The Long-awaited Launch of the Sculpture Park

What a week! And thankfully the weather was up to it. Last Saturday saw us storytellers performing at the official launch of the sculptural environmental play area in St. Buryan, designed by a member of the Collective artist's network, and friend. Mel has worked for months on this project, and has done wonders with the space. It boasts an earthcave/earthhouse in the shape of a barrow, a beautiful wooden climb-in ship sculpture - designed by Jo also of the Collective - an amphitheatre (for storytelling! naturally...) mosaic pillars and stepping stones with a theme of rockets and stars, willow maze, arches, fence, herb garden, stone circle border, pump fountain, carved wood pillar entrance...! and altogether, while built as an environmental 'natural play area', it really is an interactive work of art and a wonderful piece of landscape design. Whilst only involved with it in a support-for-the-designer, occasional bits of admin like taking photographs for the website, Collective kind of way, we storytellers still felt proud to be connected with it, and delighted to be asked to perform at its opening. As John Le Carre said in his speech to open it, it's a unique space, and will end up being an attraction in its own right, and far from just a local feature. The amphitheatre was a lovely space to perform in, and the body-masks leered at the audience from behind us, like uninvited guests when not in use, while the flags rippled in the breeze. Classic moments included one little kid trying to climb into the Dragon's mouth, and pick the nose of the Goblin! when they were lying by after the end of a set. Our first ever performance of the classic Cornish folk story 'The Mermaid of Zennor' went down especially well, and in the evening we did an informal shorter set for adults who'd been working serving food and drink all day, which met with much hilarity and applause. Thanks to all at St. Buryan Community House for being such sporting hosts! 

   Another blog would be the trials, tests and parties of the Collective, what tales to tell of how this place was built, and the many involved in it and with it...would make a great novel, but hey, who wants to be sued?

     The week's other performances and events will have to wait till another post, as another Edition's just gone off, but as ever that means the website is waiting for updates, there's signage and flyers to do for more events, invoices still to be sent and......................eventually some time off hopefully.

Chance Meetings and Surprising Greetings

The strangest things happen when you're a performance artist or touring artist of any kind...Having sent off lots of proposals to different events and venues earlier in the year, and then ringing various numbers of them up and finding that they'd lost the proposal in the overflowing inbox, or decided they couldn't afford the fee for six of us, or...as administrator and form-filler-in-chief, I was just getting fed up, when...a company in Dorchester e-mailed inviting us to perform and do workshops, having just secured their funding, someone e-mailed who'd seen Widsith & Deor's Epic of Gilgamesh show last Autumn, asking if we were free for another gig, AND, most bizarrely of all, meeting a guy in a bluebell wood who happened to be the ranger, and within two weeks, meeting up again and being offered another gig to perform at the launch of the finished conservation project there in July! All in the space of two days...You can be sure as hell that if you hadn't have slaved away with a load of proposals, the work wouldn't have come in...and yet as so often in this business, you get what you hadn't planned for, expected, or in some cases even suspected! Other storytelling companies we know have said just the same thing. But three in two days...well that was pretty good and out of the blue. We've also been offered slots at Express FM in Portsmouth, the good folks at Phonic FM on their new 'Waves with Words' programme, Spoken/Written stalls and places to sell 'Porlock'...The excellent charity bookshop Bookcycle who run a donation-only bookshop - an amazing place with lots of unexpected gems, tucked away inside the higgledy piggedly Tudor building - who plant trees and send books to education projects in Africa are interested in a small press event for Cartwheels Collective Publishing, the publishing arm of the Collective... The summer is booking up apace...Just as the leaves have sprung into life and the buttercups are livid gold against the brightening greens, so everything else seems to starts happening and gathering momentum. Pip pip!

The Merry Merry Month of May

Wow. Sometimes - especially after filling in lengthy forms to uncertain ends, overworked festival organizers deciding that instead of this or that which you actually offered, they'd rather you built them a willow cave instead, and you nearly agreeing to it, until you work out the time involved for the money you're likely to make there and pulling out, sending off work to magazines that may reply sometime near Doomsday, etc., etc., - sometimes something happens that makes you remember why you became an artist (storyteller/writer/poet/whatever) in the first place. Such a thing was this Beltane weekend. We were off in the newly converted storytelling van (thanks Wayne of Van-tastic! fellow member of the Collective) to perform at the Outlore Festival - a private event and one of the most sought-after on the Live Action Role Play or LARP circuit. The site was amazing as always (it was our fourth time there, and our third Outlore) - a beautifully atmospheric Dark Age settlement set in an idyllic stretch of countryside near Okehampton. To add to the river, bluebells, and all the rest, in a clearing in the forest over a causeway on a hill is a small village of roundhouse, Viking longhouse and many other huts and structures and a wonderful attention to detail. There's always something going on and something to look at! And this time was no exception. It may not be straight re-enactment, for instance the 'baddies' are monsters not people, and the paying player-characters ultimately win, but it has a fine feel of authenticity nonetheless. Highlights were the invasion of the settlement by the (very tall!) wolf warrior, the coming into being of the bull god, and the entrance of Hel complete with a raven. There was a new fort built to house the enemy, and a skeleton hanging from a gibbet one could see for miles. Unlike some other places, it looked scarier the closer one got! and the constant sound of war drums added massively to the sense of impending storm. The weather (as at the other two Festivals) was perfect, and in the evening, few places are as lovely seen lit up. Our stories of fools, daydreamers and wisecracks made folk laugh out loud, while they waited for the siege, our riddles perplexed, and our epic battle poetry from Egil's Saga pleased the warriors. And we got more 'gold' and 'treasure' than ever before! as well as a fair share of mead. Music was by the excellent Goliards, in the evening and the lanterns and torches amongst all the film-like setting, with the spring leaves and the latticework of the branches on a clear darkening blue sky with a bright half moon above was simply magical. But the biggest thrill for me during Sunday was when the falconer let me hold the large raven on my wrist - it stood there majestically, and then tore a mouse to shreds that someone had bought it. It felt a strange privilege to have this large flying creature so close. The evening and sunset were about as heavenly as May offers, and in doing the last verse of the 7th century (possibly) poem 'Widsith' as Widsith, as the poet explains and justifies his position in Dark Age society, it made me feel connected - as ever - with the long line of 'Widsiths'...and all in all, I was reminded - yes, that's why I became a performer...! 

   Huge thanks to Dave and Jon of Tyburn Jig and the Dumnonni Chronicles for inviting us again, and to Dave for his immense feats of organization for the whole Outlore adventure, also to all the warriors, damsels and healers who liked our tales and gave us things, the Goliards of course, and especially to the falconer!

Form Filling & Gut Busting

What a relief - finally the form to the Arts Council, along with all accompanying material has at long last been sent off. The form to try and secure another year's grace for Spoken/Written in the form of support for a big new back issues website and an information stall to tour events to tell more people about Spoken/Written Bulletin S.W., and gain not just more readers, but crucially advertisers, contributors, sponsors, donors and all interested in partnerships of all kinds. It can be an isolated job being an editor of an e-newsletter - so much work done via e-mail and on the net. So it's time to get some printed editions out there and a stall in the 3D world! 

   It was an epic task, what with all the usual admin for the Collective, rehearsing, recording new audio for the website, preparing for workshops, chasing up shops about books, and always the newsletter itself with its suddenly looming deadlines (not to mention all the stuff going off with the Collective and related matters - probably worth starting a separate blog for!), it's been tough fighting for the space to get together the new application. A 30 page form, a 7 page proposal, 4 pages of supporting testimonials, 2 page resume and 15 pages of a recent edition...making for a 57 page application...No wonder I've been so wired the last couple of weeks. I just hope it'll be worth all the work...Awful thing is, after all that, you end up feeling like you've done the work for the money asked for, already...!

   Thinking of grants and funding, one of the artists in the Collective came up and took us storytelling faction out to lunch recently and she asked me about funding applications. I told her more than she could possibly have wanted to know, and she suggested I host grants consultations, saying there was a real need for people unaccustomed to these huge forms, and missing or not hearing about things like the Arts Council's advice days, to get advice from another source. Then it occurred to me that a London based friend's partner and media producer/video artist had also asked my opinion on funding, and had even asked for a copy of a previous application proposal! So, if anyone needs advice on filling in one of these things...

   Did I mention it's a relief to have got the form off? Now just a six week wait.........

   

Wonderful World of Colour

Just come back from another set of writing and acetate workshops including my own special one on the Wonderful World of Colour, in Appledore - it was great, with more lateral suggestions from particpants than I would have thought probable! Came away with lots of new words not least thanks to Yolande who'd caught the bug and been looking for new colours too. All the workshoppers seemed to have a ball and learn something new, and everyone wanted a colour gel at the end, the only trouble being that we ran out of red and pink toward the end! as well as time, as we could have gone on for another half an hour at least! Huge thanks again to Yolande and to the Northcott Theatre who generously donated another box of gels earlier in the month. Strangely inspired, I made yet more lists when I got home, and couldn't help going off on new tangents about quality of light terms, and then for different sorts of light itself... It was good to be thinking creatively again amidst all the forms attendant on festivals wanting tech specs, funding stuff and gathering together stuff for Spoken/Written. Not to mention trying to chase up a few other opportunities for a change, especially the ones with near deadlines!

   Last night I spent the evening re-ordering the remaining colours into heaps before putting them all away. Also inspiring, as I can't wait to get back to making some visual textworks, it's just a matter of free time...

Money and Principles...

On putting out a call for feedback in order to strengthen the case to be made for further funding for Spoken/Written, one particular e-mail brought up the theme of 'integrity', urging that Spoken/Written remain free to champion this very quality. 

   Due to the fact that people are used to getting information for free from the internet, like Wikipedia, and also the fact that an e-mail can be forwarded countless times, a subscription fee has always looked a difficult beast (despite that at six pounds for all living on less than £6,000 a year not including accommodation, and £8 for others, the fee had it gone ahead was less than a pound an edition). Each twelve page Bulletin takes a good week's work to put together, once all the seemingly countless websites which have opportunities in them have been trawled - by no means limited to literature, poetry and storytelling sites! but covering performance sites, visual arts sites, museums, council newsletters and all manner of 'misc.'. One of my favourite more unusual sites to check for opportunities was the classified ads page of the well known dance website 'The Place' - sadly no more! Why they did away with the interesting ad page I don't know. But opportunities for written and verbal arts are everywhere, confirming my own feeling that words always are at the heart of things, and cross seamlessly into every other artform, whether performance, visual, sound or movement... But back to the point of this blog. Dozens of newsletters come in to the Spoken/Written desk, and countless single information posts or requests for entries from all kinds of sources and individuals. This dense block of information and research then has to be selected from, edited down, and made into a newsletter each month. I try to keep at 12 pages simply because otherwise it can get bounced as having filled inboxes! So I thought the proposed sub fee was by no means extortionate. Not least, as long ago, even when stony broke, I used to cough up six pounds for the old printed Poetry Can Bulletin - which only covered Bath and Bristol technically! and I didn't live in either. 

   The web however means that the distinctions between primary and secondary information sources has blurred and become porous, and in this 'space between the gaps' exists Spoken/Written. Unfortunately this doesn't however mean that Spoken/Written can exist without finance! So, in order to keep it going, the choice was plain - subscription fees, or advertising? Obviously, having run it for some time as if it was 'public service broadcasting' (a mistake, but it smelt good!), my own initial preference was to steer clear of ads and have it funded like a print mag, by subscription. But for reasons above, it looks as though advertising is the way, and the Bulletin will have to go down the 'private finance initiative' route. This means that some of the space in every edition will carry advertisements, and also that the proposed new website devoted to back issues, will do too. Revenue from these sources is vital to Spoken/Written Bulletin's future. 

   So, when the word 'integrity' was mentioned with regard to staying free (and if the Arts Council funds projects that must be different each time, and not the ongoing running costs of an entity, so that one can rule out indefinite state funding) - which has more integrity - a newsletter paid for by its readers with no advertising, with a supporting website likewise ad free? Or a newsletter free but with plenty of advertising and with at least one large website also full of it?

  BIG thanks to all who have e-mailed with support and feedback so far! It really is appreciated and of real help. And if you haven't already, please do send in some words of positive stuff if you value or enjoy the service. It will help to keep it free.  

The Show Must Go On!

What a week. As the education arm of the Collective, we were going up to North Devon to deliver some workshops in a school as part of a Science of Colour Week of events. Along the way, we passed all kinds of places where we'd previously broken down on a nightmare journey along the same route to perform at a festival late last August. In an electric van. Since it broke down such a lot it had been got rid of, (though the nightmare journey itself is a worth a tale!) and changed for an LPG van. As soon as we arrived on the road outside the venue, we realized that this vehicle too, was going nowhere fast, as a pool of liquid promptly fell out from underneath and covered the pavement, and the steering went. Great. As if this wasn't all, there was parent-in-hospital drama going on, and General Mayhem (that unwelcome guest whenever one's trying to get things done under stress) had definitely invited himself to the fray. 

   Despite this (and endless calls to the breakdown company, etc.) we went in, explained what was up, and then got on with delivering the workshops. The first was a 'Name the Colour Game', and all about words, colours and communication. The Northcott Theatre had kindly let me have a box of their used theatre light gels for the purpose, and I was right that having seen the beautiful colours of the gels, everyone would want one, and so it proved - as a crowd of fifty surged forward to choose the colour they wanted, for a moment I wondered if it had been wise! But the teachers made sure they formed an orderly-ish queue, and so all participants went away with a prize. My own workshop was my 'Wonderful World of Colour' workshop, which I love (being a visual artist on the inside, as it were). As ever, there were words for shades of colour hitherto unsuspected by everyone and participants came up with some new ones. So I went in with 130 odd words for colour and came out with even more. Again, everybody wanted a piece of gel. Contrary to what we'd been told, actually the younger participants wanted every colour pretty much, with only a very slight preference among boys for blue. And the older ones had a bit more of a bias towards the girls wanting pink, but the most marked trend was that we had hardly any left of any colour except orange! (But then we did have an awful lot of that...). We felt that pretty much everyone had learned something new, written a couple of poems, had some fun and that everyone had got a piece of gel with which they could make a window decal or anything else they liked. 

   We made it back to base with the help of a recovery vehicle, and Yolande who'd booked us was very kind about the hassle, and we had many cups of coffee, before leaving. Many thanks to her, Elaine, all the helpers and the Northcott Theatre.