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.