1001 tales from a lifelong jester
Necessity is the mother of taking chances. Mark Twain.
“When you get to the Parma Station go to the café just outside such and such exit and wait there where somebody will come and pick you up.” These were the simple instructions. The café in question was the sort of place with a pinball machine that looked like Noah had used it on the ark and where patrons didn’t so much walk to the bar as lurch towards it. People didn’t come in, characters entered.
Traveller, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveller, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveller, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.
Antonio Machado Caminante
Maybe 20, maybe 30 years ago I ran a weekend workshop with a group of young people called “Make a Show in a Day”. The idea was simple. All the participants would make puppets and, whilst the puppets were being made, we would find out about their characters and from those new characters we would create a story that would become our show. The realisation of the idea was not so simple. As the parent left, it began to dawn on me that the youngsters, I had been left with were a particularly complex group. For one thing, they didn’t really know each other. For another, there were some ‘special’ characters in there and I had not been forewarned. Still, I had a factor on my side – the puppet making.
Continue reading “Thirteen – I can’t to I can”
I have been told that among the many old Wild West potboiler stories one began: “Bang! Bang! Bang! Three bullets ripped through my chest and I knew that I was off on the greatest adventure of my life.” Somewhere in the adventures of my working life I remember a lecture in which a man said that participatory arts were about experience, encounter and event. Well, indeed. But then again that’s what life seems to be mostly about for us humans. Its all about relationship – even isolation. There are certain encounters, experiences and events that alter the course of where one’s heading. Let me wind my way towards one such encounter and begin the story of two wandering, nay wondering, travellers of similar persuasions. But first a question.
Continue reading “Twelve – Bang! Bang! Bang!”
The workshop artist’s journey is like any other journey. It has three phases: before, during and after the workshop. The workshop artist or facilitator is in the business of shaping the most meaningful experience for the participants that they can by crafting a creative environment and paying attention to the potential encounters and events. The devising work before a workshop aims to identify the potential shape the narrative of that workshop by putting building blocks in place, visualising potential pathways and imagining what the final outcome might be.
Continue reading “Eleven – Shaping Narrative”The Sacred Box of Eyes Talk – Tampere May 2014
The Sacred Box of Eyes was first dreamt up by a single small voice in a large civic hall. There were 250 people in that hall. I stood in front of them with a little, plastic cash box of possible eyes to glue onto their puppets. The voice shouted out: That box is sacred. The rest of the hall spontaneously chorused back: Oh no, not the Sacred Box of Eyes. A moment was born that would be re-created for the next 30 years with many, many thousands of people. In 2014 I gave a talk in Tampere, Finland. These are notes of the main points of that talk.
A Report on the Peepeekisis Puppet Project
October 2013
“Why do you get so tired from your work?” a friend of mine was once asked by her partner. She asked him whether he felt tired after his first day in a new job. He said he was. And she told him that every day in her work was like starting a new job. This starting over is attributable to the fact that onset of each project always brings a near unimaginable host of variables; the great unknowns and unfamiliars awaiting your arrival.
Continue reading “Nine – I didn’t even exist yesterday”