“Whoever sits on this carpet and wills in thought to be taken up and set down upon other site will, in the twinkling of an eye, be borne thither, be that place near at hand or distant by many a day’s journey and difficult to reach.” The 1001 Arabian Nights
The establishment retaliated by hunting down everyone even remotely involved with the business of flying carpets. The Secret History of Flying Carpets
In the last section of our dialogue Ori mentioned the magic carpet. This got me thinking that I really need to write about that carpet, a companion in workshops since the voyage of discovery began 35 years ago. As I started to write, my seven- year old Granddaughter, Olivia, came back from a swim in the river. She asked me what I was doing and I told her that I was writing about a magic carpet. She said that she wanted to write about magic carpets. She wrote this: A magic carpet can be anything as long as you use your imagination. If you believe in it, it will be real. A click of your finger will bring a magic carpet to life. There are all sorts of patterns on magic carpets and they are so beautiful. They will take you soaring to marvellous places.
Tony and I have never talked about the carpet. Our discussion about the carpet has come about as a result of this recent dialogue.
Olivia wrote – “a magic carpet can be anything – …they will take you soaring to marvellous places,” The carpet for me was and is the start of the journey.
When the children arrive in the hall that first morning and meet the team they wonder; why there is a carpet in the middle of the hall and how they should approach it. The hall looks different. Sumptuous fabrics of red, green velvet and gold are flowing onto the carpet. From behind the velvet screens appear the team and Tony.
Olivia’s so right. In 1985 Patrick Cooper and me started a puppet company called Little Jest Puppets. We both read a book about Peter Brook’s tour in Africa with a multi-cultural company. Brook wanted to explore and illustrate how theatre was an international language that exceeded the limitation of understanding the words of any specific spoken or written language. He toured a show that was based around the near 1000-year-old Sufi poem, The Conference of the Birds. The main prop for the company was carpet which could be unfurled in any location as a performance space. Patrick and I spent three days devising our first puppet workshop. We knew we wanted to transform the spaces we worked in to create a sense of theatre around guiding each group. Peter Brook’s carpet seemed like the perfect solution. One small difference, we wouldn’t be performing on the carpet. Instead the participants in our workshops would sit on the carpet and, in effect, we’d be performing to them.
It begins when the children enter the hall and see it with carpet and velvet draped screens – often seating arrangements, as to where the children sit, are disrupted and they begin sitting in the hall with a new perspective. For those of us who like routine, the disruption and changes are immediate. The Year 3 class teacher walks into the hall and suddenly where the children usually sit is no longer available! Knowing what occurs now, from experience, I enjoy watching the reactions and how children and staff cope with this new arrangement of their learning space. I am also prepared for it!
Patrick and I went to a local vendor of all things used, aptly known as The Barns. The Barns were several conjoined barns packed to the rafters with just about anything non-edible. We found an ornate, large Arabianesque carpet and bought it for a pound or two. Our main idea was to define and transform our workshops so there was a clarity and air of expectation. The carpet worked like magic. It’s uncountable how many times people of all ages have walked into a room or a hall and spontaneously exclaimed “Oh a magic carpet.” The room is transformed and, if there was only one word you could use to describe a workshop then it might well be transformation. Ultimately the aim of a workshop is to create a transformative experience. This begins before the participants enter and, hopefully, last in the memory a lot longer than their departure. A sort of bubble of creativity, a narrative community; a liminal space is constructed through the relationship between participant material and the facilitators. The vessel that holds these relationships is the physical environment of space and time. Transformation happens when expectations are exceeded. Walking into a room which one is used to seeing one way but today there is a magic carpet in the middle of it, that’s not a bad start.
The carpet is magic. It is a magic carpet. Magic is going to happen. It is magic. There is no such thing as magic. The carpet allows your imagination to fly. Just imagine…
Ori is right and another timely reminder she offered was of the performance that ensues when the participants enter and take their place on and around the carpet. I forget about this between workshops but the night before, my body feels the nervousness that attends performance. The start of a workshop is a special kind of performance. It’s a performance of self, it’s a channelling of the host who invites everybody in, makes them feel comfortable and warms them to a big challenge. Story and puppets are great allies in doing this. As Peter Brook explored with his carpet in Africa, a tale well told can be a common language.
That first adventure. The first experience of the carpet. Where Tony and the team share and tell the original story, leaves an impression. Children are given the opportunity to retell and appreciate a story that celebrates the culture and diversity of their community. They learn about traditions, faith and belief. They celebrate, share and value the moral code and are given permission to elaborate, embellish and tell the story themselves. It becomes their story.
So, in the “telling” phase the carpet is place where a story is listened to and Tony and the team tell the skeleton of the tale. They talk about the culture, the land, the place. The children absorb and as a collective they collate their memories of the story and list the animals and key parts of the tale.
In the “making” phase, the children work at tables slathered in masking tape. The children sit on the carpet and come back to the carpet time and time again; for instruction; to review progress, to make adjustments, to move their puppets and retell their part of the story – they only see their part. And it is as the making stage and on that carpet that the puppets come alive and are given their eyes.
After the absent-minded angel dropped all the foolish souls in one place, a hill. The fools built their city on and around a hill and found that this meant a lot of hard walking to do the simplest task. The town council met and, after several days, found a solution. They would simply move the hill. The hill moving would be achieved by all the town gathering on one side of the hill and pushing the hill. And so, on a very hot day, the towns people gathered. The strongest at the fronts with everyone behind and each pushing on each other back. The sun beat down and, as the fools sweated, they discarded clothing. Soon there was a huge pile of clothes and the fools stayed intent in their perspirations to shift the hill. Coming over a nearby hill was a man pushing a cart. This was not a good man. This was a thief. The fools were to busy to notice the thief fill up his cart with their clothes and wheel them off and out of sight. They stopped pushing for a rest, looked around and saw their clothes had gone. The towns folk took a silent moment of reflection and the collectively they realised what had happened. They threw their hands in the air in triumph, “Hooray, we’ve moved the hill so far that we can’t even see our clothes anymore.”
And it was a small collection of such tales that I told the children at Kings Park to illustrate how fools solve problems so that they could begin to create their own problems and solutions. The next point of immersion into the bubble of creativity is the demonstration of some simple, accessible, comic and effective puppet characters. The tales and the puppets hook the assembled cast into the sphere of ready awareness. The third act of this little performance is to ask the children to identify what they would have to do to make the show happen. Hands shoot up. Ideas are fired at us and we note them all on a clipboard: the puppets that will need making, the stories that might be written, the practice that will be needed and the qualities that we will have to draw upon as a group. The children know the answers. The group has genius.
And then they get off the carpet until they come in again to do their class-sized workshop sessions to make their puppets. When we went to Kings Park over 15 years ago, this big workshop process was still relatively new. We were still putting it all together. When Ori asked us to bring these disparate schools together, another phase in the art of our workshops began. We became more conscious of how the process of show-making from scratch in a short and intensive period of time by a large group of children had positive and multi-dimensional applications for the community involved.
Over the next few years, this was a process we explored using combinations of different art forms. And then ten years after Kings Park, Ori got back in contact with a plan. By then she had moved a long way from Bournemouth and even further from where we operate, in South Devon. She rang me and asked if we could make a show in Norwich. And, as one thing leads to the next in a workshop, Ori’s initiative led to many things.
During the years that Tony and his team were exploring combinations of different art forms. Things changed at King’s Park too. I had joined King’s Park in 1999 as the Deputy Headteacher. In 2007, having been the Headteacher for nearly 5 years, I relocated to Norfolk to take on a new challenge. In September 2007, I became the Headteacher of Lakenham Primary School, a school in the heart of Norwich. When I left King’s Park, I took with me a book of memories – post cards written/drawn/made by every member of the school community. Many of the memories talked about laughter and a puppet show.
A footnote about the first carpet. There came a time when that first carpet was threadbare and torn. It had been rolled, folded, been subject to spillage, sat on by thousands and shunted from venue to venue. I needed a replacement. I found an ad in the local paper for a large oriental carpet. I went to a flat where I was greeted (that’s a euphemism) by two large Alsatians that were less than happy to see me. The carpet was rolled up and ready to go. I looked at the corner of it, handed over cash and made a hurried and hope-for -the -best departure. I got home. Unrolled the carpet. And something very strange occurred to me. This carpet was an exact replica of the one I had just got rid of. Several carpets have followed since then. They last four or five years and we take them, they take us soaring to marvellous places.
When I was to find Tony again – the first question I had to ask him was, “how far are you prepared to travel?” We were in Norfolk and he and the team in DevonWe have travelled many miles since…
“A workshop is the one story and it has a thread and one thing leads to the next to the next, to the next to the next…. It builds a story like in a material workshop you build a transistor radio, with little pieces or whatever that you put together and at the end you have a transistor radio, and it’s built there and everything goes towards building that, nothing is wasted or nothing is done just to prepare you for other things.” Enzo Cozzi. The Workshop Interviews 2001.