After The Ballad of Ellen Strange I began to think about creating a permanent touring company. It didn’t take long before the idea of a horse-drawn theatre seemed to make good sense. To find out why go to the Horse-Drawn Theatre page. Then the next question was – what would the show be?
Pictures From Brueghel
I was teaching on the Foundation Course in Manchester, and decided to combine my teaching work with making a theatre show. Mala Sikka, a foundation student who had worked on Ellen Strange, and who had gone on to study Theatre Design at Central School in London, had been in touch. Mala told me about the work she was doing at college, including a new and exciting project led by Peter Schumann. Schumann was the founder of the influential Vermont based Bread & Puppet Theatre. He was bringing a Bread & Puppet show, Masaccio, from the USA and was looking for some ‘local’ musicians. Mala asked if our Horse + Bamboo musicians would come down to help him?
When I eventually went down to London to see what was going on I was surprised to see that the Masaccio work appeared to be entirely visual. Peter Schumann’s students were making clay reliefs based on Masaccio’s frescoes, casting from them, and then painting the resulting panels. Masaccio was, of course, an early Renaissance painter – one of the first realist artists. I learned that the material Peter used for making these panels was called celastic. It’s now fallen out of favour as the process uses acetone, which gives off toxic fumes.
The whole thing looked great, and the performance itself was loose and casual, held together by the presence of Schumann, narrating and playing fiddle and drums. When Peter Schumann left London I inherited his celastic sheets, some acetone, and a few ideas.
It was the perfect approach to introducing theatre to my own art students. So I went back and planned a show based on the life and work of another artist, Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Brueghel was a Flemish 16thcentury painter who remains popular for his paintings of wide-screen landscapes peopled with characters acting out proverbs, children’s games, and similar.
Pictures From Brueghel became our first ever tour. The horse-drawn tour itself circumnavigated Manchester, a journey of 250 miles. We started in Rossendale and Ramsbottom in mid-July, and then headed south for Buxton Festival. Next we moved east to Frodsham (mid-August); then north to Blackpool (where we camped in the grounds of the zoo) and finally to Bolton Festival during the last week of August. Throughout we performed and camped in parks and other rural public spaces.
Inevitably we learned a huge amount from this first tour. We began the never-ending journey of discovering what makes a good performance.
Another influence at this time were a group of young performers from Leiden, Holland. They were called Matrogoth, and I met them through Frank Berbee, who had abandoned his school when I first met him in Lille.
Frank kept in touch and ended up working with me on the Brueghel show. In 1980 he asked about working again on our second horse-drawn tour. Frank was precocious, playing a range of musical instruments, as well as being a writer/poet, an inspired maker, and an intense performer. I had briefly worked with Matrogoth in Leiden, and there met other members of the company – Bram Groothof, Ron Peperkamp, Peter Lindhout, Adriaan Krabbendam among them.
The Home-Made Circus
Matrogoth had a big impact on our second touring show – The Home Made Circus. Peter designed and built a beautiful circular white-cloth tented space, which was decorated with my huge woodcuts. We also liked it because Peter would send everyone else off for an hour and put it up entirely by himself. The show itself was influenced by the writings of the American West Coast poet Gary Snyder. We concocted a sort of ‘circus’ using odd life-size puppet-animals and Snyder’s wild, visionary stories, with Ron as its ring-master.
By now the company had grown into an entourage of over a dozen people, which included our own chef, Sam Richardson.
Our horse-drawn tour of The Home-Made Circus ended up being a rather short and local one. It was on the road for just over a month, in which time we took it to Rossendale, Ramsbottom, Accrington, and Padiham, albeit with trips out to St.Helens and Manchester.
BREUGHEL: BOB FRITH, FRANK BERBEE, MAGGIE MARIGLIANI, MALA SIKKA, KEITH BRAY (m), MAX BULLOCK (m), WIN HUNT (h), with SUE GOODWIN and BRAM GROOTHOF (also students from VISUAL STUDIES DEPT, MANCHESTER POLYTECHNIC).
CIRCUS: BOB FRITH, RON PEPPERKAMP, FRANK BERBEE (m), WIN HUNT (h), ANNA NEAVE, LAURA BARNES, SAM RICHARDSON, DAVE CHADWICK, GWYNETH LAMB (m), PETER LINDHOUT, KAREN LANCEL, BRAM GROOTHOF (m), DAVE COOK (m).