The Story Ship

I am pleased to announce the launch of The Story Ship, my workshop package for Devon primary schools, harnessing the magic of visual storytelling arts to explore KS1 and KS2 curriculum areas and themes, and to develop literacy, creativity and confidence.

The Story Ship is a unique Primary School workshop package aimed at KS1 and KS2 children. It offers rich opportunities for the development of literacy – particularly speaking and listening- skills in a deeply contextualised way through a combination of storytelling, puppetry and visual arts.

The Story Ship injects a classroom project, topic or school event with imagination and creativity by harnessing the powers of a range of visual art forms including puppetry, paper theatre and traditional picture storytelling techniques. Through animation and performance children can watch their creations come to life in magical and unusual ways, allowing even reluctant learners to become motivated and proud of their achievements.

Each Story Ship workshop is unique, designed and developed according to the interests and needs of the school group.  Skills emphasised include:- visual arts and crafts (puppet-making, paper crafts, textile crafts, sculpture, drawing, story-boarding); literacy (mind-mapping, story-mapping, Pie Corbett’s Talk for Writing, script-writing); drama (role play, improvisation, puppet manipulation, performance skills) as well as theatre production (music, lighting, directing etc.) A typical one day workshop will start with an introductory visual storytelling show, leading into crafting and making activities, and finishing with drama, animation, rehearsal and a final performance showcase.

Story Ship workshops enable children to explore themes, topics and ideas in multidisciplinary ways, leading to higher levels of productivity, learning and enjoyment! These workshops can be particularly effective in engaging children with learning and behavioural difficulties, and enable all children to gain confidence as artists, storytellers, performers and collaborators.

The rate is £150 for a full day workshop, plus materials and travel expenses. Rates for shorter or longer workshops can be negotiated.

Please contact Hrubyjoanna@gmail.com to arrange an informal meeting and discussion at your school.

Picture Storytelling and movements in Data Visualisation

Monday morning is too early for such assaults of inspiration. Over muesli, I discover this fascinating article which speaks of the area which is constantly in my thoughts – the link between storytelling, language, information – and pictures. The mysterious relationship which has led me to travel across the Atlantic twice to work with artists who communicate through unusual visual storytelling forms – firstly, to the large scale visual theatre company Bread and Puppet Theatre and then, to the toy theatre revivalists, Great Small Works.

But what is this fascination really about, because it goes far deeper than a desire to make a type of theatre. I, for one, have never seen myself as a theatre maker, and find that world fairly alien. I am a person who is interested in language and communication, and how to most effectively tap into the realms of imagination and fantasy within the human psyche in order to enliven, inspire, and perhaps achieve all manner of other things of which we presently know nothing but which we may one day in the future.

So why this fascination with visual storytelling? Perhaps I could just quote data-visualiser Alex Lundry at this point:
Vision is our most dominant sense. It takes up 50% of our brain’s resources. And despite the visual nature of text, pictures are actually a superior and more efficient delivery mechanism for information. In neurology, this is called the ‘pictorial superiority effect’ […] If I present information to you orally, you’ll probably only remember about 10% 72 hours after exposure, but if I add a picture, recall soars to 65%. So we are hard-wired to find visualization more compelling than a spreadsheet, a speech of a memo.“

Rather than being interested in theatre, I am interested in information and ideas – how were these things transmitted between people a very long time ago, how are they transmitted now, how is this changing, and what does this change mean. Returning to the aforementioned article on the excellent website Brain Pickings, the author discusses data visualisation – the act of translating data into pictures, graphs, diagrams, maps – a communication method which is becoming increasingly popular not only in the fields of commerce and business but also those of literature, the arts and even ecology. Take, for example, London artist Stephanie Posavec’s project Writing Without Words, in which she translates works of literature into visual form through a range of pattern-creating processes. Below, for example, is a visual representation of part one of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, a chart-like formation mirroring the organisation of chapters, paragraphs, sentences and words, with the colours representing eleven overriding themes of the book including ‘travel’, ‘work and survival’ and ‘sketches of regional life’. It seems that we are increasingly recognising the power of the picture. Not just in art galleries, not on walls, not in fairytale illustrations, but at the heart of the way that we communicate information to each other.

But it’s when you look back through history that it gets really interesting. In the 13th Century, for example, the following figure was painted representing the main characters and institutions of the Christian salvation history, via the common symbology of the tree:

The Tree of the Two Advents, Joaquim of Fiore, 1202

And a delving into medieval alchemical etchings reveals a world of arcane theology beliefs represented through mysterious visual maps:

Are we perhaps coming full circle? Are we returning to a visual age? Anyone who uses Facebook will see clearly that the predominant method of idea communication, of late, is through photographs (often with crass, inaccurate and hugely biased verbal captions, it should be added). Pictures have power. If, according to Alex Lundry, information absorbtion increases by 55% when accompanied by a visual component, the implication is that our education system could be radically overhauled, shifting from a verbally-based to a pictorally-based one. The greater implication is that the written word might one day renounce its throne in our culture, stepping down to share responsibilities with the languge of the visual. In the meantime, I’ll head down to the studio and carry on making strange little picture storytelling contraptions involving cranks and recycled duvet covers and coffee stirrers.