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Out with the old, in with the new... puppets are extinguished in the flames at the 2012 Westcountry Storytelling Festival.

Hands of Welcome

It was wonderful to draw from a folk arts tradition which really fascinates me, in making the 'hands of welcome' for the Westcountry Storytelling Festival. I wanted the outstretched hands to be like maps, treasure maps, landscapes of story - and these thoughts led me to the visual storytelling tradition which began in 6th Century India and which Victor H. Mair refers to as "Picture recitation".

I've been entranced by different manifestations of 'picture storytelling' throughout ages and cultures - all involving visual stories intricately laid out on cloth, paper or stone to form an elaborate story map. I made my own storytelling scroll a few years ago, telling the very story of the picture storytelling tradition from its origins in early India to Asia, the Far East, Europe and North America... I performed it, accompanied by my accordion, to some fellow university students but the narration involved a heavy amount of facts delivered at a very quick pace and I've been a little afraid of performing it again...

The elaborate story landscapes of 'picture recitation' were the inspiration behind these festival signs, and the story imagery itself came from another favoured world of mine - medieval woodcuts.

Nb. as a maker of storytelling scrolls my colour palette definitely seems to have settled within the dusky pink and burgundy range - due to the colour scheme of the charity shop duvet cover which formed the background of my first scroll. Time to hit the charity shops again I feel.

It was a real honour for me to create two 'storytelling backdrops' for the Westcountry Storytelling Festival, knowing that these would set the scene for the stories that would be told before them. It was a chance for me to do what I love most - bridge the verbal world of storytelling with the world of pictures, imagery and symbolism, allowing the listener's imagination to travel into the visual realm... Screens were made on the festival's theme of "Patterns under the Plough". Each screen features a collaged landscape made of William Morris prints, beneath a starry sky and moon - one screen based on dawn, one on dusk.

Storytelling shards

I am still settling in the aftermath of the 2012 Westcountry Storytelling Festival. Gosh, months of imagining and three weeks of frenzied making, in an attempt to give visual form to stories. These visual forms included the two dimensional and the three dimensional, the static and the animated. Firstly, the green man and the corn dolly, whose lives began as flimsy chicken wire shapes on my roof terrace, and ended as huge, heavy beings, leaning on each other in a fire pit as flames licked them all around, within a ring of cheering onlookers. Making these two beings, I realised that there is a distinct point at which you start 'believing' in the thing you have made - at which it comes alive before your eyes. Sometimes I have never reached that point with my creations - despite any praise given to me I have ended up unsatisfied, moving straight onto the next project in an attempt to deal with the feeling. But this time, there was a point when, at last, I felt like a stranger to what I had made, and it leapt to life. In this case it was the saturday afternoon at the Storytelling festival, when I went to the small, forested outdoor venue where the puppets had been placed, and found the breton-influenced trio Humdrazz playing their pipes and fiddle beneath the towering green man. I sat, listening to the music, and finally saw the green man as a whole, mysterious fellow with a head full of unfathomable thoughts. For that reason I felt satisfied to release the couple into the flames the following evening.

Awakening the Earth

I am at Embercombe, a very special green valley in the Haldon Forest, near Exeter, Devon. I have the honour to be able to say that at present, my professional role is to wake up under canvas in this green valley, and spend the day moulding cardboard and cornflour paste into mythic beings which will open and close the 2012 Westcountry Storytelling Festival, beginning next weekend. Amongst these beings are the two giants, Gog and Magog, a green man with a body of tree bark and a human sized corn dolly. As I wring water out pieces of cardboard and slather them with cornflour paste, I think of Peter Schumann and the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, USA, where I learnt these brilliant giant puppet sculpting techniques three summers ago.

Iron Man primary school residency

In February I had an intense week in a primary school making two puppets based on characters from Ted Hughes' children's book, Iron Man. Having little experience of working with primary school age groups it was a steep learning curve. What unbridled creativity. What quick, furiously sure-minded assertions of preference and choice! What brevity of concentration spans and constant thirst for new creative challenges!
When I had finally learnt how to harness these qualities to fruitful ends, we developed a hub of puppet-making productivity with our 2D hinged dragon puppet and hulking 3D iron man. It was a tricky but deeply rewarding challenge to figure out how to engage groups of 10 children simultaneously in the puppet-making process, but soon we were marvelling at the unique dragon scales and elaborately decorated dragon tassles being created.

Cardboard, without a shadow of a doubt, remains my most faithful companion.

Large scale Imbolc puppet

In the deep chill of february this year I made a large scale puppet of the pagan goddess Brigid, for the Wood Sisters Winter Storytelling Festival in Totnes. My first foray into a solo large scale puppet-making project, it was a plunge into the unknown, gently guided by Radio 4's Woman's Hour and assisted by a very handy gentleman with a power drill.

On the main night of the festival, as icy, sleety rain fell from the blackened sky, Brigid danced to the haunting sounds of Breton musicians The Humdrazz and led the crowd to a huge fire spitting red embers into the darkness.

She looks forward to taking on a new guise and joining new puppet friends at the Westcountry Storytelling Fesitval in August, 2012.

Surrealist puppet-making experiments

My dear PGCE tutor allowed me to run a puppet-making workshop for my fellow education students this spring. It gave me the opportunity to delve ever deeper into the issue which consumes my thoughts more than any other...how much guidance does a creative process actually require? Being tempted, for a while, to let my students create their puppets in any way they chose fit, providing the materials and basic techniques, I eventually opted for a different route.
The puppet makers wrote the initials of their name on a sheet of paper, and broke these down into single lines: straight or curved. With the initials JTH I, for example, ended up with one curved line and six straight lines.
These straight or curved lines became the puppet makers' carving 'allowance'. They could use each of these lines once in order to carve their puppet head, but no more. In this way, our puppets left familiar territory and meandered down interesting paths indeed....

Toy Theatre in schools

Rainy monday lunchbreak.
A team of dedicated 11 year olds have gathered to create and animate miniature theatres made of cardboard. I provide materials and, when requested, assistance, and watch the creations unfold....