“A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.” John Lennon
“This is the core of creativity -, by the gnosis of making something we know who we are. Then we make the big contribution that we can make to anything, which is making ourselves.” John Moat
Like many in 2020, I’m unemployed. I am also part-redeployed and a bit retired these days. Some of the things I did and liked, I can’t do at the moment. One thing 2020, Year of the Rat, Year of the Pandemic, has allowed me to do is to look back at the many parts of my last 35 years of working. Looking back at my notes for my MA in Applied Theatre, 20 years ago, this jumped out:
I believe in collective action.
I believe in following the obvious.
I believe in the wisdom of not-knowing.
I believe in the power of self-evidence.
I believe in people making something for themselves.
I believe that life embraces life.
I believe that performance is research and can be revelation.
The very last time I was invited to have “one of our chats”about workshop by my greatly missed friend, John Moat , he said, “the most I can say is that a sort of social dreaming happens.”
In 2014, ten years after our last conversation, Ori’s voice was on the other end of the phone like a ghost, albeit an instantly recognisable one, from the past. I could say that you could have knocked me down with a proverbial feather. The truth though is my working life has been the tale of unexpected invitations from anywhere and everywhere so it takes more than a feather when these surprises happen. Life has been good in getting me used to such surprises. Of course, I thought that Ori was phoning from about 100 miles away in Bournemouth but no, she had moved right across the country. She was head of a school in Norwich. Her governors had given her the go ahead to book us to come and do something similar to what we had done 10 years ago in Bournemouth. There were children from four different schools in an academic council. Could we make a show with children from each school to bring the community together?
I had moved to Norfolk in 2007, to “open a brand-new, purpose-built primary school” in the centre of Norwich. Actually, it was an amalgamation of a first and junior school. It was in an area of deprivation with approximately 44% of the children being entitled to Free School meals. The first few years were a hard slog; bringing two diverse and until 2007 very separate schools into one building was the easy bit. When I met with the LA school advisor in my first term at the school, he described it as “a poison chalice”. There was no money – but a beautiful building and the behaviour of some of the children was shocking.
By the time I called Tony, things had changed at Lakenham and I had been asked to become chair of a cluster of 5 schools; a secondary, a special and 3 primaries in the area. We had started to work collaboratively to try and develop community provision. It was such a privilege to work with a such a like-minded and passionate group of headteachers who, whilst in theory were competing for children, developed such a shared vision for the community that we served. There had always been a “divide” in the community between the three main areas the primaries served, and we wanted to bring the children together. There was some cluster funding available! We discussed possible projects and ideas and then I remembered Tony and the first project I had done in Bournemouth which had also involved creating a collaboration across a group of schools. I was asked to find him and see if he would be willing to work with us. A couple of clicks on the internet later and I found myself taking to Tony 10 years after we had last talked.
My initial and silent reaction was, “Norwich!!! That’s going to be nearly 1000 miles of driving from west to east and we have got a lot of work.” But Ori is rare as a commissioning headteacher, actually unique in my experience. This is true about Ori in many different ways but I’m talking money here. Here’s the thing. Our residencies with hundreds of children are a lot of work. They require expertise, a team of skilled and willing artists, tons of materials, assiduous preparations, very long hours and post-work exhaustion. I’d estimate that four of us total over 250 hours work per week, use over 50 rolls of masking tape, 30 litres of PVA etc., etc. However, for schools it’s a big financial outlay and that’s a big risk to take. As an Arts Council Officer said to me the other day, “You’re getting about five times as much as schools are normally willing to risk for an artist.” But, and there’s always an ‘if’ or a ‘but’, for us it’s just enough to get the team in and home again and run a company on a shoestring. In the world, there is one headteacher who finds the money for us to work at a rate that represents the quality and quantity of our work and its value in financial terms. That headteacher is Ori. And that’s how it was and that’s how we became Norwich bound.
School funding has been on a rollercoaster throughout the 30 years I have been working in education. There were and have been times when schools really did have money to invest in creativity and the arts and there have also been times when they have been the first things to be lost when funding has been tight. Recently what we do in schools has been supported by a growing scientific evidence base which evaluates the impact of interventions, investment, curriculum provision and actions schools have taken to improve pupil outcomes. The impact of some things that schools do are not easily measured in a SATs result.
As for being able to source funding, in these times of austerity, it hasn’t been easy. I play the cello because a Headteacher, when I was at primary school understood the importance of allowing children to discover new skills and explore unknown talents. My passion for the arts comes from my parents and my emotional resilience comes from being able to express myself creatively. It took 10 years to find the funding to be able to work with Tony in Norwich!
Sir Ken Robinson said, “Learning in and about the arts is essential to intellectual development.” It is. The value and impact of our investment has been immeasurable. Over the years, Tony and I have found a way to measure, with the support of the Arts Council a little of what occurs when children and staff engage in this process and I have to say after the first show at Lakenham, it was easier to persuade governors that this was something we wanted to do again.
I caught the train from Totnes and went to visit Lakenham Primary School and the other three schools in Norwich for the first time to do the site visit. I was greeted by Ori at the station and shown around what was in most ways, a rebuilt and splendidly designed school. The grandest of all the features was a huge central atrium with classes on two levels all around it. One thing about running participatory arts projects and leading workshops is that the space you are given to work in is vital. By space, I mean the physical space and the licence that you’re allowed to create something expressive. These two factors depend on the trust of the person commissioning you. In turn, this depends on the status that your work is afforded by that person. Ori knows the value of our work doesn’t just rest in the fact that a lot of children make puppets or that the children put on a stonkingly good performance at the end but that the real benefits to the children and the whole school community manifest in an overall feeling of belonging and a discernible lasting effect on general achievement. For us, as a team of artists, this is the best we can ever get. We are not seen as peripheral fun but as an integral part of a development strategy. Ori gives us the best of physical space, full creative licence and pays us properly. This is rare and it works. The trust that allows risk to be taken permeates all the pores of the project.
Well nearly all. The qualifying aspect to the unconditional trust is that none of the staff team had worked with us before. Whenever this is the case, I meet the staff in a staff meeting and try to present what they are about to let themselves in for. Make no mistake, in a standardised education system what is about to happen is not standard at all. It has its own standards and these can be quite disruptive for a teaching staff who are used to a certain sort of order. On a first project in a school where our presence is loud and unavoidable, this can cause quite a stir. Especially, as the apparent mayhem and chaos increases as the cast of puppets multiply and the full notion of getting hundreds of children to perform with just one day of rehearsal and a few minutes each to practice their part, dawns upon the staff. Simply put, it seems impossible. But, and here’s why we can do something so good, so quickly; it’s possible for one reason only and that is the brilliance of children. And the winning ticket is that because that brilliance is held by a common trust it shines like the sun when it comes to fruition in the performance. It exceeds all expectations; it’s a gravity defying sight when the children rise to the occasion and are pitch perfect in delivering a piece of meaningful and poignant theatre that is theirs,about the world in which we live.
What is this common trust built upon? And how does it support the children? The trust is built on a meeting of motivations. The potential reach of our work is only realised when there is correspondence between what motivates us to work the way we do with the children and the motivation of the commissioning school to go beyond the confines of a standardised curriculum. I think Ori and I have continued to work together and progress the work because we believe in the same essential precepts. And when I fell onto that list of beliefs from my Masters in Applied Theatre, the notion of motivations meeting was brought to mind.
I am not sure if my beliefs naturally fit with Tony’s, but just as Tony has continued to learn and develop his passions and pedagogy, I have continued to learn and develop mine. Our fields and levels of expertise are different. We collide, come together and alongside others have discovered that our shared values can result in outcomes unimagined and immeasurable.
A belief in the power of collective action to amplify the individuals involved and for the gestalt of a community to be made evident when a process and product show that the whole can equate to more than the sum of the individual parts. A belief in the obvious, and sometimes ignored, innate brilliance of children when they are in their element. And that sometimes you can’t know all the details of result without letting a creative process unfold and generate that result This can be a big leap of faith for some teachers that have gone through a training that emphasises that knowing the result is key to designing the process. However, when you accept that any child can be an expert of their own creativity, then the unexpected can emerge and produce spectacular results. In a recent show I remember two large crane puppets dancing together to the Rock and Roll classic, “Louie, Louie”. There were three pairs of cranes rehearsing and one pair began to mess about by bobbing their heads alternately to one side of each other. None of us puppeteers had thought of that, a crane dance was invented. I stopped the rehearsal and got the other two pairs to watch the dance that pair had created. It worked and it was theirs. The group has a certain genius that can be educed, drawn out. I also believe that we have different aptitudes in the different stages of our lives. I have a lot more to look back upon that I have ever had before and my granddaughters have a belief in the magic of the world that is very much the province of those early years.
I have seen, in the many schools I have had the privilege of working with, the power of teamwork. What makes a school great is the quality of the team. In educational terms, we would call this a shared vision. Audrey Hepburn said, “nothing is impossible, the word itself says I’m possible.” Frank Sinatra sang the impossible dream. When Tony tells the story and meets the children for the first time, he tells them a story and allows them to let their imaginations fly. Everything is possible. This allows staff and children to imagine other possibilities.
The brilliance of childhood is made evident in making the puppets and then creating a spectacular evident. It is literally self-evident. The self and selves are made evident and manifest in what they have created. This works very much like Froebel’s Gifts. Froebel created Kindergartens in the 19th century. He believed that there was a correspondence between human development and the way the world develops. He created “blocks’ for children and these he called ‘ the Gifts’.
“Froebel believed that playing with blocks gives fundamental expression to a child’s soul and to the unity of life. Blocks represent the actual building blocks of the universe. The symmetry of the soul is symbolized as a child constructs with blocks, bringing them together to form a whole. “ (https://www.communityplaythings.co.uk/learning-library/articles/friedrich-froebel?pk_campaign=bi-weekly&pk_kwd=243&pk_source=newsletter&pk_medium=email )
Puppets, used the right way, are such gifts. They are building blocks in which the children can realise themselves. If you were in one of our puppet-making workshops, you would hear the sounds of pure joy as the children make and bring their puppets to life. A connection is made. This connection can’t be conveyed by the language of standardised measurement and algorithms. It says very little to say that 32 children aged five and six years made 32 penguins in two hours and had a lot of fun. The experience is resistant to reduction, colonisation or devaluation by evaluation. It is experiential, it is theirs and it belongs to that moment. It is like eating gelato on a hot day by the sea or climbing a hill and watching the clouds above and the trees and fields below. It is this quality that makes it so rich and creates an effective ripple into other parts of those creators’ lives. Life embraces life. And never more than in the revelatory experience of having hundreds of relatives explode in a spontaneous display of reciprocal joy at the end of a show.
There is also something important about the fact that it is the “puppets” who perform. Albeit at the hands and control of the children. The children are behind a screen. The puppets emerge, dance, and tell the tale. The child who would normally be terrified to stand in front of the rest of the class now performs with ease and confidence. I recall at this first performance in Norwich a parent crying; seeing her child take part in a whole school performance for the first time in 5 years!
These puppets come from nothing. Newspaper, cardboard and masking tape! There are a few extras – feathers, tissue paper, material, bamboo etc. There is a unity in how the children start to build. This starting point is parallel to my journey as a headteacher/school leader. We start with what we have in common. We use those to get the basics, the underlying shape formed…the rest is up to the imagination…Then we add the eyes.
In our first year at Lakenham, we worked with the four different schools within the academic board. Ori accessed the hall for us to work in for the full two weeks. As good a design as the atrium was at Lakenham, the hall was its equal; only in opposite! It was a bad working environment. The hall had no external ventilation. The windows didn’t open and along the roof ran huge aluminium, very noisy, air conditioning pipes. The other aspect was that the acoustics had gymnasium resonance – a footstep magnified and voices become amorphous and muffled. The choice we had was to drown or to drown. Either be drowned out by the noise of the air conditioning or drown in sweat in this insulated summer hot house. We chose the latter. Schools came in and we made a show, a Mayan creation myth about awe and wonder. Then, at some point, Ori had an idea.
Me and my crazy ideas! A show in a school in a managed space even if it is hot and sweaty is very different to taking 4 schools on a Lord Mayors procession! The logistics were horrific. The health and safety issues immense and we were co-ordinating 4 schools pick up, collection and puppet co-ordination. Staff were also being asked to give up a day off! We had no idea what we had let ourselves in for. How do you get 400 puppets – some of them so large and with wings they did not fit in a school minibus (not that we had one of those) to the start of the procession 5 miles away from the school? The team rallied round. A member of staff had a friend who owned a garage near the start of the procession. Staff drove in shifts piling puppets into the garage. We didn’t think about how we could get the puppets home again! I drove to the local hardware store and bought metres of plastic sheeting. The forecast for the procession day was rain!
Ori asked us if we would consider staying for the Saturday and entering the Lord Mayor’s procession. I consulted with the team, it was agreed and that’s what we did. We entered the procession, which winds its way through central Norwich with some 35,000 spectators and hundreds of different floats. The only problem was that we woke in our digs on the Saturday morning and it was tipping down. We looked at the forecasts – rain, rain, rain… 100% rain! I rang Ori, who said she was already on it and was buying loads of plastic covering. Still, it seemed a bit of a hopeless situation. We got the puppets down to our position and protected them as well as we could. We didn’t know how many children or parents would turn up but they did turn up in large enough numbers to make quite an impact. The story we had worked on was the Mayan creation myth called Hurucan (the heart of heaven) and Feathered Serpent (Quetzacoatl). Feathered Serpent was a huge dragon-like puppet. We kept her in the van as long as we could. Just before the procession began, out of nowhere, the rain stops. We did the whole procession without a drop falling. I remember coming around the final corner and seeing the sky looking at us, ominous and foreboding and ready to let loose. We reached the end, the rain began. It didn’t matter now because we had beaten the 100% odds against us. On the journey home, which is an 8-hour drive, Ori phoned, “We got 2nd prize”, she shouted, “next year we’ve got to win!!”
The sun shone for us, and the school communities came together and waved to their friends and families in one of the oldest processions in England. It was organised chaos. It was amazing. All children were safely returned to their parents with pure delight on their faces. I and the staff were left with Huracan and the feathered serpent, and a number of other puppets and no way to get them home. The feathered serpent spent the night in a local pub and scared the clientele before we could arrange collection!
I have nothing but high expectations – usually of myself. 2nd place was not good enough. A phrase that has resonated with me throughout my career and childhood is “Reach for the moon even if you miss you will land among the stars”. The absurdity of this statement is clear but, I am responsible for futures and we need to have high expectations and encourage the people we work with to have high expectations of themselves. There should be no ceiling on potential. Never had the parents and children of our shared community imagined they would be taking part in a tradition that began in 1404.
So, I asked Tony to come back and continue our learning journey. The next time was just with the children and families at Lakenham. What I realised was that the skills, the learning that took place could be built on. The child who made a fish, the simplest of the puppets we made in that first year could next year make.. what if…we could?
So, if we return to Tony’s seven beliefs:
I believe in imaginative collective action.
I have seen what can happen when groups, schools, school communities come together with a common purpose and passion. I know that something happens when a group of people come together to create, perform and express themselves and how the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
I believe in following the obvious.
What Tony might see as obvious – may to me be absurd. We over time, have found ways of compromising! Crosby Stills Nash and Young sang: Teach your children well…Teach your children what you believe in. Make a world that we can live in. The creation myths and stories we have told over the years replicate a moral code and values that unite and contribute to the cultural capital and ethos of the schools I have worked in.
I believe in the wisdom of not-knowing.
This has been the greatest challenge in our relationship – in schools each lesson has a learning outcome, teacher’s whilst experts in asking questions – usually have an idea of what the product, the intended outcome might look like. Teachers like to be in control. When staff first work with Tony – they have no idea of what he is describing – it seems absurd – there will be animals and banners, puppets and a story… and it will all end happily ever after…Tony knows that! You can’t plan for the weather, it was probably good that we did not know what taking part in the Lord Mayors processions would involve, neither did we appreciate the impact that coming second would have…We eventually managed to retrieve Huracan from the pub!
I believe in the power of self-evidence.
Well that would be self-evident -she replies flippantly. But, to be able to source the funding, to be able to embark on these projects/journeys we need to be able to demonstrate impact and value for money. The question I am asked time and time again as a headteacher is, “What is the impact?” We continually drive our school improvement agenda by evaluating the impact of what we do and using evidence based practice.
I believe in people making something for themselves.
John Buchan said, “the task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.” Tony demonstrates what leadership is. He shares a compelling story, (a vision). The story he shares changes and develops as the children quickly transform it into their story. The resources they might need are listed and collated. The children bring what they can to the table. When the making begins, they are highly scaffolded. They are taught initially how to make the basic shape and form of the puppet. However, as this process continues, the puppets come alive as the children start to develop their personalities and define their special characteristics. Their imagination and creativity start to shine. There is a point at which the performance is owned by the children and they takeover.
I believe that life embraces life.
I think it was Talk Talk who sang, “Life is what you make it”. How do you know what you can make if you you haven’t been given choices or opportunities to experience alternatives? I consider it a responsibility of our schools and our curriculum to enable children to explore skills, talents and passions and be given an opportunity to discover new ones. To open doors and create new horizons.
I believe that performance is research and can be revelation.
Evidence based practice has transformed the way schools have worked in recent years. Not everything that can be measured should be measured. Not everything we measure has value. Sometimes an outcome is a feeling, a parent crying when their child takes part in a school performance. I have seen, felt and experienced what can happen when a community comes together and creates.
Next year we came back to work exclusively with all the 400 plus children at Lakenham. There were two great developments. The first was that, what we did was embedded into the term’s learning journey. This how I would always like our work to be. The stories we bring or create with the children do express important, universal values, which convey themes that are fertile grounds for exploration in the classroom. It felt like a realisation of my own dreams when this was finally fully recognised by a headteacher.
The second big development happened on the site visit for that year, Ori and I discussed where we could work to make the puppets as the hall had proved so problematic. Especially, as it connected to the kitchen as well as the other drawbacks of sound and heat. Ori suggested we look at the atrium as a possibility. And this does relate to Ori’s ethos of dreaming impossible dreams because the atrium housed many different shared working spaces and resources such as the school library. It was also used after school by some of the clubs. This time though we were not going to work in the hall. I asked if we could work in the atrium with all the classes around us. This was hard work for Ori and the staff because a lot of stuff needed moving but it was worth it. After our first year working with all the schools in the cluster, Ori gave us the atrium for us to do our workshops. This meant that every child in the school saw 400 plus puppets coming to life and, for two weeks, we were very much part of and central to the life if the school in a very visual and overt way
The coincidence of the working space had such an impact on the children at Lakenham – not something we have yet replicated. The children walked through this area to go out to play, to go to lunch. Their classrooms above and below were platforms from which to view the emerging chaos. The children see the story coming to life, it emerges in the forms and puppets that are being made. The children retell the story or recall the role the puppet will play and each is carefully labelled with the name of the child who made it.
Also, this time it was just the Lakenham children – but all 400 plus of them. We told a West African tale about diversity and how all the children of the world are beautiful, Nyame and The Sky Spirits. We did the show in the atrium too. At the end of the show, the Nursery children, who were down at the front of the audience jumped up and set up their own spontaneous disco of joy. And then on the Saturday, the turn out from the school was much bigger than the previous year. I remember a large complex puppet being in front of us. It had been funded by the Arts Council, who had turned us down. The mechanism required several adults to work it. Our display was all children, parents, volunteers and teachers. There was well over 200 of us with puppets and banners. A huge giraffe and a giant elephant – all made with the children. I felt though that Ori saying we had to win might not be enough to guarantee that we did. I was wrong. We did it, we won first prize. Lakenham Primary, a school in a socially and economically deprived area of Norwich with an ethnically diverse intake and a lot of challenges and now they were the best in Norwich.
For me there was something special about the second show at Lakenham – the raising of the huge elephant and giraffe in the atrium. The second show was about not being a one-off but building on what had gone before and the demands from my staff that they wanted their children to be part of. Oh, and we did win it!!!
People often say to me that I must feel a sense of achievement about my work and it must be so rewarding. Most of the time though, I feel relief at the end that we have met the serious challenge of pulling off another show, happiness for the children but that day in Norwich, there was a real sense of achievement. A school community had come together to win a major prize in their city. The next year Lakenham Primary was rewarded when, in a break from tradition, they were invited to lead the whole huge procession. We made the show of The Rainbow Serpent, a very old Aboriginal creation myth from Australia, with the themes of respecting dreams and the world. We made a 40-foot-long Rainbow Serpent to lead the procession. When we put it together, it ran two thirds of the length of the atrium. I remember carrying the Rainbow Serpent back across a bridge and it spanning the whole width of the river.
Year 3 was about us having won and me being asked to be an honorary judge. Instead we nominated one of the children from Lakenham to take this role and sit with the city luminaries and judge the procession – she was a princess for a day.
The next year was our last year in Lakenham Primary and as it happened, Ori’s too. In fact, Ori had left before we arrived. It was a different sort of year with the school dealing with the upheavals that were inevitable with Ori’s departure. We made a show of The Mud on Turtle’s Back, a Native American tale. Ori was in the audience. We combined the tale of the turtle with the Native American Medicine Wheel which has within it the four qualities for human well-being and balance: the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. The four years at Norwich were an object lesson in how those four qualities could be engaged with in the simple act of making puppets, a show and a procession for individuals and for a collective community.
I have had the great fortune to have worked with a First Nations community in Saskatchewan, Canada. In the first workshop I ran there on a reservation, I made puppets with a group of youth. The elder who was there, joined in. Ron with his eagle head, carved walking stick, didn’t say much. He just silently made his puppet. There was one moment though when he looked up at me from his puppet making and said, “this is how we learn.” By doing – we learn that we can, we learn how to do something and we learn about who we are. This process is without ending. When we make something ourselves, it’s the beginning of the next process. Permission to be creative is a vital ingredient for that learning to happen. When motivations meet then that permission is given and a trust is created from which authentic learning and personal development can happen.
