals, which he perceived as beings
with spiritual qualities, at one with nature. It was this purity that he wanted to express through
colour. In this important 1910 painting. Horse in a Landscape, observe the blue mane and tail of
a purple horse presiding over a vista of rich primary colours. This work is an excellent example
of Marc's attempt to depict the world through an animal's eyes. Yellow cows, blue horses, green
foxes and orange deer are just some of the animals Marc painted with a profound love and
sensitivity. In Yellow Cow, observe how the animal kicks up its hind legs and raises its head to
the sky, leaping and bellowing with joy.
As Marc's art matures, we see the influence of Cubism enter his work - the softer flat areas of
colour give wav to more angular, geometrical shapes. In this next picture, Deer in the Forest II, a
dense network of abstract shapes representing the forest pulls the eye toward the graceful forms
of deer emerging through the undergrowth. Note how the animals appear to be at peace, far from
the danger and corruption of a human world. Yet in a series of paintings dated around 1913,
there is a sense of trouble in the air - a presentiment of the coming of the Great War. In The Fate
of the Animals, the artist offers a glimpse of what is to come. The green horses in the top left of
the picture look panic-stricken, while the blue deer in the centre is frozen, its head thrown back
to the sky. Has it just been shot? Or is it perhaps simply relishing its life? If you look to the right
of the picture, in the direction the animals were probably headed, there are dense brown and
murky images, a rare departure from Marc's beloved primary colours, and they seem to forewarn
of something unnatural and dark. In The Wolves, Marc abandons his favourite horses and deer
and offers yet another vision of impending doom. Here, a group of wolves are depicted in
various attitudes - defensive, aggressive, menacing. Green flames and clouds of purple smoke
denote the destruction of the landscape, while
n the bottom rioht-hand corner some pink flowers, a symbol of natural beauty, droop and die.
By this time, Marc had co-founded the group Der Blaue Reiter, which can be translated as The
Blue Rider, with the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky. Their aim was to express spiritual truth
and they adopted a spontaneous, intuitive approach to painting, reminiscent of primitivism and
the pure art of children. Despite having no particular ideology as such, the group believed in
bringing art into the future. More on them later.
Now, let's look at some of Marc's later works from 1913 and 1914. At this stage his work
showed great promise and development of an individual style. Stables consists of almost purely
geometrical forms overlapping and shining through each other, a curve of red or white
representing a horse's flank or fetlock. Fighting Forms is entirely abstract and brings together
swirling complementary colours - orange and blue.
When the war finally broke out in 1914, Marc was called to the front. He was greatly disturbed
by the loss of life around him, including that of the animals caught up in the fighting. Marc's
sketches from the front reflect his fears and worries, though he hoped that something good would
eventually come out of the war. Tragically. Marc did not survive the slaughter: he was killed bv
a grenade in 1916 while patrolling on his horse near Verdun in France. He was only thirty-six.

Part 3:
Interviewer: Today we're pleased to welcome Ruth Browning of the Gaia Institute, where for
the past fifteen years they've been examining a phenomenon known as ley lines. Ruth, what can
you tell us about ley lines?
Ruth: Well, first of all, it has to be said that there is still a lot of controversy surrounding ley
lines, with many sceptics doubting their existence altogether. One definition of ley lines is that
they are imaginary lines marking the alignment of ancient places of worship, but we believe
there is nothing imaginary about them, that real geophysical power is at the root of it all.
However, whether you believe in them or not, it is true that the vast majority of ancient temples,
castles, churches, stone circles, megaliths and shrines tend to align in straight lines. Anyone with
a comprehensive tourist map, a pencil and a ruler can verify this. For example, if we consider a
significant site in British folklore - the Tor at Glastonbury - we see that it sits at the hub of a
large number of ley lines which lead off directly through hundreds of other ancient sites. Ley
lines have been found connecting the stone circles of Scotland and there is even a ley line
purported to be running right through Buckingham Palace. But lev lines are not confined to the
British Isles. The Nazca lines, which cross the plains of Peru, are just one other example. They
also occur in China, Greece, Egypt and anywhere ancient peoples constructed their temples.
In the past thirty years or so there has been a resurgence of interest in ley lines. Their existence
was discovered, or should I say rediscovered, by a man called Alfred Watkins in 1921, who,
while studying an ordnance survey map in Hertfordshire, noticed that a series of geological
features and man-made sites appeared to have a most singular alignment. He went on to publish
a book propounding the theory that the constructions on lev lines were the navigational markers
of ancient trade routes. This theory was soon discredited, however, as few considered it plausible
that a trader would have been willing to scale a high hill and then clamber down to the valley just
to follow the straightest line across the land. While most people agree that there appears to be a
definite arrangement in the placing of these sites, many consider them to be a mere coincidence.
Our own research at the institute has indicated that an alignment of historical sites does not
automatically determine the presence of a ley line, although it often points to one being there.
Instead, we believe that lev lines are a manifestation of the Earth's geomagnetic energy, which
crisscrosses the land creating a network of natural power right under our feet. There is
compelling evidence to suggest that this energy runs in straight lines, much like the meridians -
as any acupuncturist will tell you - that cover our bodies. The monuments on them merely serve
to reveal this network.
This would imply that either the peoples of ancient civilisations all over the world were aware of
lev lines, or they were unwittingly drawn to their power. In ancient times, people were far more
in tune with nature and the earth than we are today, relying more on their body's natural
sensitivity and intuitive powers to locate underground water supplies or a sacred site for a temple
or shrine.
There are other theories about lev lines. Some believe that the location of ancient sites along
specific lines was based on complex astronomical calculations made by the builders of ancient
monuments, whose intention was to mirror the alignment of constellations in the skv. And,
according to some claims, UFO sightings often occur above ley line intensive areas. In recent
years, proving the existence of ley lines has been a favourite pastime of New Age enthusiasts,
which is why scientists tend to take a dim view of the subject.
However, scientists who have studied lev lines claim that the place where they are said to
intersect seem to have a stronger magnetic intensity than other areas, but the data is currently
Inconclusive, so the jury is still out on the subject.

Part 4:
Researchers recently discovered a void in the Great Pyramid they hadn’t known about before. By
void, we mean a space that’s almost 100 feet long. The journal “Nature”, which details the
finding, says this is the first time since the 1800s that a space this significant has been identified
in the pyramid. But whether it adds to the structure’s mysteries or answers ancient secrets is up
for debate. A spokesman for Egypt’s government says there’s no evidence that suggests this
space leads to an undiscovered gallery or burial chamber. And archaeologists point out that the
pyramid has other voids, so this could just be one that hadn’t found yet.
Still, there are a lot of unanswered questions about the Great Pyramid, and researchers hope this
discovery will help them learn how it was built. They’re not allowed to drill holes or use
cameras. To identify this void, they used equipment to track cosmic ray particles insides the
structure. But that’s not the only way in which modern technology is helping archaeologists
study ancient history.
The magic is seeing this with candlelight. – Adam Low freely admits that he’s a man with
obsession to document the tomb of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, Seti I.
“The tomb actually tells us how the people from 3,500 years ago think different things, have
different philosophies, value different things. The way they thought can be read through the very
articulate evidence that’ on the walls of these tombs. And if we can really build a dialogue that
crosses time and use technology to help that, I think we’re at an incredibly exciting moment.”
- Just a room, you think, but what a room. Known among Egyptologists as “the Hall of beauties,”
what’s just astonishing is that this is, in fact, a facsimile, a precise recreation in a museum in
Switzerland of how the room looked exactly 200 years ago, when the tomb was discovered.