David McCandless - picture truth-teller

'Billion Dollar-o-Gram'

I've mentioned in this blog my thoughts on how verbal language can distort reality whereas pictures cannot really lie - well David McCandless is a London-based 'data designer' who is very much on a mission to spell out the truth about date by turning it into pictures. It's astounding to see how he takes facts and figures that get thrown at us all the time and turns them into visual images which, at last, allow us mere humans to see the 'bigger picture'. It's crazy how many times you can hear sums like £500 billion spoken about in the news but they don't sink in until you actually see them - alongside others. And when you gaze at the contradictions (eg. estimated cost of war in Iraq versus actual cost - imagine comparing the size of an arm band with the size of a swimming pool?) you begin to wonder whether a lot of powerful, clever people take advantage of the fact that information without visuals is protected information.

I told you all here first....the picture world is the truth-telling world.
And how exciting that someone intelligent, eloquent and very computer savvy such as David McCandless realises this too.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/the-true-size-of-africa/

The Weeping Tree in dim light...

Some nice monotone shots of a December showing of The Weeping Tree, taken in Central School of Speech and Drama's Puppetry studio.

Toy Theatre and Improvised Storytelling

Possibly more fun than making a performance is to make a performance-generating device...such as this toy theatre, complete with four different moving scenes and a range of characters/creatures on sticks. What stories will your friends come up with? If forced to use the characters and scenes in a particular order what will happen?
Toy theatre as a gateway to the subconscious...?

The Weeping Tree

Toy theatre performance created entirely out of cardboard and mount board. Performed at the CSSD Student Puppet Festival, London (2010) and the Great Small Works International Toy Theater Festival, New York (2010)

Picture Storytelling Scroll

Traditional picture storytelling scroll detailing the history of the art of picture storytelling from its origins in 6th Century India to its off-shoots in Asia, Europe and America. (2010)

Cantastoria board

Large scale 'cantastoria' (traditional picture storytelling) performance board with rotating, automata-style panels. Created and performed at the Bread and Puppet theatre (2009).

Archaic Animated Stage

A walking automata performance piece with central rotating dial and two 'stages' - sun and moon - which come alive via toy theatre manipulation. (2009)

The William Morris Choir Twins

At last I've dug out an old project which has been half-completed and staring me in the face for the past year now...the paper theatre Twins. Over a year ago I just really wanted to make some 2D children with long, flowing William Morris-fabric gowns on, like earthy wild flower children with the mysteries of the universe in their hearts....
At last I am attempting to do exactly that...to mount the two children onto upright panels and turn the entire surface into a kind of picture storytelling performance, with panels that rotate and little windows that reveal moving pictures, to tell a story without words. Rather like a huge, interactive snakes and ladders board, or treasure map.......

continued adventures with Japanese picture storytelling...

Last night I went to the Soho Theatre in London to take a seat in a cosy, dimly-lit studio along with thirty or so other audience members on fold out chairs. On stage was a black-painted plinth, illuminated with a lamp. Shortly afterwards, Spice Arthur 702 took their places on stage - a female narrator to one side, a pink-clad trombonist on the other side, and behind the plinth, a picture handler, with a wad of approximately 300 stacked cards with pictures on them.

During the evening we were told...no...given, no...assaulted with a series of stories created, primarily, with pictures. One picture would lead into the next and the next.....with each square piece of paper dancing, creeping, plodding or sliding eerily aside to keep the conveyor belt of images moving and to draw us further and further into the journey. It was quite simply hypnotic, whether or not accompanied by the endlessly entertaining trombone, or the broken English translation of the highly energetic narrator.

The picture 'handler', a manga-animator who had painted each image himself, displayed a fascinating relationship with his pictures, which started off as a heavy wad on the plinth and ended up as a carpet on the stage surrounding the performers. The simple act of revealing, and then discarding each image to make way for the next one allowed us to watch him 'perform' his paintings...to turn them into movement, to see the investment he had put into each of his designs transformed into a strange, symbolic dance. From the inexhaustable energy of the postman on his journey to a distant land to pass on a crucial message, to the agonising unspoken grief of two doomed lovers on separate sheets of card, suspended by one painted cord only to finally be smothered by a black-painted card whose significance we all understood...
...And all the while, the fast paced trombone, and the constant, brutal tossing of each image onto the ground once it had played its part.

My friend and I both commented on the energy this performance provoked in its very small audience - unbridled, hysterical laughter that I don't think I've ever witnessed in a formal theatre before, and a standing ovation at the end. People were bowled over by the simplicity and immediacy of the performance - heightened, I think, by the language barrier - allowing us to enjoy the kind of stripped-bare emotion often provoked by a clowning act.

Interestingly, the Kamishibai tradition of telling stories with pictures in Japan is very much connected to education, with the tradition often used in school settings (reminding me of the Rudolf Steiner quote I put in an earlier post). Whilst looking into this I found a blog about a teacher in Vermont, USA, who has been developing Kamishibai education techniques to fit in with learning in schools:
http://www.storybike.com/

My explorations in pictures, stories and learning continue...

'Picture consciousness'

from "Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to his Life and Works" by Gary Lachman

"One toy in particular he was very fond of, and the impression it made on him may have influenced some of his later ideas. Steiner was captivated by a kind of picture book whose figures could be moved by pulling a string. He tells us that he and his sister spent many hours with these, and that through them he took his first steps towards reading. In later life, Steiner would argue that a kind of "picture consciousness" formed the tyoe of consciousness of human beings during their "Old Moon" incarnation in the distant past, and that in the future, this would return and be integrated with our current rational consciousness to form a new state..."

A-wassailing..

I am beginning to learn that it isn't the precise realisation of my dreams that is important - it is the perseverance to take that dream forwards even if all doesn't go to plan, and dreams are warped by an endless rangle of potential problems. Finding new ways to just "carry on", to quote from the Crosby Stills and Nash song, leads to possibilities which previously never occurred to me.

On Saturday 9th October my toy theatre tree was back in action, as the centrepiece of an Apple Day at the Cecil Sharp Folk Institute in North London. Amongst traditional Apple Day songs, dances, games and storytelling children (and their parents, who, once they understood that the craft session operated without precise age restrictions settled down to some incredibly concentrated apple-crafting) spent the afternoon decorating their own apples to hang on the tree. I helped to run the workshop with Matthew Cowen, Cecil Sharp's 2009 artist in residence and, wonderfully, a fellow enthusiast of strange archaic folk traditions such as toy theatre, mummers costumes etc. By mid-afternoon our studio was a frenzy of parents tripping over their children trying to grab the paints and glitter needed to finish their apples (the children made some too) and by the end of the session the tree really had become a thing of beauty - adorned with glittering, multicoloured orbs and looking very much like some sort of pagan shrine...

At this point the tree was transported to the main hall, where some frenetic barn dancing came to an end and we all gathered around the tree to sing a traditional Wassailing song.

The strange and wonderful thing is that my original intentions for this 'transforming', hand-animated toy theatre scenery carried on into this event, but came about through completely unforeseen ways.
Throughout the afternoon, in the buzzing creative hub of the workshop room, children made their very own elements to add to the tree - elements which oozed their own unique creative choices and individuality. This process brought the tree to life in a way which was unpredictable and, for me, really exciting to watch.
But the most wonderful thing was that, after this workshop, the collective imagination, love and creative pleasure that children and adults alike had given to the tree formed one unified sculpture which a large audience was able to gather around and celebrate. By the end of it the tree had become a storyteller, and provided the visual aid to the final song of the event.

I had never previously considered that pictures could be formed to tell a visual story in this organic, collaborative and ritualistic way, and it has left my mind racing with possibilities...

Let There Be Light...?

At 11.30am, two and a half hours before the start of the Ghosts From the Basement afternoon performance at the Cecil Sharp House, two strangers introduced themselves to each other for the first time. Toy theatre set, meet stage. Stage, meet toy theatre set. After my initial viewing of the room a month ago, I had gone away with a nice fuzzy, vague idea in my head of how big the stage area would be...likewise, the people organising the event had a nice, fuzzy idea of how big this girl's toy theatre scenery would be. Wham, bam... one glance made it absolutely clear that the dimensions of both were absolutely incompatible with each other. What followed was a hasty decision to position the toy theatre scene next to the stage. It looked lovely. It would mean that the audience would have to shift their glace by about 30 degrees each time a sequence took place. It looked fine, I felt relaxed. So long as the two crucial ingredients were put in place - music, and light - all would be fine.


The music sequence - a one minute track called 'The Garden of Zephirus' by Dead Can Dance, was in the diskman on the sound desk. The plan was haphazardly in place - once an act had finished, and the next act had set up for their performance, the sound guy would play the track, and this would cue the sequence. But did all the acts understand what was going on? What if someone wandered onstage at this point and the audience's eyes immediately followed them? We would just have to wait and see. And now, where is that lighting guy....
It was twenty minutes before the event was due to begin that we realised we had no light. Lights had been fixed on the main stage - there they were, I could see them pointing upwards to illuminate the beige curtain that hung behind the musicians' heads. There they were - my lights. And to the left, there was my life-sized toy theatre, shrouded in shadowy dimness - or, what William Morris would possibly have called Vagueness. Sometimes strong, dramatic words just don't fit the bill - meeker ones like Disappointment are so much more effective. Lack of light was to be the downfall. What a silly little reason for a dream not to go to plan. And why, why oh why don't I carry a couple of torches around in my bag?
Well, we carried on, the performances started, and oh what beautiful enchanted music followed. And at times I forgot my racing thoughts and just smiled to be part of such a beautiful event in this strange, subterranean dance studio with its Dim, atmospheric lighting on a freezing saturday afternoon in September. And when each act finished, like clockwork the music changed to our slightly eerie medieval forest dance track, and we continued to tell the story of our tree passing through the seasons, and our king and queen separated by the departure of the magic bird at the end of summer and reunited by its return in the dead of winter.......and through the dimness it seems that people did turn their heads, did sense what was taking place, were curious, and did perhaps allow the music around them to mingle with the pictures taking shape before them.






Light. Because if you're trying to guide peoples' eyes towards something a little out of the ordinary, they need to have an easy path to follow. Music and light..not the final add-ons, the very bones of a ritual event. I've learnt that for sure..

But dear readers, it's been a wonderful exploration and it might well be that we haven't reached the summit of this little line of investigation. In fact, I don't think I've even started. What this experiment did lead to was a conversation with the wonderful, ever-open-minded and adventurous musician who originally gave me the go-ahead for the project, and the conversation went something like this:
me: you see, next time this needs to be done in a stage space with at least an extra metre in depth. And it needs to be planned around the visuals from the very conception.
him: well, here's my idea. I think we should come up with a story, and I will create a soundtrack for it - an album's worth of songs, to be performed live - perhaps the band perfoms to the side of the stage. And your visuals tell the story, brought to life by the music. What do you think?

Readers, what do you think I think...?


NB. in the meantime, it's time to go electronics shopping....I'm buying a handheld projector and whilst I'll be quite happy not to cut up any cardboard for a while, I'm more than keen to start finding out what happens when these medieval worlds are projected through a digital lens...

The day before..

In the eye of the storm I'm afraid it wasn't possible to maintain regular blogging habits. When I look back, beyond the window of sleep which has taken up much of the past 48hours, I catch fleeting memories...of night cycling across North London with seven large cardboard panels strapped to my bike, of deciding between the importance of eating breakfast on the big day or glueing a golden star into the beak of a cardboard bird, of sitting, bleary-eyed, on a rough carpet in a community centre with a mug of wine, surrounded by confusing, scrawled cue cards...
And then there was the event itself. My strongest lasting impressions were of the melodies - the musicians whose songs threaded the day together, drenched in strangeness, melancholy and magic. It was an honour to be witness to such music being played, and to the atmosphere amongst the 200-or so people in the Trefusis room of the Cecil Sharp House, and to know that somehow, perhaps, my intentions and energy had contributed to this atmosphere which now seemed so very tangible to everyone present....even if, in the end, the intention never quite found a home outside of the imagination of its creator.

Back-tracking, in any case...by Friday afternoon, the scene had been set. In a tiny, cell-shaped white room in a North London community centre stood an apple tree, seven feet tall by ten feet wide, and before it, two almighty six feet figures - the moon queen and the sun king. And by hooking and unhooking, tying and untying various panels with loops and strings, this little scene was able to tell a story in two dimensions.



With the help of scrappy notes, storyboards, bulletpoints and our 'incidental music' track, Ms Rachel Drazek and I spent the afternoon creating nine sequences. In a tea break, during which mutual exhaustion began to get the better of us, we pondered how exactly to perform this cardboard-placing, toy theatre-animating ritual. We realised that, actually, we were not meant to be seen. Were this a toy theatre performance in traditional scale, we as animators would be hidden from view, pushing and pulling our panels with rods from behind a screen. So, really we are human rods. We are fulfilling a practical purpose alone, rather like the roadie who crosses the stage pre-gig to pick up a loose cable. To the thousands of people watching him, waiting expectantly for their performance, he carries a huge weight on his shoulders. To him, he is picking up a loose wire. This performance was about moving pictures. The thoughts and feelings of the individuals moving the pictures was irrelevant - in this precise moment, all these individuals cared about was allowing the pictures to tell their story.