Friday 12 February 2016

Wandering houses and Titania’s troubles


Wandering houses and Titania’s troubles
Fallibroome Arts Week, 2016
The mountains of Ancient Greece
a temple from Ancient Greece
 A week of slightly deranged creativity draws to a cheerful close. These last 5 days have bounced me from Leek to Blackshaw Moor to Nether Alderley, Prestbury and Whirley. This could simply be a collection of delightful names if the names weren’t also accompanied by some delightful people

The majority of workshops were part of the magnificent Fallibroome Academy’s Arts Week where they coordinate arts input, trips and performances among the Academy’s feeder primaries where teachers take workshops to each other schools, classes go on trips to art galleries and the likes of me come into school and disturb the equilibrium a bit….
 
retelling myths
This has been my third year as part of Arts Week and I love it! I meet wildly enthusiastic children in friendly schools where people just dive in and have a go at whatever gets thrown at them…..

In Nether Alderley, we met Victorian explorers and the people, buildings and myths of Ancient Greece

The Storm.
Clouds in the sky,
Rain is coming.
Tip, tap,
Raindrops going tip, tip tap.
People in the puddles go splish, splash, splosh
While the thunder bangs and lightning crashes

With bobble hats and boots
Or no hats, no shoes, no long trousers, only shorts
We go out in the rain and the rain goes splash
And the wind goes whoosh
A storm strong enough to blow us away!

Running home,
Running home
Wet footprints in the hall
(Whirley Primary School, Reception)

At Whirley Primary School, we also discovered the scenes that Shakespeare missed out of Midsummer Night’s Dream
 
he forgot the angry trees

...and the dramatic castles

...he didn't tell us that Demetrius was carrying a ring

 And today in Prestbury Primary’s Reception classes, we heard of adventures….
 
brave nights cross a bridge over a river
There was the house that needed a pee, so it stood up and went for a walk. Eventually it found a swimming pool and relieved itself but having tasted freedom, the house didn’t want to go back to its own place in the  street and wandered off exploring. It found a cave and squeezed inside looking for treasure. But the cave was the home of a lion who, alarmed by the arrival of a whole house, roared! The house was so frightened that it ran all the way home and jumped into its space in the street. But it was in a such a hurry that it landed the wrong way round with its back door where the front door should be*. If you walk through Prestbury now, you might find the back-to-front house and then you will know it is the house that went for a walk

an adventure storyboard
 
an adventure following a path through a wood and flowers
Or there was the pirate who lived in a tall, beautiful house that had no kitchen, So he went off hunting for a kitchen. He looked in the wood of blue and yellow trees: no kitchens here. He looked under the bridge where the trolls lived: no kitchens here. He went into outer space on Alexander’s Flying Boat. They few to the Dark and Dangerous Planet: no kitchens here. They went to Saturn: no kitchens here! Coming back to Earth, the pirate went into a shop in Macclesfield: kitchens! Kitchens! Being a pirate he tried to steal a kitchen but it was too big to carry. So he went home and dug up some of the treasure he had hidden under his bed and went back and paid for a kitchen. Now he is a happy pirate

 Many thanks to the artists and storytellers of Nether Alderley, 
Whirley and Prestbury Primary Schools

* It is just possible that the house ended up upside down, “like that house in London”.
 
Midsummer Night's Dream: the Fairy Woodland

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