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.