Week 8

This has been a busy week, picking my way through the turmoil that's been created as the project starts to branch in different directions.

The answers to last weeks questions.

1. Hermes tells riddles. He also tells lies and plays with words. He's like a cross between the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland and Jack Nicholson's Joker. In my head he is anyway - making him appear in person might be slightly trickier!

2. I met with Debbie and Cat to discuss using the money gallery in the card game. When will I learn - those problems which bug you for hours can usually be solved in a few minutes of lively discussion. Or maybe that's only after they've bugged you for hours, I'm not sure. Anyway, the solution to how to bring the money into the game, might be to bring money into the game. Looks like we're going to buy lots of lovely gold and silver coins and allow children to buy words from each other as part of the game. (Political aside - is this what I want to teach them about capitalism? Actually yes, it's not money that's the problem it's neo-liberalism and this game has rules!).

3. I'm not thinking about Frogs yet, or the Benin empire. One thing at a time. I might still buy a toy one though, once I've finished this costume.

Ah, yes, the costume. I've been working on Hermes' costume. Here's his hat, sandals and staff.

There are a couple of yellow rubber snakes on their way from Hong Kong to add to the staff, along with 3 narrow belts, which seems to approximate how Ancient Greek women wore their toga's (he's a very gender-flexible god). I just need to get a white bed sheet for said toga and I already have a nice gold brooch in the shape of a snake.

Oh, and today, this from a charity shop. It's not very Greek but it's gold and it'll probably hold most of the props I need for the show. Hurray!

Week 7

Today I'm writing from home - they're having the windows done in the museum and Debbie and Cat have decided to keep a wide berth and I decided that I needed to catch up on thinking and writing.

Three things are taxing my brain.

1. Riddles. I think Hermes might be a riddler. I think it could work as a way of involving the children and as a basis for follow on workshops. I've been re-reading the Exeter Riddles to see if I can incorporate them. But there's not much overlap between their Anglo Saxon working world and the world of a Greek God. And they're really rude!!

But they've given me some food for thought. Double meanings, puns, visual clues, anagrams.


2. How to use the Money gallery in the card game I've created which uses objects from the Living Cultures and Manchester galleries. I've got a list of words like "reward" "contract" "exchange" "value". They're all quite abstract though. Maybe there's a way that this gallery provides Chance or Community Chest cards like monopoly. Or do we somehow work with a list of concrete nouns and a list of abstract nouns.

3. Frogs. Specifically Strawberry poison dart frogs. He's my next candidate for a poem and a riddle from Hermes.

Look at him here, He's delightful. I can also buy a toy of him on Amazon. Oh dear.

Consquently I've eaten a lot and written very little. Never mind. Thinking is still work.

Week 6

This week I decided to track down a story of human migration that might fit into the show that I've found myself developing.

So, back to the Living Cultures gallery. This time I decided to watch some of those films. I'm one of those people that never watches films in galleries. Partly this is impatience - I like to experience things in my own time, and partly because I spend enough of life staring at a screen - when I go to a museum I want to stare through glass at stuff.

Anyway, the films were well worth watching. I heard about a man stabbed through the heart by a thrown Sudanese spear after a property dispute, I learned about Kente cloth and Mohawk beadwork. I also heard the tale of a prince of Benin who travelled with his people and founded the Kingdom of Warri.

There's a wonderful carved Elephant tusk which was dedicated to a Benin ruler or Oba who was exiled by the British in 1897, just about the same time as this tusk was taken as it happens. Exile's a word that always brings a chill to my heart. I remember Mobray in Richard 2.  "Now my tongue's use is to me no more than an unstringed viol or a harp.... What is they sentence then but speechless death, which robs my tongue from breathing native breath."

There's a lot of heartache behind the glass at a museum.

In the meantime I'm trying to find out more about this prince of Benin and the Kingdom of Warra. Sometimes people are better than Google, so I'm hoping to speak to a curator soon - and I'm really hoping I'll be able to get in touch with someone from that culture to hear their experiences and stories.

Week 5

It's been quite a week. Dominic Berry came to see me at the museum on Friday. Dominic's a talented and experienced writer of poetry for children and I've asked him to mentor me on this project. You should check out his webpage. Earlier in the week we'd both been to see http://louisethepoet.co.uk/'s show The Sleepover at Z Arts. It was great. Lots of chewy rhymes, physical theatre and humour. It really got me thinking.

Especially I started to think about making Hermes the star of the show. I started off thinking of making a big Hermes doll complete with gold sandals, winged helmet, staff and before I knew what was happening I was online shopping for gold sandals for me. I think I'm going to be Hermes. (Dominic's quite excited by the whole gender switching thing as well as the vegan carrot cake in the cafe!). 

Dominic's encouraged me to stick to four key poems within the Hermes narrative. I was all set to write twelve, and I still might, but only 4 will be central to the show. The others can be imported if required. We thought they should represent a journey in time. I was already keen on writing about the meteoroite (Oooh, yes, I bought a meteorite from ebay. It's only as large as my thumb nail but I keep touching it and thinking "That's come from outer space!" and "That might be older than the earth!") and the tree frog. The tree frog's interesting because not only is it that strange transition between land and see (and Hermes loves those boundaries) but because there's another story, about how we've impacted the world around us without even thinking about it (Palm oil, folks!). 

We talked about also having a human story - just yet I'm not sure what that is, and also a story of a future. I checked in my notebook and noticed that according to Aesop (who argues with Aesop!) Hermes was the ruler of the gate of prophetic dreams which fits beautifully.

We also went down to the dinosaurs to have a look round. Dominic's working on a work for children around Dinosaurs. I thought he should have a land, air and water dinosaur, but it turns out the air and water reptiles aren't actually dinosaurs. Which is a shame because they're cool. Actually it was mostly nautilus that charmed me. Guess I'm going to have to write about nautilus myself!

So we started to think about my poems in terms of the air (meteorite), water (frog) and land (human migration). I think the fourth might be fire. Have we a fiery future. I was talking to one of my pupils about the sun cooling into a red giant and the probability that the earth would get swallowed up. He told me that when his primary school teacher told his class about it, one little girl cried inconsolably. I don't want to have that effect on children. Personally I'm not all that bothered about what happens in 7 or 8 billion years. I guess Hermes might be though....