The above sequence of photographs forms the basis of my ideas for a collaboration between live 'psychedelic folk' performance and live, animated theatrical visuals. This is my stab at turning a folk festival into an all day ritual theatre spectacle.

The poetic imagery in much folk music overwhelms me with inspiration, and has always struck me as a form of storytelling in itself. So at last I am doing what I have wanted to do for so long, and attempting to create a visual narrative to accompany a day of folk performances.
The basic aesthetic framework I am using is that of toy theatre - the Victorian tradition of telling stories via flat, animated figures and scenery made of paper, performed within a miniature proscenium arch theatre. Only this toy theatre will be on a human-sized scale, and the musicians will perform within it, surrounded by it. A zany idea perhaps, but one that I have not been alone in entertaining - Terry Gilliam constantly refers to the scenography of life-sized Victorian toy theatre in films including the recent The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus :



and his 1988 production "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen":



Crucially, my aim is to "stitch together" the otherwise fragmented aspects of this all day event. There are several major linking themes running beneath the various acts performing on the day, which indeed sum up the themes lying beneath much British folk music - a yearning for nature, the desire to rekindle a long-lost relationship with some kind of mythical idea of Albion... I am going to try and solidify these themes in a set which undertakes a gradual voyage of transformation throughout the day, and which responds to the music performed within it...

Setting the Wyrd cogs in motion

This is the home of Wyrd Motion, an odyssey I have set myself upon in order to bring together two art forms which, although now regarded as separate entities, have a mysterious and fascinating relationship with each other which lies buried at the heart of the ancient performance and storytelling traditions of the world. The two mediums in question are that of music, and the visual image.

What is the difference between the experience of going to a gig and going to the theatre? At a gig, what your senses immediately perceive in that present moment is what matters, is it not? Emphasis is on the here and now, the experience, and for that reason we see going to a gig as an opportunity to...stop thinking? Going to the theatre, on the other hand, is slightly different - although your perception of sight and sound is crucial, emphasis is not on the experience of these sensory elements but rather on the way that these elements are arranged and translated into ideas in the brain. No?

What interests me is the vaguely-defined area which I referred to with the example of the gig. For me, it touches on the oral roots of performance. "In primary oral cultures, the perception, action, and doing fundamental to early human survival remains central to what one does and how things are known." (Zarrilli, McConachie, Williams & Sorgenfrei 2006) Folklorists studying oral performance have become aware of the complex and refined creative skills involved in transmitting unwritten storytelling and song traditions, describing the process as: "weaving or stitching...to stitch songs together."

Referring back to the experience of a gig allowing a person to 'stop thinking': "Primary oral cultures are "episodic" locations of listening, hearing, and voicing where "mythic" worlds are created. The hearer does not attempt to analyze, understand, or interpret what is heard, but experiences and absorbs the musicality of the voice - its timbre, tone, amplitude, pitch, resonance, vibration and shape...Reception is perception, not "meaning"."

So how does the visual image fit into all this? Once again, I turn to the well-worn pages of the 'Oral, Ritual and Shamanic Performance' chapter of Theatre Histories: An Introduction: "Just as "listening" is an episodic mode of communication that helps create a "mythic" world, so does "seeing"...the oral elaboration of a story by an excellent teller makes the story a "spectacle" in that "it is visible through the storyteller's dramatization, and the spectator visualizes it further in his mind's eye" (Drewal and Drewal 1983:1) As seen in early cave paintings, some if the earliest forms of oral performance no doubt literally made use of images as a memory aid for the teller and to enhance the pleasure of the audience."

Today our lives revolve around written language.

We cannot express things unless there are words with which to express them.

Is there really a word or sequence of words to express every thought we have?

But do we get bogged down by words when attempting to communicate the real truths of our beings - when, for example, we try to speak about body language, subtle impressions we get about people we meet that we barely even register, when we try to describe particular physical sensations so that other people can understand how they feel?

Words are a tool, but words are also a mask and a barrier. Words, I argue, only serve a purpose Up To A Point.

These thoughts, and others, have led me to become fascinated with performance traditions whose emphasis is on the direct experience of "seeing" and "hearing" - not as a means to learn, think, analzye or conclude - simply for the sake of the experience in itself. One which I find rather liberating. My interest took me to Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, USA, where, alongside large scale puppetry pageants I witnessed company members telling stories using a combination of pictures and music, a tradition they called "Cantastoria". A year later I found myself working with Great Small Works, a New York-based folk arts theatre company particularly interested in storytelling via the flat, animated imagery of the toy theatre medium. (see my other blog: http://greatsmall.blogspot.com) After returning from this experience I tracked down a seminal work on the ancient tradition of picture storytelling: Victor H. Mair's "Painting and Performance" which traced the art of combining the visual image with music back to 6th Century Brahmins in India.

"Imagery is a way for humans to access the "invisible" where their language is not written."

In conclusion, the intention behind Wyrd Motion is to facilitate a new type of sensory and immediate theatrical experience, one in which the visual and the aural are 'stitched' together via tools based on archaic, ritualistic traditions.
More news to come...

References in this post were from:
Zarrilli, McConachie, Williams & Sorgenfrei, 2006. Theatre Histories: An Introduction. USA: Routledge.