Thanks for all your hard work last Wednesday. Next Wednesday, the plan is to try out a couple more things with the OHP - coloured gels, different liquid effects maybe - and try out a few other lighting instruments, just to see what happens. Then we choose a story and get cracking designing, scripting and building. We'll test out the idea that the new flat, with the window, might make a good space for working.
Source material for dreaming up shadow plays can come from anywhere. I think anything which started life as stories to be read aloud works well, and poetry. Having said that, browsed through our school library last week expecting to find lots of stuff, and finished up falling back on things I've had for years, so maybe it's not so simple.
The stories I brought in ( and I'll bring the books in next week ) came from :
One Moonlit Night, by T. Llewellyn Jones, translated by Gillian Clarke ( Pont books 1991 )
Russian Gypsy Tales, by James Riordan ( Canongate, 1986 )
Earthtales, Storytelling in Times of Change, by Alida Gersie ( Merlin Press 1992 )
The Sandman : the Dream Hunters, by Neil Gaiman ( Titan Books, 1999 )
And of course, Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales, which are public domain and available through many internet links, for example here.
The music we've been backing the work with so far comes from a variety of places. The poem Lord Baker I passed out to Mech and Jess is actually a song lyric from an Irish band called Planxty, which I fell in love with the moment I heard it. Isn't it just crying out to be dramatised, or maybe it's just a masterpiece of storytelling.
It's no secret I'm into harp music, and a few of the tunes I've used to create atmosphere include Lisa Lan , a sweet love song with a traditionally sad ending ( it's a rule of all Welsh traditional songs that even if you start healthy and happy, fairly soon you'll be lying in your cold mountain grave while a pale-haired maiden wanders the seashore alone. ) Lots of Delyth Jenkins as well. The music from other parts of the world is either lifted from a couple of Realworld compilations, or a cheap CD of Chinese music I got in the Fnac a few years back. Like a lot of Guiris new to Spain, I went for the folklore big time, I spent a while a few years back poking around sephardic and al-andalucian stuff, and came across Rosa Zaragoza and some of her CDs of sephardic lullabies.
Finally, a thought from Neil Gaiman. He was asked once by a fan what quote he would like to see written on the wall of a library. His reply was the four words which are at the heart of all storytelling, what you want any audience to want to know :
"And then what happened ? "
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