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.

Day: 14
Days remaining: 1

Today things rose from a horizontal sleeping state into one of vertical alive-ness, becoming more alive even than their maker, who was feeling tired today to say the least... it was a day of huge steps and huge changes, aided by the fleeting but much valued visit of power-drill wielding Terry Hackwith and leaf-painting Rachel Drazek. A tree stands now, broad and proud, ready to be decorated, embellished and cherished on stage, and a medieval king and queen loom above me slowly inhaling, ready to take their first steps...









But tomorrow is the crucial day. Tomorrow all the questions I have avoided answering up until now have to be confronted, but they are the very driving force behind the decision to take on this project...
Tomorrow I will pin a scrappy sheet of A4 paper to the wall. On it is listed the sequence of nine folk acts performing within the three hour time slot of this event. And inbetween each act is a strange scrawl of pencilled notes: "Start of spring, three blossoms on, medieval king and queen take one step inwards....." The notes detailing how this visual story will be told, in nine installments.
But how, how can pictures tell a story by themselves?
This scene comprised of pictures will move by human intervention alone, but how should a human perform this act? Is it an emotional act? A clinical act? How does the world of humanity interact with the world of pictures?
Do pictures carry sufficient emotional weight by themselves to not require any additional impact by means of how they are physically handled by the manipulator, the puppeteer, the individual placing them within the physical space?
.....Do pictures contain their very own language?
When left to their own devices, what power will pictures have over people?

"A Wall Against Vagueness"

Day: 13
Days remaining: 2





The panels of cardboard which edge my world right now are fuzzy through the sleep-deprived faculties of my vision. But to say that I have been confined to my North London cardboard-crafting cell over the past few days would be misleading, for yesterday a magic companion whisked me off to the Eastern fringes of London, to the William Morris Gallery itself, in Walthamstow. There we passed silently and blissfully through the rooms of Morris's life, gazing at stained glass panels, woodcuts, illuminated manuscripts and heavy wall-hangings, all bursting with life...life encapsulated by Morris in the curling hand-drawn stem of a flower.
Morris created his own mythology, via pattern.
"...Each pattern suggests something beyond itself, something of which it is but a visual symbol."
Morris, in his creative quest, referred to "a wall against vagueness". In my possibly misled interpretation of this, I see that with his patterns he strove for total immersion into the world of the imagination and it was important for the 'edges' of his patterns not to bleed into vague half-hearted incompletion. His patterns were geometrically designed to fill an entire panel, and to be repeatable. His fantasy world was whole, covering all available surface, its aliveness filling the surface to its very edges, the point where his world met the outer, ordinary world.
And in a funny kind of way this project is an attempt to fight against that same "wall of vagueness". Music can transport people but it can not fill a physical space..it is fluid, transparent and anchor-less. I am trying to create a fantasy world with clear cut, clearly-defined edges, which gives music a container.




Tomorrow...the vital stage of lifting these floppy cardboard pieces off the ground...

Moon Queen and Sun King

Day 8

“You may hang your walls with tapestry…cover them with mosaic; or have them frescoed…all this is not luxury, if it be done for beauty's sake…”

"If others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream." William Morris

Day: 6
Mission: to turn psychedelic folk festival at the Cecil Sharp House, North London, into visual theatre experience with ritualistic elements.
Remaining days: 7





Cardboard elements for my lifesize toy theatre are now complete - today was the first day of embellishment and decoration. 19th Century dreamer, environmentalist and craft-revivalist William Morris has been with me in my little box studio all day, with his views on investing ordinary objects with craftsmanship, quality and beauty. Surrounded by his swirling, nature-inspired patterns I took my four panels, made from mosaic sections of cardboard boxes glued together, mixed a shade of olive paint, clasped my paintbrush and began. The crucial remaining requirements were patience, and the desire to beautify cardboard. As Morris was quoted, “If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

I love the fact that a monotone shade of paint and a drab substance used to transport the world's goods can come together to create a crafted object. I feel certain that, were Morris alive today, he would be out there helping me to source nice clean cardboard boxes on a weekday morning.

And speaking of crafted cardboard.....



....the owl totem in the reception of the Etsy offices in Brooklyn, New York.

Toy Theatre Tree

He stretches out across the carpet of my studio cell, limbs spreading in all directions. He does exactly what he is told, laid against the carpet. But when the time comes to lift him to his vertical postition he keels over and I frantically try to save a dozen tree boughs from slowly, elegantly bending and snapping. Gravity.....is always against me.