Why The Winter’s Tale?

By Ruth Howard, May 2010

• because I’ve loved this play for years,
• because I felt it would suit a multi-community arts project, with its wide gaps of space and time,
• because it’s about atonement and recovery from loss,
• because it’s about coming to life against all hope,
• because it has a bear, a storm and a cast-out baby,
• because the poetry is beautiful,
• because it’s like an old tale,
• because it’s a way to spark new stories,
• because maybe others will grow to like it, even though it’s not from their culture or they’ve never liked Shakespeare,
• because Jumblies has always invented new plays, and it was appealing for a change to start with an existing text
• because some of our veteran participants wanted a new challenge and an existing dramatic text,
• because we wanted a new challenge for our new project,
• because if I don’t do in my middle years, when will I?
• because I hope that, by starting with something that’s close to my own heart, I can meet and learn about other people and what’s important to them,
• because it will be interesting to see where it goes, what we’ll keep and what we’ll let go,
• because we are having fun and something seems to be working.

In 2007, wondering what Jumblies might do next, I recalled three desires:

1. to take an existing dramatic text into a community-based project,
2. to do an expansive production for Jumblies 10th anniversary (2011) that could bring together all the communities and veteran participants that we have worked with over the last decade, and
3. (a long-time aspiration) to create an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale for a community-engaged production.

It struck me that these things could all fit together quite happily in one new venture.

The Winter’s Tale, aside from being an unabashedly personal choice, lends itself particularly well to Jumblies’ multi-layered brand of engaged art-making, with the play’s cycles of seasons and life; of tragedy, comedy and myth; its sweep of time and place; and its iconic motifs: found in old tales from many lands. It can furthermore, be populated by citizen’s from two contrasting lands, with an open-ended number of courtiers, oracles, shepherds and shepherdesses, sheep, sailors, storms, dancing satyrs, a man-eating bear and Time personified. When Jumblies was invited to undertake the Scarborough residency, I offered this as a possible direction with the new project as home base, with a favourable response from our artists, staff and neighbourhood partners.

By no means are we heading towards a straightforward rendering of Shakespeare’s play, and yet we don’t want to lose the story and poetry that enticed us in the first place. During our second year of the residency (2009/10), we took the play’s story, themes, imagery and text as catalysts for an plethora of arts research and activities: storytelling, movement, puppetry, dance, music, video, costume design, mask-making, a giant evolving story board and parallel stories from people’s own lives. To varying degrees Shakespeare’s words, dialogue and narrative were included, so that the more constant participants became familiar with the material. We played with text in Tamil, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Hungarian translations. We created a distilled telling of the story, and a chronology of twenty-four motifs. The motifs were printed on small boxes, in which people could place their own stories and drawings, which provided portable drop-by activities in the motels, shelter and apartment lobbies that we work in. We matched up artistic teams with community groups to prepare short expressions of these segments to be set into the storytelling, which ended, for our May event, with a grand finale statue-coming-to-life choreography. In our Fall 2010 workshops, we connected  personal, mythical and social narratives: the land that is barren or locked in everlasting winter and how it gets brought back to life – imagining that Scarborough itself is the land waiting  to be revitalized

We are developing a form to embrace the severe transience and dislocation that this project encounters – a controlled and flexible template into which many and variable numbers of people can step, whether they are around for three years one a day (e.g. by learning a movement, sound or song; joining a spoken chorus; speaking into a recorded soundscape; or taking a costume or puppet and becoming a citizen of Sicilia or Bohemia). The extension of this idea is to eliminate the audience-participant boundary altogether and require all audience members to enter the world of the performance to some degree. All of this is tending towards the final production, Like an Old Tale, in December 2011, and a subsequent legacy/sustainability phase.

Jumblies’ re-telling of The Winter’s Tale will be performed in Scarborough from December 8-18, 2011. Tickets on sale starting October 14^th here.