Month: January 2024

Glow Matters

At the beginning of his book ‘The Element’, Ken Robinson recounts the story of a young girl being in her own world at the back of the class. The girl’s head is buried behind her crooked arm and she’s immersed in drawing something. The teacher goes over and asks the girl what she’s doing. The girl answers, “drawing”. The teacher asks her what she’s drawing. The girl answers “God.” The teacher informs the girl that nobody knows what God looks like and the girl says, “Well, they will in a minute.”

Two ways of looking at that tale. The young girl wasn’t paying attention to what the rest of the class was supposed to be doing and she was lost in her own fantasy world. Or, the girl was someone with imagination and originality opening a subject for discussion and exploration by everybody else in the room. Both ways have a point, depending on the context but if the aims of education are to open hearts and minds to new things whilst drawing from their motivations and social realities then this moment of drawing God was a brilliant opportunity for everyone in the room to explore a subject that could, by its nature, lead anywhere. 

There’s a concept invented and used by Dorothy Heathcote, who was a pioneer of using drama as a learning medium, called ‘Dropping to the Universal’.  What Dorothy meant that there is a way for anything that arises to be relevant if you ask the right questions. So, she would start her classes by asking the group what they wanted to make a show about; confident in the knowledge that any subject they chose could open up an endless list of questions starting from big questions: When did this happen?  Where did it happen? Who did happen to? What happened? Why did it happen? And, from each of those generalities  getting more and more specific in the questions. In this way a class might choose to make a show about pirates but they would end up researching a history, boats, geo-political situations, economic questions, criminology, mathematics and the list goes on…one thing leads to the next.

Early on in this little series, I referenced the National Curriculum and, whilst Dorothy’s approach might touch on many relevant topics, it’s not an approach that lends itself to standardisation. My approach doesn’t lend itself either. I run workshops. And to go back to another earlier reference, I was lucky enough to get a grant to run a project that begun with me interviewing artists about their workshop practice. This quote from those interviews has informed my practice since: “A workshop is the one story and it has a thread and one thing leads to the next to the next… it’s built there and everything goes towards building that, nothing is wasted.”  Nothing is wasted. This narrative approach is a way of finding out and building together but, as important, it is a way of intensifying experience so that it is relevant and memorable. By building something and finding meaning together, a new story is created.  

And here I hit mystery. 

I have been in hundreds of workshops and in nearly all of them I have been the workshop leader. I watch the glow build and I feel it in myself. I am both separate from the rest of the group in my distinctive role and simultaneously I am with them. So, when they glow, I glow and I don’t know exac6ly what’s just happened. It’s just happened.  But time after time, I get adults coming up to me and saying something like, “you probably don’t remember me but you came to my school and we made that show. I still remember. I fact my child plays with the puppet that I made back then. I’ve still got it.”

Now that matters. That crystalising of a memory, of something learnt, matters. We need an education that provides an environment that is relevant to life. Remembered things have greater relevance than forgotten things. If the remembered things about schooling are hurt or shame or failure then this is not a good thing. The room glows at the end of residencies and the end of shows because something relevant and affirming has been built. 

I have been very lucky because, despite the restrictions of standardisation, assessment, league tables, lack of funding and many other challenges that schools, I have increasingly got to work with schools and headteachers who see the relevance of children glowing with self-esteem and the joy of effective, collective imaginative endeavour. So, more and more, we have been asked to not only animate world stories with the children but write new world stories and animate those.  These events have been placed at the centre of a term’s work to build towards and to build from. When our van pulls up at the school and the children first see us it’s a little like the old films of The Beatles getting off the plane. But…and there’s always an if or a but, I am not doing that anymore. The work will continue though because the team of artists are brilliant and led by Karol Da Silva.

AND…and ‘and’ might be the biggest word in any language…the work we have been doing has been put into a book called Making Worlds – The Creation Myth Puppets Handbook (https://tonygeeauthor.com/making-worlds/).  The book is out and on sale on Amazon and from my website AND the official launch will be in a week-long, participatory exhibition at Birdwood House ( https://www.birdwoodhouse.org.uk/ ), Totnes High Street from March 3^rd to 9^th.  We will exhibit the originals of Charlie’s beautiful illustrations, tell some stories, make some puppets, create a wish wall and show examples of our work over 40 years with thousands upon thousands of children. AND, as the story goes on and YOU make it and, as the story says, “this will last forever BUT forever never lasts!”

A seven-year-old girl wrote: “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. “

What did that artist on the reservation in Canada mean when she said “the youth were just glowing?”  If you had been there, you would have been able to see for yourself and, like some of the simplest aspects of being human, it is ineffable – the complexity of words undoes the simplicity of the moment. It happens in a moment and if you are not there then…well, you are not there.  Still, being of the type who looks for clues and builds suspicions, this is what I suspect might be happening. Could it be a concoction of the following?

Preparing the ground – When we go into a school, we are looking to let everyone know that our visit is going to make something special. With this in mind we change the space. The school hall is described by a headteacher: “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 the puppet stage at the front of the hall.”  

Making the space is one element that creates expectation and is part of preparing the ground. When the group arrive in the hall, they need to meet us and understand the challenge of what we are inviting them to do – namely, for all 200 plus of them to make a huge puppet show that brings a world creation myth to life. This show will not be rubbish, it will be magnificent and it will be theirs. This message is conveyed through a telling of the story, a puppetry demonstration and them, not us, naming everything they will have to do to realise the challenge. By the time they leave the hall there is a collective excitement and a emerging common purpose. They know that they are going to be creative together and they trust us to guide them through that process.

“So, in the “telling” phase the carpet is a 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. “

Making something of ourselves – My old friend the poet John Moat, co-founder of Arvon, said when I first interviewed him about what happens in an arts workshop, “…the big contribution that we can make to anything is making ourselves.” He went on, “…we sometimes talk about individual imagination. I think that’s misleading because suddenly there’s all sorts of hubris, all sorts of inflation of the personality that can get caught up in this, my imagination.  Actually, if you see children working in one of your workshops, you realize that the imagination is this limitless, indefinable store of endless invention, which is the common source of all imaginative product. As individuals we have intercourse with that limitless store in a funny way and out of that experience, we have the gnosis of making something.”  

I suspect John’s description is accurate. After the initial introduction the children come back to the hall for half-day workshops so that each can make their own puppet. Puppets that they have identified from the story introduction on the magic carpet and that, in turn, we have ensured are age appropriate to their class. This process is described by the headteacher, “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 at the making stage that the puppets come alive and are given their eyes.”

I could spend pages describing what goes on in those workshops. There is so much happening and most of it is invisible in the twin processes of making the puppets (the art) and the self-realisation (the group process). What is happening is that each young person is making a reflection of themselves in the puppet. This is unavoidable. Everything we put our hands to create will inevitably carry our signature. The other visible aspect is that each child is taking simple materials and turning them into an animatable being that exceeds their expectations. This process is happening in a hall alongside others so each person is simultaneously an agent and a witness of creative endeavour that takes the whole group from sticks and card to thirty or so creatures that they made. 

Teachers have often finished a session by saying something like, “well that was fun and now we have to do some real work.” That is not how I see it. One day I decided to test this assertion by asking a class of nine and ten-year olds whether they thought what they had just done was fun or more than fun.  From the carpet, every hand shot in the air. The first girl I chose said that making her penguin was more than fun because whilst she made it there were all sorts of stories about her puppet coming into her head. Next a boy said that it was more than fun because he may not make any more puppets but he was learning he could make things and now he would make lots more things. The invisible and the visible parts of the process identified. Both identifications are about the lack of separation between self-realisation and learning something new. The story, inner and outer, had a relevance that will sustain in the memory of those who had that first hand experience. Another younger child once asked me, “is the world inside or outside us?”  Of course, it is at once both and the best learning engages with both.

Our partner headteacher, whom we have worked with across twenty plus years in several schools across the UK, named what she witnessed the children doing like this, “In educational terms, we call this the zone of proximal development; the distance between what a child can do without help and what a child can achieve with support (Vygotsky).  Children, through social interaction and working with experts, start to make sense and solve problems independently. We can advance teaching and learning by giving children experiences that are within that zone. Getting the challenge just right is the skill of the teacher.”

The story makers – The first time we got a large group of children to bring a creation myth to life I left the school amazed by several things. I could hardly believe the quality the children brought to the puppet theatre they created in such a short time. They threw themselves into the task and their motivation to make something special grew as the week went by. Parent came in and asked, “what did you do to my child? They never come home from school so excited.” And, “she won’t stop talking about it.”  And I saw it for myself. At the end of their performance, there was a luminosity about the children about their creation.

One thing that occurred to me was the resonance between the story and what the children were doing. In this instance, they had brought to life a West African creation myth called Nyame and the Sky Spirits. Nyame, the sky god, loves to make things and he creates the world. He takes nothing and makes something very amazing. Hadn’t the children we worked with just done exactly the same thing?  And if I needed confirmation about that resonance, I got that confirmation from an 8-year-old girl, “We’re creating something in the same way the sky god did, we’re moulding little people only the Sky God used mud and we’re using newspaper.” That comment was a real eye-opener. I had always viewed creation myths as being about the grand creation of earth, its creatures and humans but, as that child pointed out or, as Samuel Beckett said, “the creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day”.  Any act of conjuring something new into existence is a manifest creation myth. There was nothing and then there was something.

Those children, and thousands since, experienced exactly that. With no idea of what was going to happen, they had made their own creatures, brought them to life and received standing ovations from audiences.   All in one week of school.

Perhaps the most common creation are stories. Stories of the everyday, about others, about the world – we story our lives. We are story makers.

The power of with – They say a story has three apples – one for the teller, one for the listener and one for the story itself. Stories are, by nature, collective affairs. A story in your head is still a story but to bring it to life, the story needs sharing.  The way I see and prepare a participatory workshop is as a living story. The participants create their own story across the workshop. Each of them has their own story which unfolds. In the case of our puppet residencies, this unfolding runs from the introduction to a myth and a challenge to making the puppets, to crafting a show and finally, to performing that show. Although, each person has their own story of how this was for them, those individuals, in the imaginative experience of collective creativity, amplify each other. This amplification builds across the week until the common purpose of the group is all poured into performing together. In all this, the team and I are their story guides. At each stage we facilitate. Literally, we break each task down into appropriate and manageable steps so that the big event they are making becomes realisable. And so, when it is realised, there is something of the revelation about it. An aspect of self, of with-ness is evident and the humans, who are the agents of that revelation, glow.

In the words of a teacher: “It’s an epic experience, bigger than a puppet show, there is more going on! It created a golden memory for the children. There was unadulterated happiness.” A parent: “I was on the door this morning welcoming the children as normal, the comments and hugs I got from other parents and children and the “we won” statements, expressions of joy and love for our school you could not have believed.” A child: “It made me more than happy.”

Why does this matter?

PART ONE

“This partnership has challenged assumptions, opened up new ideas, illustrated difference and similarities, made unlikely connections, built on ideas to make better ideas, got us to look at things in new ways and taken advantage of the unexpected such as a caretaker and school bursar suddenly being called into action to work two giant Dodo puppets.  Taking chances and risk has opened new worlds for both of us, the people whom we work with and, most importantly, the children – thousands of children.”  Ori Dalton, Headteacher, The Trumpington Federation, Cambridge

I am writing this because over the last forty years, I have worked in several hundred primary schools across the UK, Ireland, Canada, Taiwan, Belgium, Holland, Italy and Switzerland with many, many thousands of children. 

When the National Curriculum was introduced, I had already been an accidental puppeteer visiting schools around the UK and beyond for five years. I was a Youth and Community Worker is South London when the accident happened. I had set up and run various projects for young people from creches and nurseries to youth clubs. At the last of these projects, I became friends with a Chilean who had worked in theatre. He had written a puppet play. An allegory for the oppressive and vindictive dictatorship of Pinochet’s Chile. The play was called El Tomate y El Condor (the Tomato and the Condor). On a visit to my friend’s flat, I offered to do some administration to help him launch his play and by the end of next day I found myself cast as the narrator of the show and maker and puppeteer for the condor in the title. And so, something new started which was to sustain, challenge, nurture me and many others for the next forty years. When the puppet accident happened there was no National Curriculum.

In those five years, we moved from South London to South Devon and I discovered an unfathomable magic spell that puppet theatre cast upon large groups of people, especially children. This spell was particularly potent when it was the group who participated in making the puppet theatre by transforming nothing into a spectacular performance in just a few days of intense applied imagination.  When the first attempts to standardise schooling in a measurable ‘scientific’ form were introduced in the form of the National Curriculum, freelance artists who worked in schools were told to make it evident how their work was relevant to the National Curriculum. 

Tracking back a long way, my formal education was in the gloriously freewheeling Fifties, Sixties and early Seventies. By the time I began in the sixth form, I was reading A.S. Neil, John Holt and the Little Red School Book. So, with the certainty of youth, I knew that the education system needed changing and I wanted to do that. 

By 1989, my beliefs hadn’t changed. So, when told to make the work relevant to the National Curriculum, it didn’t take me long to decide that the work we brought to children enhanced learning in a different way to a standardised curriculum. Our offer to schools was to make large shows involving any sized group from a single class to the whole school in a very short time. These workshop residencies in schools led to long-standing partnerships with schools in the Primary Sector in both the UK and Europe. Many years ago, an art teacher from a school in Zurich wrote to us after a residency with one hundred six- and seven-year-olds: “When Tony and the team comes a kind of magic descends over the whole school and when they have left you suddenly wake up and realise that something very special just happened.”  

Magic is a difficult word to employ and is definitely not part of the National Curriculum but there is an accuracy to that teacher’s observations. From the outset, I saw it happen and wanted to understand the what, how and why of it.  That search for understanding catapulted me on another trajectory – a parallel trail to the making of worlds with children. The second trail can be characterised by a single question that arose after the first school residency brining to life and African creation myth with 120 year 6 children.  The question was and is: “What is Workshop?”

One of the places this parallel path led to was working with indigenous youth on a reservation in Saskatchewan, Canada called Fort Qu’Appelle for an organisation that ran out of Regina University called the Indigenous Peoples’ Health Research Centre.  I guided a team of artists in running workshops in different art forms in a two-day workshop with some 40 youth about bullying. At the end of day one the youth decided that they didn’t want to look at bullying. The wanted to look at well-being. At the end of day two, when the youths had left, the artist team sat in a circle to process the two days. One of the artists said “They were glowing. Did you see that, the youth were just glowing by the end of that? The problem though is how do you measure glow?”  This was exactly where I found myself in the van after that African creation myth with the year 6 children. They were glowing too and, when we glow, it transmits to the others in the room.

What happens to create that glow and why does it matter?