Prelude

For the past four days I have been spending three hours at the Little Angel Puppet Theatre in Islington, London, doing a workshop on developing character in marionettes (a little side note: it allows me to hold a proper, a real puppet for the first time since childhood...) It has astounded me how exhausting these three hour sessions have been.

Although this workshop is separate to the course, I feel I may look back on this week and see it as absolutely pivotal. What I really needed was to get a feeling, become introduced to manipulating marionettes...to just confirm to myself that it is how I have been imagining all this time... I was afraid I might be disappointed - or even have a huge crisis and ask whether I have made a grave error of judgement.

It was all that I imagined and so much more.

It was this exercise that did it for me. We spent a considerable length of time walking around the theatre, with the gentle encouragement of our lovely, earnest teacher Christopher. We were to create three different walks - the first representing how we felt on waking this morning, the second representing how we would feel as a "master puppeteer" and the third, what kind of walk our 'inner puppet' would have. As an individual whose beloved drama lessons ended just before GCSE level it was a huge pleasure and novelty to be focusing on the subtle movements of the body, and the massive effects of the imagination. We were to choose one 'character' and build on it, strengthen it. I chose the master puppeteer. My master puppeteer was just a very calm, quietly confident individual with strong hands and a look of contentment. Now we were told to go and choose a puppet off the rail, and extend this character into it.

The elegant, stately human puppets seemed to be at the far end of the rail, so I opted for a goose and wondered what would happen. This was the big moment: my first experience.

I stood in a space with this surprisingly heavy assemblage of wooden parts dangling by string from a very complex-looking handle contraption. Our teacher put on some puppet-friendly, ambient music. And I just tried to transpose the feeling I had whilst walking, and the person I imagined, into this goose. I ended up bobbing it up and down gently in the air, and making it slightly sway its head from side to side as if contently pondering nice thoughts. After a bit of fiddling around I discovered a part of the handle that unclipped, so that now the long goose neck could arch upwards and sideways and downwards, its personality really beginning to ooze out.

All I can say is, I doubt it looked like much to a bystander, but in those ten minutes I felt a huge stream of very odd, intense feelings. During that time I concentrated on the goose like I have never concentrated on anything before, and to me it was animated and alive. Its movements were scarce, and really the effort was spent trying to keep it very steady and still. But by focusing on such tiny little shifts and movements (I can really see I'm going to have to watch out for cliches and trite phrases on this blog) I felt like I was sharing in a spooky and electric silence with a living thing. It was how I would imagine Zen buddhists feel after meditating on flowers, or blades of grass.

In any case, it confirmed for me that the art of the marionette holds some kind of enigma, and it made me almost pass out from exhaustion on the tube on the way home...

Things that stoked the fire.

I am attempting to bring you forward to the present tense so please bare me a little longer. First I just have to explain how this Puppetry lark got into my head and under my skin.
Last autumn, for the first time in my life, I was living close enough to London to be able to stretch the possibilities of what one could get up to there in a day. I began to realise that, rather than being a mighty, fearsome ugly machine, London held tiny pockets of enchantment, and it was an exciting process beginning to seek these pockets out.
One day at the computer, I had a daydream - about a puppet theatre on a canal barge. I thought it would make a wonderful idea for a story, but I doubted that such a thing already existed. When I typed "puppet theatre barge" into the internet search engine I discovered The Puppet Barge. Possibly the most life-affirming discovery I have ever made on Google.

www.puppetbarge.com/

The present location of the barge was Richmond in Surrey - a refined, elegant, candles-in-windows style town surrounded by the green countryside and intersected by a river. The nights were drawing in, England was becoming chilly, pumpkins were selling well in the supermarkets....and around this time myself, my boyfriend and two close friends also searching for a similar kind of fairytale undertook the journey to Richmond for an evening performance of The Ancient Mariner at the Puppet Barge.
There it was, we could see it - the long boat covered in its mysterious dark tarp, the little steps leading over the water to reach it. Light fading from the riverside. We drank locally-made cherry beer in a riverside pub, and then approached the Barge.
Down the steps, into the hatch, and into a miniscule submarine world of wooden walls and ceiling, the smell of coffee coming from a little percolator on a stand, a pile of marionette books and postcards on the side and old, dusty puppets hanging in corners, staring.
Into the theatre - about the total size of a schoolbus - the lights dim, the play starts. A disembodied voice verberates through a speaker, an old man narrates the tale....in it there are fishermen, billowing sails, an albatross...moments of silence, moments of wind, moments of water rippling deep down under water. Sometimes all there is to be seen is the great white sail of the ship against the black night, moving in the wind. Or of the depths of the ocean, with scatterings of dust falling through it like miniscule sea creatures.
At the interval we stood out on the deck, as a blanket of mist settled on the river and a slice of white waxing moon hung above us. It was freezing. And at that point we knew that there was something impossible to explain about this new world we had just uncovered.

Here is where it all begins

The purpose of this blog is to record what promises to be a fairly pivotal chapter in my life, which started around two days ago. After spending the past eight years (since I left school) as far away from institutionalised places of learning as possible, I am now making a full U-turn and returning to the world I spent so long running away from. But I am not doing your average undergraduate degree - I am starting a three year BA(hons) degree in Puppetry at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
Until about a year and a half ago the mysterious cultural undercurrent of Puppetry had neither entered my thoughts nor caught my attention. I was just beginning a one year Art and Design diploma, to see where it would take me - I always knew it would take me somewhere. In many ways it was a rather harrowing and upsetting year for me. During my time away from schools and universities - living around Spain, soaking up parts of Morocco and later Mexico, I felt like I was truly beginning to tap into my own natural creativity - in fact my whole lifestyle was designed to support it in the best possible way. It was childlike, un-thought out, it grew in an unplanned, meandering way and the sense of happiness and, I suppose, inner peace that it gave me was huge. During my wanderings through places I started to recognise an affinity with craft traditions, things which took time, patience, love and extraordinary dedication. And at the same time I discovered that the amazing artistic creations I kept stumbling upon, and seemed to be looking for, on roadsides, up hills, outside peoples' houses, had a name, which I could use to search the media for endless other tantalising examples - Outsider Art. Art made by individuals outside the sphere of formal artistic practice - untrained, unrelated to financial gain, born of a private passion and vision.

This photo was taken on a roadside in Nevada, USA. The creator, a man called Slim Selems, died recently and a friend was displaying his four 'sculptures' in the yard of his mechanic workshop.

But I'm digressing. My one-year Art Diploma showed me, with bittersweet clarity, that pinning my hopes on the formal art world as a way to express myself would only cause me upset. The sincerity, the feeling of the kind of creativity I had discovered seemed to be a cause of great embarrassment with my tutors. What they wanted from me was mental enquiry, not romantic, gushy, twee outpourings of expression. Apparently it is not good to give way to feelings in the contemporary art world - such sincerity only runs the grave risk of rejection and ridicule. Although I managed, finally, to create a piece that embodied my outlook, it was a struggle from start to finish and I knew my days in this kind of environment were numbered.