A century ago, Imber was a quiet agricultural community on Salisbury Plain, a remote village set in the chalk downland seven miles east of Warminster. But then came the two world wars, and more and more of the plain was transformed into military firing ranges. In 1943, Imber itself was requisitioned, the 170 villagers evicted so that their homes could be used to train the US army in street- fighting. They were promised that they could return to their homes when the hostilities were over.
That promise was never kept; the Ministry of Defence decided it needed Imber as a permanent training area and, though the displaced villagers tried every means to regain their properties, a public inquiry in the 1960s found in favour of the army, granting the former inhabitants the concession of an annual visit to the church to tend graves and hold evensong. Now the village is the location for the latest Artangel project: the Imber Event. Designed by Jeremy Herbert and directed by James Macdonald, it is part installation, part musical performance, climaxing in the church with a work commissioned from the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli.
The audience is bussed into the village, which now looks like a macabre Legoland. Few of the original buildings survive, and others are concrete-block houses with red or green corrugated roofs. The installation brings them to life; painted cloths attempt to evoke what the village looked like in its thatched heyday, while tapes of Kancheli's film scores, just as trite as you would expect 1960s Soviet film music to be, seeps out of the glassless windows. At the village centre a Morris Traveller, the original half-timbered car, goes round and round silently, without a driver.
The Rustavi Choir, resplendent in Georgian national costume, process through the village singing their unaccompanied mixture of folk music and liturgical chant, leading the audience to the church for the performance of Kancheli's half-hour piece by the choir, the Matrix Ensemble under Nika Memanishvili, while the boys of Salisbury Cathedral Choir are heard on tape. The score is the usual Kancheli mixture of the sacred and the profane - the choir and a solo male voice offer slipping, soothing harmonies interrupted by flurries of baroque figuration, and there is a brief, violent intrusion of martial rhythms before a sickly sweet coda, harmonised in barber-shop-quartet fashion - but it never provides the clinching experience the whole elaborate enterprise demands.
This may be a fascinating chance to visit one of the strangest spots in southern England, but it's a pretty low-calorie artistic experience.
