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The Paddock is currently developing a number of different projects, continuing to create work that inspires and engages local communities as well as brings together professional artists of this region in new collaborations.
The Commute – An Opera for Towns
Opera for Towns is a new project being developed in partnership with Farnham Maltings, to be performed in towns across the South East region.
Working with the same team who created our community opera The Finnish Prisoner, The Commute is the story of one person’s journey from work to home. A journey that should take fifteen minutes, half an hour, an hour at most. But on this day, it ends up taking much, much, longer.
Based loosely on the journey of Ulysses, the piece will be specifically created for venues common to most towns, a playing field, a town hall, a leisure centre, a pedestrianized shopping street, and performed promenade-style in each of these venues during the length of an entire day. The audience will be free to follow the whole story in one day, or to see various chapters of our protagonist’s long journey home on different days.
As in The Finnish Prisoner, we will once again be employing a combination of professional and amateur performers. We will also be combining different art forms in this work, with music as the common thread, so will be looking for lots of different kinds of participants – dancers, actors, singers, musicians – to be involved.
Picture Books
We want you to help us tell a story. Picture Books brings together as collaborative storytellers the residents of a town or village and makes a film of it. A Moving Picture Book – a communal Jackanory on film, if you will.
The process begins with the selection of a book – a novella, children’s book, or short story. Once selected, the story is broken up into segments of a few sentences, and then everyone in the town is invited to grab a segment and go. People can submit their own film version of the lines, being as creative as they wish to be, or they can ask us to film their contribution. They can animate the lines, set them to music and sing them, mime them with added subtitles, paint them on a wall…however it’s done, the end result is a fantastic story told to camera, to be played again and again.
Final stage: we get the largest hall we can find and play the book to the people who have made it (and all their friends and family).
The first Picture Book will take place in Lewes and the featured book is The Thirteen Clocks, a story for children by the famous American humorist, James Thurber. We also hope to take the project to other towns and villages in this region. This project is being developed in partnership with Lewes Live Literature.
Keep an eye out here, or in local newspapers, as to when and how you might become one of out storytellers.
The Reluctant Dragon
The Reluctant Dragon is a story for children by Kenneth Grahame, the author of The Wind in The Willows.
It tells the tale of a boy’s friendship with a pacifist dragon – he’s reluctant to fight – and the problems the two encounter when faced with a village gripped by dragon paranoia and set on the beast’s destruction.
We are currently adapting the story into a stage play and hope to tour it in castles around the UK in the summer of 2009.