Thirty-Two – Glow Matters (the accidental puppeteer part three)

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 3rd to 9th.  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!”

Thirty-One – What is Glow (the accidental puppeteer part two)

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?

Thirty – The Accidental Puppeteer (part one)

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?  

Twenty Nine – A Hole in the Head

A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about. —Miguel de Unamun

Take the nothing therein and turn it to the matter at hand – Possibly Lao Tau

Even though it was in the last century, as tomorrow is the first day of the Jewish year 5784 it really isn’t so many years ago when I wrote a show based on Jewish stories about a city of fools. It was supposed to be the fourth show in a series called Tales of A Far and Wide Cat. My company back then was called Far&Wide Puppets.  Each time I’d make a show from a story that fell into my field of vision and made special sense to me. The first was Arabian, the second, Romanian and the third North American. What next?


“Hold on a moment”, I thought to myself, “these tales come from cultures all over the world, what about tackling one from my own culture?” And like the words say” …when you commit to something then magic happens.” Almost immediately a story fell my way. It was the story of the Golem of Prague. I should have mentioned that I am Jewish. Not religious, not particularly adhering to anything but unequivocally Jewish. This ethnic inheritance runs deeper in my DNA than any other national or cultural trait.The story of the Golem happens in a time of pogroms. The Jews were confined to the ghetto in Prague and baseless rumours were rife. Especially at that time of year when Easter and Passover coincide. At that time, it was rumoured that the Jews made their flat unleavened bread, which they eat at Passover in memory of the miraculous escape of Jewish slaves from Egypt led by Moses, from the blood of Christian babies. If you’ve ever seen a flat piece of matzo made from flour, water with a little salt – you’d see the utter absurdity of this claim.

Nevertheless, absurdity abounds in the world of humans and it was enough to start another bout of Jew massacre.

There was a wise rabbi in the ghetto. His name was Rabbi Loew and he was known as the Maharal meaning the lion heart.  He was a great educator and studied the mystical book called the Kabbalah. The Maharal decided that something had to be done to be done to save his people. He decided to make a giant and powerful man out of mud. So, with three close friends and disciples they went to the river and performed the magical necessaries and the Golem was born. The Golem saved the people but the Golem became more and more autonomous and hard to control. Rabbi Loew found a way to end the Golem and rumour now has it that the Golem is in the attic of the old Synagogue in Prague. Like Mary Shelley before me, I I was captivated by the tale.

My mother’s oldest friend from early school days came over on the Kindertransport. My Mum also escaped from Germany. They made friends at school and remained friends ever since. I rang my mother’s friend and she said she knew a Rabbi who had written her rabbinical thesis on the Maharal. An appointment to meet the Rabbi was arranged. And so, given my lack of observance, on what I thought was any old day, I turned up at the Leo Baeck College in North London. I knocked on the door and a very weird masked face peered through a hatch on me. This was absurdity but good absurdity. I didn’t know it but I had arrived on the festival of Purim. A festival for children, for giving to the poor, for feasting particularly on sweet things.

I was ushered into the college which was full of masked people in a very celebratory mood. Something in me felt instantly at home. In some ways, more at home than I had felt out on the streets of London moments earlier.  People were noisy and irreverent, happy, loud and full of ebullient colour. My presence was welcomed but not overly fussed over. Over the course of that day, I learnt much more about the Rabbi Loew and the Golem.

Afterwards I bought several books and read several versions of the tale including a purported first-hand account of the Golem’s creation by his brother-in-law. My mother’s friend rang me and asked how I was getting on with the story. “Fine”, I told her,” But I’m not sure I feel comfortable doing a show that is so blatantly about bigotry and massacre.” She replied” Why don’t you tell the story of Chelm?”  When I said I knew nothing about Chelm (a line later repeated back to me by a very old man from Baghdad in a Jewish old people’s home – another tale) Anne, my mother’s friend, said she’d send me some stories. And a show was born about a city of fools.

Now, as I said before, as the saying goes, commitment to an idea can lead to magic. A friend from Chile visited. He showed me pictures of Indian story boxes. Boxes that unfolded to reveal different scenes.  To ensure food on the table, I was doing some paid work with a fostered teenager who had some very serious issues. The lad taught me the vital importance of home. He had lost his idea of home and it deprived him of the value of being alive. He would play a game of standing in a busy road with cars coming on either side. It was extremely scary to witness and try to stop him because he didn’t care.  My job was to make a puppet with him.  Like all of the work I’ve ever done with young people, all I can do is hope that the time we spent together made some sort of difference and created some sort of different sense of self.

One day I was taking him home and there was an old wooden trunk on top of a skip. My story box of Chelm was born. I had a carpenter friend and he helped me create a story box that could unfold to reveal several different panels within the trunk. I also had a painter friend who was willing to paint different scenes that portrayed an element from the Chelm stories I intended to tell. There are a lot of stories. I mean these are stories about how humans are fools so there would be a lot.

Chelm happened because of a foolish angel. The angel has a simple job. The angel’s task is to fly around the world with two sacks – one full of wise souls and the other full of foolish souls. The angel simply has to ensure that everywhere in the world there is an equal distribution for the sacks – half wise and half fools. A simple task. But… (all these small words like if, but, yes, no, why… are really the biggest words are they not?) but the angel was absent minded. The angel was enjoying flying so much that when one sack got snagged on a tree on top of a hill, the angel failed to notice. By the time the angel noticed, the sack had emptied its contents all around the steep hill. That sack was full of all the foolish souls. So, all the foolish souls built their city around a hill in Chelm.Chelm stories are almost endless, always absurd and imbued with foolishness. They usually involve solving a problem, answering a question or meeting a challenge and coming with a madcap solution. Quite like Harpo, Groucho, Chico and Zippo Marx! In Yiddish there are many words for fool and a hierarchy of foolishness – Schlemiels, Schmendricks, Nudnicks, Klutzes …and many more. I enjoyed portraying them all to populate the city and bringing a world of fools to life as Leonardo De Mish Mash, a Chelmite artist in search of wisdom. He finds it in the Yiddish concept of chochma. 

The Zohar breaks up the word chochma into two words: “koach” and “mah“. “Koach” means “potential”, and “mah” means “what is”. Thus chochma means “the potential of what is”, or “the potential to be”. Leonardo realises that that his fellow citizens have chochma because they are kind to each other and that, as well as fools, is what they are. Kindness is the highest type of human wisdom.

Two weeks ago, a surgeon made a small necessary hole in my head by removing a lump. He said it was a secondary intention. This contrasts to a primary intention, which the surgeon stitches together so the healing is greatly helped, as a secondary intention is one where the healing is up to the body to gather its resources and send them to that point in your anatomy where the hole is.

I like those two intention phrases. I think actions have more than one intention. The first might be your conscious intention, the second one becomes apparent quite quickly as events unfurl  and the third is a hidden intention.

Last week I went to get the wound redressed and I asked the nurse what it looked like. He said that my secondary intention was a hole in my head a bit bigger than an old penny. When I thought about a hole in the head, a character from my Chelm tales popped  into my mind: Yente Pesha, the wife of the hugely foolish Mayor of Chelm , Gronam Ox in my show.  “Oi!”, Yente, constantly exasperated by Gronam, exclaimed, “You give me a loch in kopf (a hole in my head).”

So, the little op I had brought me back to my tales of fools and that was the hidden intention in my secondary intention. My show, A Sackful of Souls, was a new departure for me back then as is my current hole in my head now.  Let’s see what awaits in Chelm (Aka Totnes. Aka the 21st Century. Aka my 70th year) now!

TwentyEight – Between You, Me and a Puppet

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning…We witness every minute the miracle of related experiences, yet nobody knows better how this miracle is worked, for we are ourselves this network of relationships

(Merleau Ponty, 1945/2002, p. xxii-xxiii)

In reflecting upon my applied arts practice the alarming truth that I am a man guided by puppets is an inescapable one. Somewhere between others and me, puppets invariably emerge. For as long as I can remember my motivation has been to engage with the imagination, especially of the young. It was never my intention to become a puppeteer. The continuing magnetism of puppets for me has not rested in them as objects but in what they allow others to make of themselves. The puppets give voice to stories that may never have otherwise been told. They make makers out of those who have been persuaded that they are unable to make anything creative. The puppet engages audiences in irresistible, anarchic and surreal ways. And for me as an applied arts practitioner the dynamic of others, me and puppets is constantly surprising and stretches my practice into a future that is unimaginable to me in the present moment. But on retrospective reflection I can see how that future was suggesting itself back then. This piece is a simple, personal tale that emerges from thinking about reflection through applied arts.

THE FISHERMANS DREAM


We can follow this better if we think of a fisherman making a net. As he works, care and meaning are present in every flick of the finger. He draws his thread, he ties the knots, enclosing emptiness with forms whose exact shape corresponds to an exact function. Then the net is thrown into the water, it is dragged to and fro, with the tide, against the tide, in many complex rhythms. A fish is caught, an uneatable fish, or a common fish good for stewing, maybe a fish of many colours, or a rare fish, or a poisonous fish or at moments of grace a golden fish. There is however a subtle distinction between theatre and fishing that must be underlined. In the case of the well-made net, it is the fisherman’s luck whether a good or a bad fish is caught. In the theatre, those who tie the knots are also responsible for the quality of the moment that is ultimately caught in their net. It is amazing―the fisherman in his action influences the quality of the fish that lands in his net! (Brook, 1993, P.84)

Early on in my workshops the puppet Abdullah the fisherman often enters. He is one of Four Abdullahs who end up sharing their wealth with a whole nation. Abdullah the Fisherman is poor with many mouths to feed. He is also a hopeless fisherman. Two things change his fortune. The first is Abdullah the Baker who keeps giving the fisherman bread without wanting anything in return. Second is that his wife advises Abdullah to break his habits and fish in a different place. Abdullah follows her advice and as soon as he casts his net it becomes very heavy. He has caught a merman – Abdullah the Merman, who offers the fisherman jewels in exchange for fruit. The fisherman repays his debt to the baker and then takes jewels to the market to sell where he is immediately arrested as the thief who stole the Queen’s jewels. He is dragged through the streets and taken straight in front of the king, whose name is also Abdullah. The king is amazed when he hears the fisherman’s story and he makes him prime minister. The story ends with the king deciding that all this new found wealth from the bed of the ocean should be shared amongst everyone and so nobody in that country goes hungry or without a house to live in.  

Early on into my journey as a puppeteer, my performing partner emigrated so circumstances dictated that I needed a new show. It had to be put on fast and performed solo. I had discovered that as a performer I needed to see the audience. As I searched for a tale to tell, the above story found me and gave birth to several other theatrical inventions – a storyteller, a magic cat and a baddie -F.L.Schmang, the greatest brain in the universe, who wants to catch the cat, stop the storyteller and close the Gap – the Gap through which the storyteller, cat and stories mysteriously arrive in different venues. The Four Abdullah puppets were made in one week using good toilet paper to fashion four papier-mâchéd new characters that would fit in the rucksack of the storyteller. They were to appear 1001 times over fifteen and a half years.

Although each Abdullah was much smaller than me, when held up with my focus as puppeteer on the puppet, the audience’s attention was focused on the puppet. And not only was it focused there but the intensity of that focus was different than when they were focused on me. Their disbelief is instantly suspended so that without any psychological character complexity they can read the happiness, sadness and anger of these simple puppets. Remember this is painted toilet paper that they are looking at. Obviously it is not the emotions of toilet paper that a workshop audience are seeing. The simple act of Abdullah the fisherman entering the space at the beginning of a workshop hooks a group in ways that they don’t expect. Their imaginations are irresistibly drawn in.

The fisherman is giving me everybody’s attention. There is an instant unconscious commonality in the room. In other words, the group is becoming present with each other and me in a single, simple and transparent moment. This does not guarantee that this presence will be a lasting one but it’s a good start. We are in a workshop though and they are about to create something themselves and this will entail risk and they need to feel safe. The fisherman on his stick provides evidence that if they perform with a puppet the focus will not be on them:  the focus will be on a puppet. 

The fisherman at the beginning of a workshop permits us a license to play. He’s a little man who is not a little man who engages and says, “you can”.  How does he do this? He doesn’t say so in so many words. He demonstrates the license by showing that in this space here and now there is an ability that we hold in common. That ability is our ability to read.  Read not words but objects. From almost the moment we begin to play we manipulate and transform an object. The fisherman reminds us of that moment in our life when we haven’t learnt we can’t yet. I tell the people in the room that the fisherman is made of toilet paper and so we all know that toilet paper doesn’t have emotions. We hope not. Then the fisherman’s head goes down and he sinks his eyes towards the floor and walks slowly along his imaginary ground. How does he feel? Sad. All of us know he feels sad and most of us can feel his palpable sadness in our guts. We read it, together.

So the fisherman puppet is a mirror of childhood and shared abilities. Now, in the workshop we begin to make our own puppets and the story of them – then – there unfolds further. Card, newspaper and everyday objects are transformed into animatable beings by animate beings in ways that none of us could have imagined. As we create of ourselves in our own ways we play in a paradox. The paradox is that we simultaneously control a process and the process controls us as the puppet takes on a life of its own through our hands. This symbiotic flow displays its hold in the same way the special low hum we hear that accompanies a party of children eating ice cream fills the space. There is a moment of joy as the realization dawns that expectation is being exceeded. The transformation that is happening to the newspaper is replicated by a transformation that is happening within the individuals making that transformation.  The character taking shape through the hands of each maker is also happening in their mind’s eye. These makers can be seen imagining conversations with their embryonic paper on a stick characters long before anyone else in the room can see a shape. Parallel inner and outer processes are at play and this allows story to be told that may never otherwise have seen the light of day. Sometimes this manifests in informal chats around table and at other times puppets begin to speak to each other and tales begin to emerge. A platform though is built in the group that allows performance and in just a few hours a dynamic social dreaming has become a complete creative process. 

It was long ago the story of that fisherman found me. The puppet then stepped right out of its show into a fully participatory space but the story of an inclusive gift economy that emerged from deep below the surface, from the unknown, remained.  When guiding a workshop I have an idea of where we are aiming to get to, more ideas about how we are going to get there but no idea about who is going to come into the room or the look of each individual creation they might make – much less how they will blend with each other to create the bigger whole. I know, though, that the fisherman is an ally at the beginning, that we are going ‘to fish’ together and that they will find themselves somewhere in the process of making a puppet.  In each workshop, to paraphrase the bard, the imagination bodies forth and finds local habitation and a name. 

ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN

 It happened by accident, by chance. Thirty years ago when I was thirty, I walked into a friend’s flat just as he was starting a puppet company. I offered to help with some administration to lessen his evident stress. My friend accepted my offer and invited me to meet him in a hall the next day.  I did this and was instructed that I was to be the narrator of the show and that I would make a puppet representing myself as narrator and another of a Condor.  

An unknown universe of puppets in which there were books, a history, professionals and distinctive performances found me. And I found, in time, that I had autonomy within a whole creative process. I could realise visions and make and animate characters and tell stories and produce theatre. Everything was up for grabs, everything mattered and anything was possible. By accident a practice emerged that made sense to and of me. Many years later an artist in our collaborative, cross-art form company described Workshop, a practice we in the company treat as an integral and distinctive form of practice, as the art of anomaly. How much of what we learn is accidental? How much do our lessons depend on being given permission to make mistakes? Or indeed, how much can develop from permission to explore the seemingly frivolous activity of making a puppet and bring to life?

WORKSHOP IS A WAY TO CREATIVELY TELL OUR STORIES

A long time after that catalytic collision with the Chilean, I began to research workshop as a distinctive form of contemporary arts practice. I was doing a Masters Degree in Applied Drama and interviewing practitioners from different creative practices on the question: What is Workshop? One of these practitioners was my Chilean friend who had played such a large, if unconscious, role in initiating this journey. He said, ”Every workshop tells its own story. It is a story that is told then and there by those people. One thing leads to the next and to the next. It is a unique story. It is told then and there by those people and can never be told again.”

Although my practice has moved in all sorts of different directions, the puppet remains at its heart. My eldest son, when he was seven years old, wrote a piece of homework about the jobs people did our small town in Devon. He wrote that there were bus drivers, shopkeepers, schoolteachers, road cleaners and puppeteers. As I mused about his perception it dawned on me that he was right. A quirk in the structure of the universe meant that there were an unusually high number of puppeteers in our town. In a town of 5000, I could think of at least 15 puppeteers. My idea was that we all collaborated to make a huge show in a day called The Biggest Puppet Show on Earth!! And so, some months later, 15 puppeteers ran 8 concurrent workshops with 250 participants and created a show called The Guests of Chance. Later on that day, the same number crammed into the Civic Hall to watch.

Everything about this event exceeded my expectations: the way the workshop artists collaborated, how seemingly disparate random parts suddenly clicked to make a whole, the quality of all that was made and the effect of it all on the those there and beyond into the town.  I had no idea that this much could happen in a single day. 

This event affected three areas of my practice. It gave me a new form – making huge puppet shows of high quality in short amounts of time that reflected something special about those who made the show. It showed me that working alone was not the best way forward to expand my practice and thirdly, it provided me with irrefutable empirical evidence that my participatory work was not an adjunct of my main artistic practice. It was my main practice. Why, when there are so many practitioners who bear witness and give articulate expression to the potential and power for transformation of creative, collective practise is that power and potential systemically sidelined?  

THOSE JEWELS FROM THE OCEAN BED

In a recent schools workshop, 120 children were animating a West African story of emergence that tells the tale of why humans are so diverse. It is a story of a creative sky god, inquisitive sky spirits, intention and accident and beauty. The sky spirits mould children from mud. The week was arranged so that the story is told then all the students decide what they need to do to bring it to life as a puppet show. The first part of the week entails all of them making the puppets in class groups. This is followed by rehearsal and devising. They create a script and we make a soundtrack. On the fifth day the show is performed to other children and parents. 

Early on in this process I noticed that these world creation myths or stories of emergence reflect the process that the children engage in and that this reflective aspect between form (the story) and content (the creative process) has a special resonance.  In that recent workshop one class was making the children who in the story emerge in all sorts of different shades and colours. A hand went up. The girl looked thoughtful and then said, “I’ve just realised that we are doing the same thing as the sky spirits only we are moulding our children out of newspaper.”  Of course, she was right and to some extent that is exactly the point of the story and those children breathing their life into that story – the reflection that they are diverse makers. As John Moat, the poet, painter and co-founder of the Arvon foundation said to me in a recent interview, ‘Workshop works and is authoritative because when alive it becomes a microcosm of the creative universe.”

If our universes are not creative, what are they? 

WHO’S TEACHING WHO?

Part of the motivation for my research into Workshop as a distinctive form of practice emerged from my inability to get support to develop my practice outside the economic imperative of the next gig and a perception that I was part of a community of practice that was unsupported. The aim of the research was to find the right form to provide that support to those artists for whom Workshop was central. 

And so I found myself leading a workshop on Workshop for workshop artists – this was called A Moveable Feast. It began with a story and the fisherman and then one thing led to the next and the next. Over four days 42 artists made all sorts of creations and reflections of their work. A book was written about the event and the practitioners went away to create new workshops, forge collaborations and even found new companies. Eventually, a core group got together and founded a multi-art form company, The Moveable Feast Workshop Company, who collaborated to make cross- art form, bespoke workshops.

We did a lot of work with the disability branch of a now defunct, national initiative called Aim Higher, which aimed to widen participation in Higher Education. At the first of these projects we are asked the group to decide on a name to frame their project. The group were between fourteen to sixteen years old and visual and aural disabilities that impacted on their confidence. Two or three would only address the group through their personal assistant. They went away to discuss the title whilst we spoke to the teachers. After a while they reappeared and announced that they wanted to call their project: “Impaired Teens don’t have Impaired Futures.” 

Over the next few weeks those young people were transformed. One big moment in this was when they created puppets that represented their daemons – their inner selves. This wonderful moment opened the multi-media show they created in which the stage filled with them represented as butterflies, horses, lions and all sorts of creatures. When one makes a puppet, especially for the first time, it is an extension of oneself that simultaneously reaches outwards and inwards. It inevitably bears the signature of who made it embodied in its character, attitude and colour. This reflection of the maker is dug out the great seabed of their unconscious. There is so often a delight and almost a shock as the eyes are placed on the face and the make sees what they have made. What the others in the space see is a reflection of that person holding their new creation. The puppets open up three levels of story: stories of self, of others and of the world.

One day many years ago I woke up with no idea that I was ever going to have anything to do with puppets and that night when I went to sleep a puppeteer. Watching this same process of being a puppeteer, for that’s what you are in that moment, happen as I guide young and old through workshops over all these years endlessly renews my practice.  

I write this from a break in some work in with the Indigenous People’s Health Research Council in Saskatchewan, Canada that does Arts- Based Health Research with Aboriginal Communities. Part of my job last year in this project was to create a puppet show with a group of indigenous Cree youth to open a symposium. At the end of the show, the audience of artists, researchers and academics asked if they could question the puppets. One woman said, I want to ask that puppet there with the blue hair how she feels about us asking her our questions” The puppet answered, “I didn’t even exist before yesterday”. And that’s it. As Samuel Beckett said, “the creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day”.

Puppets have been exemplary companions to create an applied arts practice that is open to so many different worlds. Sometimes I have wondered why such evident joy in learning is not exploited more by those organisations concerned with learning. At other moments I have been grateful that it is ignored so that I can get on unhindered to work on what works. How do we write about our practices and processes of embodiment and emergent actions? Do we need to quantify what really is not measurable because funders and assessment agencies require it? Or does the act of reporting those moments shorten the life of the freedom to learn through doing and permission to make mistakes? As one practitioner so aptly reflected upon a workshop, “…those kids were glowing at the end of that workshop, but how do we measure glow?”

This article was first obliged as the Afterword in Playing in a House of Mirrors by Warren Linds and Eleanor Vettraino

Twenty Seven – The Moveable Feast

This is Blog is simply a link to an online version of the book I wrote about a unique and luminous event that I led in collaboration with Ken Beagley and Martin Corbin. SO MUCH came out of this event. I will add a link soon to a video of that event. In the meantime here’s the book.

Twenty Five- Breath Taking

“It made me more than happy.”  Child’s comment in evaluation focus group for Kindling.

It’s celebrating their childhood isn’t it. It’s making their childhood years special and memorable because these years are so fleeting really and they only have one shot at childhood so we feel it is our duty and our privilege to make it as good as it can possibly be.  Teacher, evaluation for Kindling.

We can reignite the creative compassion of our communities if we think differently.” Ken Robinson

The purpose of these pieces of writing are so Ori and myself can take a long look into how and why the children are empowered to create an event that is simply “breathtaking”.  The work breathes, it allows the participants’ imaginations to breathe and those who are witness to it find it breathtaking. All this breathing is the stuff of life. All living things breathe, one way or another.  Taking breath is literally to inspire (“2. breathe in (air); inhale. “They can expand their lungs and inspire enough gas to satisfy oxygen requirements””). The work enhances lives and creates new life possibilities. We are looking at how this work has inspired – created the necessary creative gas.

Continue reading “Twenty Five- Breath Taking”

Twenty Three – The Magic Carpet

Children’s poster for the first Norwich show

 “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

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Twenty Two -If you only think there is one answer, then you will only find one.

Fools learn where wise men fear to tread

If you only think there is one answer, then you will only find one. Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum 1996

We made a mistake. That’s good. We just learned something… In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very ‘gifted’ improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action… Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more ‘respectful’ teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children. Keith Johnstone

Continue reading “Twenty Two -If you only think there is one answer, then you will only find one.”