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A Past ProjectWhen Will The Sleepers Awaken..?
When Will The Sleepers Awaken...? was a 1960's caravan, transformed into the world's smallest, interactive, Situationist mobile art gallery for the 2004 Staveley Carnival, Cumbria.
Recently featured in The Guardian newspaper, When Will The Sleepers Awaken...? contained a variety of weird and wonderful exhibits hidden in the drawers and cupboards of a brightly painted Castleton touring caravan, kindly donated by John Fox and Sue Gill of Welfare State International.
Visitors were encouraged to contribute their own paintings to the colourful mural painted on the caravan.
Exhibits inside the van included A Ridiculous Monument to the Absence of Dreams, Five Volumes of a World History of Peace and Co-operation, and Brains of Presidents and Prime Ministers - Dissected to Explain Their Behaviours.      |
MOP ProjectsCompton and Marldon Candlemas Lantern Festival 2006The following article was written by MOP director Jon Croose for Devon Folk magazine: Villages Unite for a Celebration of Light More than 200 people wound their way through the dark village lanes of Compton and Marldon, near Paignton, in a beautiful, four-winds lantern procession to celebrate the traditional early Spring festival of Candlemas. Accompanied by
bellringing from the parish church, people of all ages hung their
lanterns on a
flickering light sculpture in the Jubilee Meadow as part of an
atmospheric
event organised by And following the four processions from North, South, East and West - which resurrected a centuries-old tradition of heralding the threshold days between Winter and Spring - locals swapped songs and poetry in the village hall before dancing the night away with the Barnacles barn dance band. Like many festivals in the traditional calendar, Candlemas sits on the shoulders of many more ancient rituals practiced on these shores for thousands of years. Held in the first week of February, the Christian Candlemas tradition celebrates the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin, though prior to that the ancient ceremonies of Imbolc celebrated the arrival of the first lambs and the point in the year when we start to notice that the days are becoming longer and Winter is receding. The Compton and Marldon event on February 5th was the result of months of hard work by Means of Production artistic director Jon Croose, who lives in the parish. Workshops held throughout the winter passed on traditional skills in willow and tissue paper lantern-making for the event, and Jon contacted local groups to find musicians and performers willing to play and sing at the community cabaret. “The Imbolc and Candlemas traditions have certain key elements to which we tried to stay faithful,” said Jon, who has also worked with arts company Welfare State International and helps run the Dance and Fire Stage at Glastonbury Festival. “The pagans held torchlit processions circling fields to purify & invigorate them for the coming growing season, and the 11th century Christians introduced the lighting & blessing of candles in the home, hence the name Candlemas. Fire is also an important element of the festival, which relates to the sacred fire of the Celtic pagan goddess Brigid,” he said. The blessed
rushes
and woven straw wheels made by pagans to honour Brigid - goddess of
inspiration,
poets, song, creativity, and the arts - provided Means of Production
with the
impetus for the willow lantern-making work and the community cabaret,
where
locals brought food and drink and swapped songs and poems. And many people
who
were not able to leave their homes for the processions were also able
to
participate by turning off their electricity and lighting their windows
with
beautiful displays of candles to get the villages off the grid. “There is a traditional rhyme that says: If Candlemas day be fair and bright, Winter will have another flight. If Candlemas day be shower and rain, Winter is gone and will not come again. It looks like we may be in for some more wintry weather before Spring really starts to warm up,” he said. A Current ProjectNeither Here Nor ThereNeither Here Nor There is a dramatic performance installation, designed for use in a range of settings, which traces a refugee journey from push factor to immigration. All persons awaiting processing must answer "Present" when their number is called. MOP is currently seeking partners for a development project to help young exiles adapt to life in Britain and to encourage young people to use theatre arts to explore issues of asylum and migration. I am a man, nothing more, and sometimes I am a word, or a look, or a feeling. More often I am a ghost, a memory, a prediction, a fear for the future and God knows we have enough of those. Neither Here Nor There is a dramatic experience which helps students and host communities develop empathy for migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. The installation aims to foster better understanding and counter prejudice and hostility. The little one is Dusko. He's frightened. You're frightened, aren't you Duski? If your organisation is interested in helping to develop Neither Here Nor There as an awareness-raising, interactive performance for teachers and others working with young exiles, to be followed by facilitated discussions and workshops, then please get in touch. Write. Write to the old father who is late for supper. Write to the daughter who stayed late after school. You must leave a message. Then you must run. If you are interested in becoming part of this project, click here.A Current ProjectStories From The Stone ForestMOP
is currently collaborating with Oddbodies Theatre Company on Stories
From The Stone Forest - a
mixed media arts and performance project.
The project seeks to amplify the physical, dramatic and cultural presence of Dartmoor by means of a series of creative interventions and collaborations between artists, scientists and communities. Stories From The Stone Forest imagines Dartmoor as an island in a rising sea, a world encircled by a ring of fire, a laboratory for artworks inspired by the lives of humans, animals and birds. The project aims to create performances, happenings and installations which flow from the water, weather, hot springs, high points and low points of Dartmoor's geography. Stories From The Stone Forest draws inspiration from Dartmoor's past to create artworks of the future. It explores how the stories, images and archaeologies of Dartmoor are expressed in its present culture and how they are felt in its landscapes, families, prisons and farms. Stories From The Stone Forest will generate a series of individual artworks in a variety of media. We imagine harnessing the power of the Army to create a beautiful shower of lights in the Dartmoor Military Zone and reverse our headlong dash towards destruction. We hope to send performances on radio waves to audiences assembled at different times at specific Dartmoor locations and to create installations of "found" objects on the moor which hint at stories untold, traces, evidences, trails and treasures. Stories from the Stone Forest will map Dartmoor locations of love, fear, discovery, mourning wonderment and the Beast. It will use the Letterboxing culture to collect creative input from people responding to installations and interventions, documenting this input as material for its final performance. The project will harness the creative networks offered by partnerships with Villages in Action, Parish Councils, schools, community groups, Dartmoor's professional arts community, the National Parks Authority and the National Trust. It will create a season of arts events, repeated over an extended period, which can be experienced individually or as steppingstones towards a final, climactic performance interpretation of Dartmoor itself. Stories From The Stone Forest aims to mine the moor to discover what new layers are being deposited and what new minerals forged in Dartmoor's volcanic cultural fires. Interested? Contact us here. |
A Recent Project:Tales From the Keep 2007Organised by Totnes Young People's Theatre, Tales from the Keep was a day of music, circus, theatre, dance and storytelling in the grounds of Totnes castle.
Hundreds of local people took part in the event, which filled the Norman tower with colour, flags and magic.
Working alongside TYPT and English Heritage, MOP worked with a group of 12 young people aged 14-16 to devise Freeze, English Heritage! a comic mystery described as "The Da Vinci Code meets Scooby Doo."
MOP also helped organise the climax of the event, a community lantern procession through the town. |
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