Why We Gather: Festivals as Ceremony and Cultural Bridge

Why We Gather is a talk given by Zak Avery and Jenna Ansell, co-directors of the medicine gathering in the UK, now in its sixth year and drawing around 10,000 people each August. Filmed at GOAT Community and posted by Medicine Festival in October 2026, the talk is less a program description than an argument about purpose. Avery and Ansell trace their own paths, one out of international development and the other out of festival production, to a single conviction: that a gathering can do the work that top-down institutions have struggled to do, if it is designed as ceremony rather than entertainment. What follows draws on the opening stretch of that talk, which covers their origins, the logic of the gathering, and the question of who is bringing what to whom.

What does it sound like when two co-founders take the stage together for the first time?

The talk opens with a small, unpolished exchange that carries more weight than its length suggests. "Um, my name is Jenna," Ansell says, and Avery answers, "I'm Avery." They have been collaborating for seven years, they explain, and this is the first time they have given a talk together. That detail matters. Two people who have built something large for most of a decade are now stopping to say, out loud, what they think it is for.

Their stated agenda is ambitious. They want to talk about "where we are in terms of the more sort of transformational progressive sort of subculture of the festival space," why that matters, and "where we can go from here," because, as Ansell puts it, "it really feels like we're at a big threshold not only within this culture but also in the world in general." The rest of the talk is an attempt to show how they got to that threshold.

How does a diplomat-in-training end up running away with a festival circus?

Ansell's story begins, about 1:24 into the talk, in a very different world. "I started off in quite an academic um, background," she says. She wanted to be a diplomat or work in international relations and development. She saw quickly that the field was full of bureaucracy and hierarchy, and that "the top down approach to changing things in the world was really limited."

The turn came at 25, in the middle of a master's degree in international relations, when she went to a UK festival called Secret Garden Party. Afterward, in her words, she "sort of ran away a little bit with the circus." What she noticed there was not simply party behavior. "The people who were experiencing that space were really changing who they were and tapping into a purpose that maybe they didn't know before," she says, pointing to "the very specific magic and alchemy that's present in those spaces."

She describes a moment of recalibration. She had been considering free internships in London and had nearly gone to the Democratic Republic of Congo for work. Then she reached a different conclusion: "maybe it's not just about hedonism and taking a bunch of drugs. Maybe there's a lot more to this gathering." That reframing is the hinge of her whole account. A festival stops being an escape from purpose and becomes a place where purpose is found.

Why did a teenage party in a seaside hometown point toward the same destination?

Avery's route runs parallel. Gatherings were part of his life from age 15, when he and friends were running parties where he grew up. "It started as a birthday party and evolved into this beautiful" gathering on the cliffs, he recalls. At 16 he felt "this unification of dance, the trance of dance with my friends," a connection he could not yet put into words. He went on to study entertainment management and festival production, then, in his words, followed "my own journey of spiritual awakening, however you want to frame it," which led him to what the talk calls the medicine path.

Both stories share a structure: an early, half-articulated sense that gathering matters, followed by years of testing that sense against institutions, traditions, and the practical craft of putting people in a field together. The festival industry gave them the tools. The wisdom traditions gave them a reason to use those tools differently.

How did eight people from different traditions become a constellation?

The pivot point of the talk comes at roughly 5:29, when Avery describes a pilgrimage across the UK with wisdom carriers. There were "seven or eight different traditions all represented," speaking different languages, and the experience was, he says, "constellating something much greater than any of us could really articulate." It was on that trip that he and Ansell met, and he says it anchored him "particularly into ancient ways of being and wisdom traditions and what we can learn from and through them."

The medicine gathering was born in that same spirit. Eight people were involved at the start, and Avery credits their varied perspectives, breadth of experience, and backgrounds with making the project so rich, and with allowing it to flourish. Ansell adds a lighter note: the early co-founding group felt like "Avengers Assemble a little bit," followed by laughter in the room.

Ansell also points to earlier work. A project called Reigniting the Ancient Ways brought elders from different wisdom traditions to Boom Festival and Glastonbury. She has spent about ten years working at Lightning in a Bottle in California, "bringing in this culture there as well." In her account, the gathering is not a single invention so much as the convergence of many threads.

What is medicine, if the why comes before the what and the how?

The talk's most important conceptual move arrives at about 6:51, when Avery says: "medicine has always been about the why before the what and the how." The why, he explains, is threefold and open-ended: how to be medicine for the planet, how to be medicine for ourselves, and how to recontextualize what medicine means in the contemporary world. Underneath those lies a further aim, to bridge cultures and to return, in some measure, to older ways of being.

The "medicine" in the title, then, is not primarily a reference to substances. It names an access point. Avery describes the gathering as "a bridge really an access point to heal some of the wounds." The wisdom carriers who come bring what he lists as their "philosophy, their ceremony, their music, the soft technologies that have guided them for generations," and he stresses that these practices are "fundamentally rooted in their connection to the earth," in a relationship that does not treat the planet as separate from people to be extracted from.

Read this way, the idea that a gathering is a form of ceremony is not a metaphor. It is a design principle. The question at the center is how a large group of people can be asked, together, to inquire into how they might act as medicine for themselves and for the living world.

Why would a festival refuse to call itself a festival?

One of the most useful lines in the talk is a confession of sorts. "We always hate calling ourselves a festival," the co-directors say. The reason is practical as much as philosophical. The medicine gathering uses "the operational format, systems, processes, sound systems, team structure that we know so well through working in the festival industry all our life." Those are the tools of a festival. The aim is different: to facilitate "a collective prayer, a ceremony, a question actually, kind of a deep inquiry."

There is a craft lesson here for anyone who makes gatherings. The scaffolding (stages, power, staffing, logistics) still has to be excellent, because a ceremony that fails on the practical level is hard for people to enter. But the scaffolding serves the intention. The label "festival" describes the logistics; the purpose is something older and more serious.

What changes when the wisdom comes to you instead of the other way around?

Avery is candid about history. Britain, he says, "is responsible for colonizing so much of the world" and for "causing so much destruction and pain and suffering." He draws out what that means for the gathering: "rather than us going out to their lands, all these wisdom carriers are coming to the UK." They step, he says, "beyond all of that trauma, that ancestral grief to come and share with the intent of healing, growing and connecting."

That reversal is the political heart of the project. Usually the relationship between a dominant culture and a traditional one runs in one direction: the outsider travels, observes, and extracts. Here the elders arrive as hosts and teachers, and the people of the island are asked to listen. Avery frames it as healing across generations, a way of acknowledging an inheritance rather than pretending it is absent.

Where does the money go, and why does that shape the purpose?

Avery is specific about the economics. "We're completely nonprofit," he says. "We give all of the funds that we do raise, all the profits back out to indigenous communities to preserve and protect their cultures and their land." He names examples: cultural centers in the Amazon, seed banks, and support for schools in Kenya, among "a variety of different things."

He describes the organizers' north star as service rather than profit, and says it gives the gathering "a generative abundant sense of service." Whatever one thinks of the broader festival economy, the structure is clear. The money moves outward, toward the communities whose wisdom is being shared, so the gathering's reciprocity is built into its accounts rather than promised in its mission statement.

Where to go from here

This article draws on the opening portion of Why We Gather, the first several thousand characters of a talk that runs nearly 80 minutes. The rest of the session returns to the questions the co-directors raised at the start: where the transformational festival subculture now stands, why it matters, and where it can go. The excerpt suggests the talk will go deeper into vulnerability, into what it means to live as part of the living world, and into the threshold the speakers believe the culture has reached.

For a reader arriving from this piece, three practical threads are worth following. First, watch the full talk to hear the co-directors develop their argument in their own words, especially their account of the threshold moment. Second, look at the difference the speakers draw between the logistics of a gathering and the ceremony it is meant to hold; it is a useful lens for anyone organizing community events. Third, consider the reciprocity question: who receives what a gathering produces, and whether the structure of the event makes that answer visible. Avery and Ansell's answer is clear. Their gathering is built to send resources back to the people whose traditions it carries.