Tuesday 25 September 2012

Beautiful Days - onward and upward

After a hectic summer including Dorchester Play Day right after the Beautiful Days, we are gearing up for a Halloween event at Old Wardour Castle in Wiltshire - a lot of work! The festival was good, despite the worst lot of rain we'd seen there. It just dried up enough to get off site without tractors on the Monday! The workshops went down a storm, we were packed to the rafters as usual. I was especially pleased to hold my all-ability workshop host corner, where the very unconfident or small can make headdresses or mobiles and the older or more ambitious can make dreamcatchers, whilst those in between can design themselves some wings! And of course with Deor's leather workshop running alongside, we can kit people out completely! Wings, headdress, leather wristbands, a dreamcatcher round your neck (depending on size), leather head band, you name it, the possibilities are endless! I was stupidly delighted when a participant (parent, child or teenager) made an especially good mobile, as they are my own design. It was great to catch up with Andi and Mandy of the Collective, and really good to work with Lewis at last who stepped in to the breach at the first Beautiful Days commission, when we were doubled booked and had to go to the Sunrise OffGrid instead. We also ended up doing an hour and a half of storytelling each day as one storyteller had had to drop out! So it was just us and Kulchalee to hold the fort each day! Lastly we were put on in the Majical Youth big top, but as well as being a mudbath, the sound system gave up (I don't know whose it was) as did the back up, so we were left yelling across an empty acoustic - exhausting for the voice, so all in all we worked hard. But being with the Collective who are always such good fun, and a bottle of Pimms (thanks to the ever-wonderful Deor!) got me through!

   Then on the Wednesday afterward, we were lucky enough to have Mandy with us to help out at Dorset Play Day - rammed as usual, and Carol the organizer complimented me on being 'so patient'! As she came in while I was showing three different participants of varying skill how to make dreamcatchers, while cutting fabric for a much smaller headdress-maker. It was very kind of her - although what I was going for was super-efficient and keeping-one's-head rather than patient! No one was being unreasonable, just all-at-the-same-time! Mandy was great to have with us and was amazing at folding up the huge and unwieldy tipi pvc flooring into a square! I was much impressed. And we all had supper at the Imperial, a beautiful pub with a Brunel conservatory near Exeter St. David's railway station. And then we would have been off to another festival...but as they hadn't paid us from last year! 'A Sussex Peepshow' the diary of travelling Punch & Judy performer, Walter Wilkinson in the 1930's sums up the life of the travelling player perfectly...