Layering and affect in commemoration: listening to Jenkins’ Cantata Memoria, watching The Crown, and visiting Aberfan

In 1966, a colliery spoil tip fell onto the Pantglas Junior School and several houses in Aberfan, Wales, killing 116 children and 28 adults. On visiting Aberfan, we ask in what ways our experience of the town, the cemetery and the memorial site is informed by, and predicated upon, our earlier engagement with two major creative productions that commemorated this event, Sir Karl Jenkins’ Cantata Memoria: For the Children, and an episode of the television series, The Crown. We have used process and walking methodologies that involve ‘plugging in’ and thinking with affect theory to shed light on the affective intensities and entanglements of commemorative layering.