Sweet May is gone, and now must poets croon
The praises of rather stupid June.
(Patrick Kavanagh)
Photo by Deborah Roberts Photography
May has been a busy month. I put my Endangered Animals Trail into shop windows around Stroud town centre for the SITSelect Festival and developed my new Growing Victorians in your Garden performance. There are pictures of both on the website.
I enjoyed doing the Endangered Animals Trail and felt it stretched my drawing abilities (drawing other animals than crows!) in a way that was welcome. It was good also to collaborate with SITSelect’s Lizzi Walton and with Stroud Valleys Project, a local conservation charity who provided useful help and advice. I also enjoyed making badges with my new badge maker and will hopefully be doing a lot more of these.
Over three successive weekends I developed my new Growing Victorians in your Garden performance. I started off with 5 minute and then 10 minute versions to small audiences in a small shed attached to Atelier in Stroud as part of the Site Festival. It was incredibly useful to run this material close up to small audiences of all ages and to see what worked (and for whom). Many thanks to all who crammed into the shed to listen.
For the third weekend at the Stroud Steampunk Weekend I then developed it into a 30 minute performance and was pleased with how it went down with two very awake (and Victorianophile!) audiences. I made a model of Brunel specially for this event and was heartened by the alacrity with which they got the Box Tunnel joke! (It was also interesting to spend a weekend at a Steampunk event, a world with which I am fairly unfamiliar.)
Many thanks to all who came to these performances. I am keen to develop the Victorians show, so if you would like me to come to your venue or garden party, please get in contact.
And what does June hold? A quieter time, I think, but with a lot of crows.
(Apologies to Alexander Pope)
(There’s also a new gallery of CROWS on the website to have a look at, if you so desire.)