Weeks 31-33

The posts are getting fewer and farther between and soon this page will be archived and replaced with this one: http://juicefromspace.blogspot.co.uk That's mostly because the main thing happening at the moment is me hammering away on the keyboard and learning my lines.

In the meantime, there are a few things you should know: there's a preview of the show at the museum on Wednesday 26th October, the teacher's pack has been drafted and is ready to be reviewed by Tania, my colleague at Sustain Education, and we've a filming day with Jason booked next month to create films of two of the poems to be featured on youtube.

So here are the details of that preview - also featured on the Juice from Oranges, Rocks from Space page. Please do book as numbers are limited.

Juice from Oranges, Rocks from Space

Wed 26 Oct

11.30am - 12.15pm & 1.30-2.15pm

A new poetry performance from Helen Clare, about exhibits from around the museum; where they came from and the journey they’ve made. There will be happy poems, sad poems, gory poems and fun poems – and opportunities for children to join in and create too.

Find out about the giant carved tusk, a moth, bloodworms, a man who was murdered and left to rot in a bog, a Greek God, Stan the T. Rex, and an ancient rock from outer space. 

For children aged 8-12 and their parents/carers

Free, book on mcrmuseum.eventbrite.com or 0161 275 2648

Week 27-31

Today, as I chatted to Jenny on reception I stood feet, possibly inches away from the woman who unwrapped one of the mummies on display in the Ancient Worlds gallery. I ought to make that the over-arching metaphor of this blog, but in truth I mention it just because it's so unbelievably cool, and even though I don't really like the mummies I find it exciting in a way that's almost certainly uncool.

It's also been a notable day today because it was Debbie's last day. Debbie's been a crucial part of the project since the beginning helping to facilitate my needs and support the production of materials for the Learning Team. She's going back into school to work full time as a secondary Drama teacher. She'll be great! Good luck Debbie!

We met in the cafe for celebratory cake but Debbie was a bit green around the gills after her leaving do last night so Cat and I tucked into Red Velvet cake.

It's been a while since my last blog, not because I've been doing nothing but because we seem to have reached the stage where there's a lot of beavering behind the scenes.

We retrialled the Trading Words activity with one of our schools and edited that - so that's more or less finished. I've also worked on teacher instructions for turning the children's sentences from the activity into a class poem. And the Dinosaur egg activity is also now written up. Hopefully a member of staff is going to take a look at some of the design elements because that's really not my strong suit!

Dominic and I have been working hard on the script - which is now a script - with words and staging and everything. We had a really productive rehearsal session on Tuesday. I think I've got away without jokes - although there's a new dinosaur poem about Stan the T,Rex, which is fun, if not actually funny (I think it's funny, mind you, but that's not a guarantee of much!)

My next job is to make an axe so that I can brandish it during the Worsley Man poem about a man who was murdered, probably sacrificed sometime in the 2nd century AD and spent the next couple of thousand years pickling in a Salford bog. It'll be made of foam rubber and spray paint so no children should be harmed during said brandishing.

I also need to find music - I'm having music! Something exciting to start things off with a journeying theme and something electronic for the meteorite poem. It seems strange to accompany the 'oldest thing you'll ever see' with such modern sounds - but of course we do receive radio waves from space - check out this video from NASA with the sounds of space. Again, so cool I'm decidedly uncool about it.

Week 26

The show is starting to take shape. Here's the map of the poems showing the different themes and working out the transitions between each one.

Between the six poems there are 5 opportunities for other objects. Beside the quilt these are taken from a museum project in which the children chose their top 10. The ones I've decided to use are: The Chameleon (who lives in Madagascar like the Golden Mantella) and who at the museum occupies the next door tank); the Wolf (who forms part of The Nature Discovery section which houses a fairy tale collection of  animals - and a giant ant - to entice younger visitors) Stan the T. Rex, and a mummy case.

Although these five objects don't have poems they give opportunities for discussion, poetry games and story telling. I'm working on a story about a wolf and a boy who travels to find him, based on a Native American story

Then I need to think up some jokes....

Week 24 and 25

Photo: Manchester Museum on flickr

"Follow the poems. They have the answer." Well of course they do, but it took my friend Christine, writing from her hospital bed to show me the way out of my quandary - even though it perhaps was not her job to fix my problems just at that moment.

And she was right. Six of the poems fit immediately together - they are the voices of objects talking about different kinds of journeys - the Benin tusk, the Meteorite, The Death's Head Hawk Moth, Worsley Man, Hermes and the Golden Mantella Frog. Dominic also suggested that we use "Who are these souls at my breakfast table" - a poem that looks at all the people involved in making the food that we eat - as an opener.

It occured to me that all these poems answer the question "Where do you come from?" as well as "How did you get here?" Thats a good unifying principle for starters.

I have a couple more jobs, as well as a little more editing work. One is to do a mapping exercise looking at the connection between the poems. I like this sort of thing - paper, post-its and coloured pens, maybe even fancy tape, spread all over the floor.

The second job is to look for other things in the museum which haven't got poems but still have connections and form part of the narrative. Dominic suggested that the quilt with all the quotes from immigrants might have this role. The found pantoum I wrote may well be a little grown up and, as the phrases repeat with the strange claustrophobia of the pantoum, too difficult to hear.

There's also another poem on the way. On Friday I spent some time talking about buckles with Bryan Sitch the archeology curator, which was fascinating. One of the things we talked about was how ornamental and bejewelled brooches marked out people's status. He told me about sumptuary laws preventing people of lower status from wearing certain things even though they might have made the money. Here's one: "no knight under the estate of a lord, esquire or gentleman , nor any other person, shall wear any shoes or boots having spikes or points which exceed the length of two inches, under the forfeiture of forty pence." Anyone who's ever been stopped for driving too nice a car will know what that's about!

What's really nice about this is that it's almost the anti-migration poem, in that all the other poems have been looking at the journeys of things - but this one's about one of the forces that stops flow and movement - in this case social mobility. This is how people are pinned in their place.

So we didn't quite manage Buckles and Butterflies. But we have got Brooches and Moths. And then no more poems!

Week 21

It's all coming together. There are 11 poems now and this weekend I've redrafted the meteorite poem and tried out a found pantoum based on this lovely quilt. I'm also working on the Hermes poem (again!) and hope to write one about buckles - even though the butterflies lost out to the Death's Head Hawkmoth in the end.

We've also got the trading words activity finished and the visitor's poemlet activity is almost ready for the blog.

We're looking at doing one more workshop for the museum - this will be a family workshop, encouraging people to write nonsense poems inspired by the exhibits and based on my Dinosaur Egg poem, hopefully alongside a film of me performing the poem - I'll be talking to Jason Wingard next week about the filming.

The plan is to get all the poems written by the time I see Dominic next on the 21st June.

Then what we have to figure out is how to connect all those poems together into a narrative that can form the basis of a show. Dominic's determined there will be jokes, which will be interesting. I'm not a natural comic - except by accident! I'm really hoping Dominic has some bright ideas, or at least some smart questions - because right now I'm struggling to imagine it.

But then, that's the nature of the creative process. You start with something you can't imagine. You think and you talk and you dream and you put some words on paper and you mess with them and you think and talk and dream some more and eventually something exists, not in the imagination, but in reality. It still scares me. Every single time.

The best thing I did when I planned this project is to bring together some really good people to work with. Dominic's been incredibly supportive and not afraid to push me to do better and to ask difficult questions. Cat and Debbie have been there to talk to every week and to help shape the workshops into something that works for the museum. The curators have shown me things and answered my questions. Jennie showed me the Dinosaur egg and her enthusiasm helped lead to the poem, which was really the one that got me on the right track. And soon I'll be meeting with Tania to discuss how we extend the show into a fuller educational experience.

We're half way through the 10 month project now - and it feels like we're where we should be. There are plenty of challenges ahead, but it's very exciting and I think we're going to end up with something pretty good.