Twenty- The Ape and The Optimist

The astounding Cosmo, last Great Calpenkian White Ape

There are three masks: the one we think we are, the one we really are, and the one we have in common.” – Jacques Lecoq

I was awoken by a bright light. It was a milkman driving past my car. I was up on Dartmoor. It was October and I had fallen asleep in the front seat of my car with a large, white ape on top of me. It was 1993 and I was learning the true meaning of optimism. I wonder what that milkman thought. This is the story of what led up to me only having a large ape puppet to keep warm in my old estate car up on Dartmoor.

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Nineteen – All Together Now

all together now

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.  Samuel Johnson

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. Carl Gustav Jung

The dynamic of a workshop depends on relationship. Not just the relationship in the space but those that go into making that space possible and they may not be physically present. At the turn of the century, I got a grant to interview workshop practitioners. The first person I interviewed was Wendy Greenhill. She had been in charge of educational outreach work at The Royal Shakespeare Company. It was a great conversation- a benchmark for the rest of series of interviews but, and there’s always an if or a but, we had bought a guinea pig for our son’s birthday.

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