I am just working on the invitation for participants to join Debbie Warrener and I on the workshop sessions at which we will test out our scheme of exercises and tasks that will guide a group towards ‘making a mappa mundi‘.
At the moment I am calling the whole project mappa mundi, the online interactive space that will inspire and collect crowd-sourced drama videos about change, as well as the 3 minute drama videos that will form the larger work. So all the participants are making the mappa mundi and each participant group (or individual!) is ‘making a mappa mundi’ or ‘doing a mappa mundi’. I hope this works i.e. it isn’t too confusing.
The reason I like this is because each drama video is like the map of the world made by that particular group. The space of drama is like a world. This is a metaphor that Shakespeare uses at significant points in his plays sometimes subtly with a glancing word or phrase and sometimes more explicitly. The most famous example, is Jacques speech in As You Like It that begins: ‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players’ (Act 2 scene 7). He uses it again in King Lear when he refers to our birth and how ‘we cry when we are come to this great stage of fools'(Act 4 Scene 6). A similar trope or turn of thought is used by Prospero in The Tempest as he dismisses the masque that he has conjured up to entertain Miranda and Ferdinand and explains that like the disappearance of the masque with all its scenery, ‘the great globe itself, Yea all that it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams Are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.’ (Act 4 Scene 1).
It is a commonplace with those who spend their lives or part of their lives making theatre that making a performance is like making a world. When Shakespeare’s company moved their theatre to the south bank of the Thames from Shoreditch, having called it there simply The Theatre, they then renamed it The Globe!
So making a map of a changing world can happen in the mappa mundi project both locally and centrally. Also by equating the microcosm and the macrocosm the sense that the local is central can be made real.
We are also planning, by the way, to ensure that the online interactive space will be co-produced and co-curated by participants. Undoubtedly we will return to this organisational issue that we have associated with the employment of ‘radical trust’
These initial workshop session will take place in London over a weekend in early November. The participants will be volunteers. We will be joined by people who worked for Insightshare, the innovative participatory video company based in Oxford. We will all work together to create a 3 minute drama video. We will learn from this work how we can best put together the TOOLKIT that will guide participants.
I don’t think we will be able to create a three minute drama video in a weekend but who knows!!! Obviously we won’t be able to edit it.
That isn’t the only unknown. Will we be able to describe a series of creative sessions that will end up with a group of participants being able to produce a 3 minute video?
These sessions will have to address how to make a creative working group, how to explore stories of change, how to focus on specific stories, how to combine these stories (maybe this can be done by creating a dramatic central image that takes from all the individual stories), how to elaborate the work in dramatic scenes (maybe this can be done by making a story board), how to rehearse, how to organise the participants into a cast (that does the acting) and a crew (that does the filming), how to choose locations, how to film the scenes, how to edit the material and how to upload it onto the online interactive space.
Should this TOOLKIT consist of words only or should it have video instructions or animated instructions? How can we bring this process alive for downloaders of the TOOLKIT?
Also, do participants have to do it as we describe it? Can they follow their own path? Will there be space for flash mob type depictions of change?
We are considering having different ‘pathways’. So the TOOLKIT itself is like a kind of garden. Maybe everybody comes in the entrance gate (inspired!) and goes out of the exit gate (with a 3 minute video!!). However there are a number different ways through.
In our original thinking we thought of three different types of mappa mundi. One, was like a flash mob, a performance in a public. Two, was a very short text by a dramatist that would be open to interpretation and could be performed anywhere in any style (we were inspired by Caryl Churchill’s SEVEN JEWISH CHILDREN). Three was a group devised and produced original drama story (this is what our workshop sessions in November will be focused on).
But these types are not totally distinct. For example the flash mob has to be devised. The original drama story could use a very short play text. Any of them may be performed in public!! Maybe this mix is exciting because it means that people will come up with original cocktails. Or maybe its confusing and we will have to simplify!