Eighteen – The Hare and The Wire

After the rest of the class had left to go out to play, one nine-year old boy stood around looking a bit lost. My friend, who I was working with, asked the boy if he wanted to ask us something.  The boy did, “What qualifications do I need to do this a job?” My friend explained that, although both of us had been to university, neither of us had any specific qualifications at all to do what we were doing. The boy flung his arms up in the air as if he had just scored the winning goal in the cup final and ran out of the room shouting, “Yes!”

What we had been doing was running a puppet workshop and what the boy had just done was make a puppet. It is the undiluted joy, expressed so vividly by that boy, that has kept me plying this particular trade for so long. For me, it began very suddenly in a time before the world wide web.

I visited a friend and offered to help with a little administration so that he could put on a puppet show he had planned. He was very pleased and asked me to turn up at a hall the next day. I did and he informed me that I would making a condor puppet and would be the narrator for the show. I was at a loose end so why not and, as it happened that was how The Tomato and The Condor, the show I was to narrate, began. A young boy living in the shanty town around Santiago asks, “Why not?”  And the narrator then explained that this is the question that begins all adventures. Before that moment I had not one single iota of a notion to ever have anything to do with a puppet and no idea that being puppeteer was an option at all. My motivations, inspired whilst I was still at school, by A.S. Neill, John Holt and The Little Red School Book, was to change the education system. I had no desire at all to be a puppeteer. But the white rabbit that had led me into puppetry wonderland had different ideas. An endless array of surreal riches would emerge, each new one bringing its own peculiar lesson.

So, here I am back where I started – narrating. “Make a condor puppet”, was my first ever puppet instruction. Where to begin? Off I toddled to a place called The Puppet Centre in Battersea. There I was gobsmacked to find a whole library of books about puppetry. I looked up how people made puppets and how the different parts moved and set about making the condor.  Very early on in the making process, I had a clear picture in my mind’s eye of what this puppet needed to look like, how it might move and oddly, who it was. A few years later in a different place and making a different puppet for another show, I remember waving some roughly shaped chicken wire at my wife, “Look, look at the hare!”  She responded, “What are you talking about? That’s a piece of wire!” I couldn’t believe that she couldn’t see what I could see so clearly. I could see this whole new being. Looking back on it after so many new beings, I can see that from the outside what I was waving was chicken wire and yet for me, the waver, it was a hare. The hare or the wire, depending on who was looking, was the simultaneous occurrence of two inseparable processes; the inner and outer creative processes.  In other words, the visible manifestation and the invisible passage from the unconscious to the conscious field of awareness of the maker. As if by magic, nothing becomes something.

It is impossible to encapsulate the moment of experience through a refined list of categories. The moment happens and is gone. It belongs to that room and those people at that time. The access to each other’s hearts and minds is felt and, if expressed at all, then often in quite oblique ways. That nine-year-old boy who celebrated with such glee when he heard that our work did not derive from a formal educational background, perhaps his sudden emotional attachment to his work came from making a meaningful connection of his inner and outer worlds in imaginative activity? Maybe it was born from his sudden discovery of a world of possibilities that he didn’t know previously existed? Or, maybe he loved the fact that his creative process was his and nobody else’s? Who can say? Who can know how his life has unfolded or how the place that moment took in his heart or mind?

His story is just that, his story. I can tell you my story, speculate about what happens for others, recall moments of undiluted joy and remind myself how important those imaginative principles are to me.  And that’s why I keep on being a narrator, so that I remember. In this story Is the shadow that walks next me into each space and each time I go into a room to start a group on another journey with the imagination.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *