Tag Archives: juvenile drama

Are Arts Professionals doing enough to Advocate the Value of the Arts?

Posted on by Collette Knowles
2

I recently attended an X-Trax Street Arts Networking Event in Manchester.  A point was raised by one of the people there in response to a newspaper article that was suggesting that attempts to make the arts appeal to the masses were failing.  The article justified this position by looking at the audience numbers and demographics for traditionally elitist art forms such as Ballet and Opera.

Unfortunately I have been unable to locate the article in question.  It was suggested by people at the meeting that we, as street arts professionals, should be doing more to highlight our success in reaching huge numbers of ordinary people.  It was also suggested that we should try and counteract the possible dearth of work and funding next year, (in the wake of the olympics) by blowing our own trumpets.  We should try and highlight all of the good work that we have done this year with the cultural olympiad money.

While searching for the article in question, I found another article which questions whether arts professionals are using the right approach to advocate the arts or whether they just come across as elitist and “luvvy”.  It also raises the issue of whether Equity’s approach of concentrating on the economic benefits of the arts is missing the point.  A lot of art that is truly in touch with ordinary people in the community is not about making a profit, but about wellbeing and quality of life; but are the government interested in that?  CLICK HERE FOR THE ARTICLE.

While I was perusing this article I saw an interview with Liz Pugh from Walk the Plank in a “culture professionals network” sidebar which seems to be doing exactly what was advocated at the meeting.  CLICK HERE FOR LIZ’S ARTICLE

If you are an arts professional, or anyone who values the arts and are concerned about the lack of artistic subjects in the new EBacc, there is a petition and other resources for campaigning on the “Bacc For The Future” website.  CLICK HERE FOR WEBSITE

On a different subject, we have peformed our Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre show for the locals at Low Bentham Victoria Institute.  Everyone who attended really enjoyed it with 2 children who came back to see it a second time!  A big thankyou to everyone who came to support us.

Our next appearance is also a local one.  Our popular Shadow Puppet Suitcase show “Edward Lear’s Nonsense” will be seen in High Bentham for the first time at Santa’s Late Night Shopping Evening from 6pm on Friday the 7th of December.  There are lots of other exciting things going on, particularly for children.  CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO.  I will have more specific details of where in the town centre I’ll be performing soon, so watch this space!

We’ll also be taking the Hansel & Gretel show to a birthday party and to a Pupil Referral Unit (where they’ll also be making their own shoe-box toy theatres).  And, in what I expect will be it’s last outing of the year, our “Alice in Wonderland” show is giving a North Yorkshire Primary School a Christmas treat.

As a little topic for thought and discussion.  Please leave your comments on the question “What is the best way to demonstrate the value of the arts?”  If you have comments on anything else in this post please feel free to stray from the question. 🙂

Toy Theatre Film Finished and Mechanical Horse Takes Leaps and Bounds!

Posted on by Collette Knowles
Reply

At long last our film of our Hansel and Gretel Toy Theatre show is finished, and the trailer is now online!  See below:

I hope that this will give people a better idea of what the show is like.  So if you like what you see, please get in touch!  There are more details about the show on the Rough Magic Theatre show page, (please click here).  There are details about the making of the show and our performances at Vischmarkt Papierentheater Festival 2011 and for Ted Hawkins and family in the U.K. in earlier posts on this blog too.

We have made leaps and bounds with our mechanical horse for Pioneer Projects: “My Last CARnival” event in High Bentham on June 2nd.  There are going to be all sorts of other events and activities going on in the week preceding this and there wil be a flotilla of boats down main street as well as a picnic tea on the Jubilee day on Monday the 4th, so it would be well worth a visit to the area if you can.  There are more details about everything that is happening on the My Last Car and Pioneer Projects websites.

We had been in a slightly sticky spot with regard to what to make the control rods for the horse’s legs out of.  Eddie Knowles, who is is working on the project with me, had thought originally of using the pieces of dismantled washing line that you may have seen in earlier photo’s.

It had occurred to me that although the mock-up of the movement may have worked when we used wire for the controls, these metal rods would be considerably heavier, and I worried that this would be too much for the plastic piping we had been using for the pivots.

Luckily David Clough, of Pioneer Projects, had an idea we might find some lighter aluminium tubes in a store room above a local bank.  He brought down a selection of tubes of different sizes and types, among which were some steel tubes that were considerably smaller than a lot of the aluminium ones we’d been looking at and therefore worth considering.  I was still concerned that they would be too heavy, and wondered if we’d be better sticking to the bamboo cane mock-up controls that we had been working on to get the lengths right.

That is when I made the made the break-through of wondering if the steel tubing was in fact the same size as the plastic tubing.  This turned out to be the case and meant that we could use it for the pivots as well and eliminate the problem altogether.  It looks very attractive, too, being chrome plated!  In case you were wondering, the tubing started life as a set of shelves.

I also sorted out the head nodding mechanism, which works a treat.  It will be a manual mechanism separate to the pedalling for the legs.  It’s going to end up being a bit like a combined rowing machine and exercise bike for Tim Austin, my husband and fellow performer, who will have the job of operating the horse on the day.  We also fixed the height of the seat for Tim so that his feet should actually reach the pedals now!

In addition, you can see I’ve been working on a paint job to match the trappings on the model cart horse we borrowed from our local pub, “The Horse & Farrier”.

Today we’ve been working on the “carriage” seat for members of the public to sit on.  Tim thought it should have wheels so that it looks as if it could move if it wanted to so we’re pressing the wheels we removed from one of our scrap bikes earlier back into service!  It has happened several times that we have removed something from a bike and set it aside and it has turned out to be useful attached somewhere else on the machine, so we are hardly wasting anything.  The grill part that people will sit on used to be a grill in my old van, so the machine has both bike and car components now.  We are very pleased with how it is going and feel that the Mad Max influence is definitely showing through.

Here’s more pictures of the work in progress:

There is only my M.C. automaton costume and the seat to finish now.  I have succeeded in securing some waterproof battery-powered LED fairy lights for the costume and also a pair of white trousers that will match the horse and will contrast with my black tail coat.

…

We took our Alice in Wonderland show on an outing to Willow Tree Primary School in Salford last week.  The children asked us questions and were shown some of the puppets close up afterwards.  This was in preparation for a puppet making project that one of the classes would be doing afterwards.  I think it was our largest ever audience for that show, there being 240 children not counting the staff.  I had breathed a sigh of relief a few days earlier when I found that, as I suspected, the new van was in fact more than big enough to fit the show inside.  No O.H.P.s travelling on Tim’s knee from now on!