As a lot is going on, for your convenience I’ll simply list them by date first so you can scroll quickly, and then more info will follow below. Ready? (big breath…)
Monday 4th July 7pm
Twickenham Library, Twickenham
“Alexander Pope – A Search For Perfection” (full version) Booking details here
Saturday 16th July
as part of Festival At The Edge Friday 15th to Sunday 17th July
Stokes Barn, nr Much Wenlock, Shropshire
“Discover Your Natural Voice – a Workshop” Festival details here
Weds 27 July 11am to 12pm (and every Wednesday until 24th August)
William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, London
“Indian Fairy Tales” Free event, details here
Saturday 30 July 2.15pm – 3.15pm
The Globe Theatre, Southwark, London
as part of the Telling Tales Festival – “Shakespearean StoryMaking”
a participatory workshop for visually-impaired children. Festival details here
Ok, that’s the bare details so now you know what you’re interested in, what’s within reach. More details now if you want them…
“Alexander Pope – A Search For Perfection” is my new Arts Council England supported work. Commissioned by Pope’s Grotto Preservation Trust this 45 minutes (-ish!) celebrates the life and achievement of the 18th century English poet Alexander Pope. An outcast from society on two grounds, one his Catholicism and the other his terrible disability, Pope nonetheless became the most celebrated writer of his age. This story is his story. On Monday 4th of July at 7pm, I’ll be telling it in Twickenham Library. It’s been called “wonderful memorable storytelling” and if you can’t catch it this year, it’ll be running again in 2017.
On Sunday 10th July it’s “Stories On A Sunday” again at the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities. The 7pm session sold out today but the 9pm session has only just been opened. The theme for July is “Cock Tales”. Well, it’s a cocktail bar upstairs, so why not have a narrative celebration of cockerels and some everyday stories of poulterer folk? The audience might force me to abandon my plan and instead tell some mucky stories about willies and penises (penii?), but that will be entirely against my will I assure you, honest mate straight up no kidding.
Surviving that dangerous ordeal, I shall be on my way to the 25th Anniversary of the Festival At The Edge, one of Britain’s most wonderful storytelling events. A greenfield site on Wenlock Edge in Shropshire hosts three days of the best storytelling in the country (if not the world). On the Saturday I’m running “Discover Your Natural Voice“. Other than that I shall just be chatting, lounging, listening and grinning from ear to ear. Come and join me?
Then, the following weekend, on 22-24th July I get to celebrate the FIRST EVER birthday of the brand new East Anglian Storytelling Festival. I’m chuffed to bits to be invited to be part of this! On Saturday I’m running a one hour voice intensive workshop in the morning and MCing in the evening. On Sunday, I have the honour of closing the festival with an adults only performance, “50 Shades of Grimm” in which I take Grimm’s stories and allow the women to be a bit less passive? So “Rapunzel” becomes a story of awakening, “12 Dancing Princesses” becomes the negotiation of a daring and exploratory relationship between an experienced older man and a princess who wants to feel more intensely, and I close, I kid you not, with the story of a threesome. Feeling daring?
On Weds 27th July at 11am at the wonderful William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, London, I shall be running an interactive storytelling session for children on the theme of Indian Fairy Tales. William Morris loved Indian fairy tales. This session is free! Just bring a child, preferably your own. This is the first of five weekly sessions and it runs every Wednesday up to and including Weds 24 Aug. No, I’m not going on holiday this year.
The last gig of July is on the 30th at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in Southwark. As you know, for years now I’ve been analysing story structures and using them to channel the creativity of children and adults in various contexts. For the Globe and for young visually-impaired people, I shall be running a session wherein v.i. children, as a group, co-devise a new story based on the same narrative structure which Shakespeare uses in his great tragedies, Hamlet, Lear, MacBeth. It’s only an hour long so I shall have to tell back to them what they devise. With double the time, they would be doing the telling! This probably won’t be relevant to you, but if you know somebody who would have an interest in this session, please encourage them to contact The Globe for more details and in order to book.
On 11th August I’ll be back at the National Portrait Gallery as part of their Late Shift programme telling the tale of Allan Octavian Hume – a quietly extraordinary man. If you pop over to my event page you can listen to the trailer and find out more.
Sheesh!!! I’m very happy to have such a busy summer! And I know and accept that there’s no rest for the wicked. What I do think is a little unfair is that I can’t remember any of the wickednesses I must surely have committed to get so little rest. I should like to remember – I bet it was fun…
See you somewhere, I hope?!
best wishes,
Giles ;{~
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