The Tiger who came to Monday Night

So, Monday night is a bit of a tradition at my parents' place. They put on a delicious meal, and whoever of us offspring is around (there's seven of us, plus our families, plus some really good value cousins and their families) drop in for dinner and birthday celebrations and frequently other commemorations.

Last night was tiger night, because last week saw the death of Judith Kerr, whose 1968 picture book, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, is magnificent.

My mother Mary Anne asked me if I'd make a kamishibai story to celebrate the great Kerr, so I dropped around in the morning, we had a chat, I had an idea, went off into my day and in the arvo went and wrote and drew and painted a 4-card story.

After the main meal, but before sweets, my dad Salvatore read William Blake's poem 'Tyger, tyger' from his old school poetry book, In Fealty to Apollo, then I performed this new kamishibai story, which curled The Tiger Who Came to Tea up into our Monday Night dinner tradition.

Then mum talked about Judith Kerr and the place that her book has had in our family, then people sang happy birthday because it had been my 51st birthday on Saturday (yes, it was a lovely day, thanks for asking), then we ate a cake that my sister Anna constructed out of two squiggle cakes (the cheap, nasty and very popular cake that I bring every week), iced and garlanded to precisely resemble the cake in the book.

All in all, a highly successful Monday night.

But as you may have gathered, they pretty much all are.

(thanks to Anna for the photos)

Tsugi wa? (What's next?)

What's next is that I am back in Japan.

That's the view from the 8th floor of a hotel room in Ueno, Tokyo, taken last Saturday night the 23rd of May, after an izakaya dinner with my Polyglot colleagues, Stef and Dan.

The next day we piled into a charcoal-coloured van with our fellow artists, Aachi Cocchi musicians Izumi-san and Tomoya-san, and the director of Aachi Cocchi, Mikako-san. Our tour manager, Lang Craighill, drove us north up the Tohoku Expressway to the town of Minamisanriku.

Polyglot have visited this town twice before,  the first time only months after it was ravaged by the March 2011 tsunami. This time we are working with residents of temporary housing, and then school children at the Iriya Elementary School, to produce a mega kamishibai which we will perform at Minamisanriku kindergartens next week. Aachi Cocchi (it means 'here and there') have been presenting classical music, opera and dance 'cafe concerts' in places affected by the tsunami since 2011 as well. As part of this two week program, called 'Drawbridge: Kids Are The Boss', Tomoya and Izumi have been playing Tchaichovsky, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Piazzola and Disney for the residents and the students, and then providing live accompaniment for the kamishibai section.

Here's Stef, Dan and I presenting a kamishibai introducing us, which I produced back in Melbourne. It was designed to introduce us and also to be able to performed to the chorus of 'Give Me a Home Among the Gum Trees'. There's Mikako-san translating for us, Izumi-san playing the piano, and Tomoya-san looking on.

Here's Dan and I showing the Iriya students the story that the temporary housing residents had given to us in the previous two days: the residents told us the story, and I drew the pictures as they narrated it. Although an elderly lady did need to get up and correct my picture of the peach floating down the river towards the lady washing her clothes.  The peach, apparently, didn't have enough of a bum-like curve to it...

And here's the image I produced back in April so Mikako-san would have a picture to put onto the flyer advertising the cafe concerts for the temporary housing residents. The middle flag is the Minamisanriku flag.

Bernard Caleo's Paper Theatre

Last week it was my birthday and I turned 45.  Last night I was at the parental home, where my family gathers every Monday night for a meal. Parents, brothers, sister, spouses, children, cousins gathered as usual. And then, unexpectedly, my friends began to arrive. And arrive. And arrive. WHAT was going on?

 Candles were lit, the song was sung, cakes were cut.

I was delighted.

And then Part Two began.

The wonderful Fleur and her bloke Marcus got up (other suggestions: 'Male and Female', 'Marxist and Free Market', 'Mongrel and Flaneur') and Fleur explained that maybe just maybe it stood for 'Fantasist (or Fabulist) and Maker' and suggested that those two titles could be applied to me and that if they could, both roles could probably do with

a kamishibai box of their very own.

I was something flabbergasted, alright. Oh boy. I have been borrowing fellow kamishibaya Jackie Kerin's beautiful kamishibox, or K-box, designed and built by Ted Smith, for the last couple of years. This beautiful new one looked very like, very like.

And not without reason - Fleur had got onto Jackie and placed Ted's plans in the hands of Marcus, who as it turns out is a master wood artist. The timbers in this case are meranti and red gum, making it a darker, redder K-box than the one that Ted made for Jackie.

Fleur then performed a lovely kamishibai tale about the genesis of her idea to make this box for me - a plan hatched two years ago - and a vision of its use

Well, as you can well imagine.  I was staggered and astonished and absolutely delighted. The box was placed on Leopold, my bike, wheeled in for the occasion, and I managed to blather a few words about sophrosyne and poiesis and the Ancient Greeks before just saying, thanks.

And again, thanks. To my family, to my friends, to Jackie Kerin, for smuggling the plans across the border, and for the photos in this post, to my wife Susan for her part in all this wonderful skulduggery, and to Fleur and to Marcus, builders of dreams.

Well.

It's time to get writing and drawing and performing.

Licence to Kamishibai!

It's one of those things that I never knew I wanted, indeed needed, but when it was issued to me tonight

something clicked - it is just the thing that I have been waiting for.

I was out west at Dinjerra Primary School in Braybrook, where Lachlann Carter of Pigeons literary literacy projects has been working with kids from prep to Grade 2 over the past school term. About a month ago I went over and did a couple of kamishibai sessions, including a performance and a workshop, and it must have got them really fired up, because when I got there tonight, there were dozens of black-painted cardboard butai (kamishibai stages), with exquisite pictures within them. Tonight we were celebrating the premiere of films of the children performing their stories. There was a red carpet.  There was popcorn.  It was really very exciting.  Very very exciting And very beautiful.

---------------------------------------------------

Boy I'm glad that I (along with 60 Dinjerrah students) now have that licence.  It makes me breathe easier about performing the 'Snail climbs Fuji' story at last week's Graphic Novels! Melbourne! fundraiser.

The above picture, taken by Pigeons' Jenna Williams - shows the title of the kamishibai which in toto reads (in English)

Snail

Slowly slowly climb

Mount Fuji

Sounds great in Japanese though.  It's a haiku by the great poet Issa, a.k.a 'Cup of Tea'

So there was that one, and a couple of weeks before that, I was up at the Woodend library as part of the Woodend Winter Arts Festival and the cartoonist and artist Trace Balla took those shots of me performing there:

This is from my kamishibai, 'A Box of Stories', set in Tokyo in 1931.  It's a kamishibai about kamishibai. Is that going a bit far?  Perhaps.

But blimey.  I'm glad I have that licence, now.  Really glad. Thank you, Dinjerra and Pigeons!

The Nun's Priest's Kamishibai

So, a month ago, on May 6 2012, as part of the Williamstown Literary Festival, a group calling ourselves the 'Canterbury Tales Book Club Project' put on an afternoon of performance, song, dance and talk about Geoffrey Chaucer's great bunch of stories written in Middle English at the end of the 1300s.  Above, pre-show, Jackie Kerin (the owner of the kamishibike) and I work out how it's all going to get set up for me to do my bit after the interval. Jackie performed a hilarious 'Pardoner's Tale' in the first half. Jackie also took all of the photos in this blog post - except, of course, this one!

Above, Catherine Ryan, in a wimple of her own design, gives us the 'Canterbury 101' talk.

Author Claire Saxby, our Middle English MC.

Simon Leverton on guitar was the musical director (a lot of bawdiness going down in them thar lyrics it must be said) and behind him?  Yes, absolutely.  Morris dancers.  They got bells that jingle jangle.

This was the first time I'd ever done the kamishibai box + simultaneous projection, and apparently it worked pretty well.  I must say I'd like to see it myself, to be sure.   For my part I had adapted 'The Nun's Priest's Tale', which I studied way back in the Middle Ages of 1984, taught by my beloved HSC English Literature teacher, Marisa Spiller.

Above, my first image of the tale, depicting the 'narwe cottage' in which lives the widow who owns the rooster

called ('cleped') Chaunticleer.  'He was a real cock', as I say in my translation. And of course if there's chickens then there's gotta be a

fox.  Let me hasten to add, it all works out okay, but there's some tense moments along the way, ohhh yes.

..............................

It's good to have another story in my kamishibai repertoire, and I'm thinking that I will deliver the 'G' rated version of the tale this Saturday 9 June up at Woodend library where I am giving a kamishibai storytelling session as part of the Woodend Winter Arts Festival.

After me came Daniel O'Connell, with a filthy, funny version of the Miller's Tale.  Brilliant.

Highlights of the afternoon for me were certainly the other performances, and also seeing Robin Grove, a remarkable English Literature lecturer (more like 'inspirer') from my university days, and meeting Ted Smith, the builder of the beautiful kamishibai box that I borrow off Jackie whenever I need to tell 'paper theatre' stories.

Melbourne Writers Festival - August 2011

Once we got back from GRAPHIC up in Sydney, it was time for the Melbourne Writers Festival in Melbourne.  This festival has had more and more comics content over the last few years, which is great to see, and above you can see me, Pat Grant and Mandy Ord talking about graphic novels in general, and their ones in particular, as part of the MWF schools program.

Also for the schools program, I presented a kamishibai session at Artplay, in which I spoke about the form and told 3 kamishibai stories: a new one, 'A Box of Stories' (a kamishibai kamishibai); the Fuji snail story (from 'What It Is' #4), and my very first story, 'The Legend of Rat Boy'.  In the lead up to this session, Michael Shirrefs on ABC Radio conducted an interview with me about kamishibai and even filmed (for radio!) the Fuji snail story - and that's all here.

There were cartoonists drawing live outside the National Gallery, there was the launch of a beautiful new comic book from a new-to-comics book publisher (more about this next post), there was a session with the great and terrible Jim Woodring (and anybody who has heard him talk about 'the Age of Cake' will know what I'm talking about here), there was of course the Oslo Davis-edited comics newspaper 'Drawn From Life' and there was the 'Martin Martini In(k) Concert'.  Hoo hah!

This last was at the venue The Toff in Town, where Martini and band played a suite of songs from his 'Vienna 1913' cycle (of which I am a big fan), while Jim Woodring -

- and a rotating cast of three fine local cartoonists -

- Pat Grant, Andrew Weldon and Jo Waite - kept drawing live while the band played on.  The audience got to listen to music and look at pictures:

Yes, it's some sort of bliss, as this crowd of cartoonists shows.  The idea comes from the Angouleme Comics Festival in France, where Mike Shuttleworth had seen some 'Concerts du Dessins' (Drawing Concerts) in January of this year and come back to rave about them to Steve Grimwade, the director of the Melbourne Writers Festival and a hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is, to boot.

Photos in this post are courtesy of Dan Hayward and Stephen Elliott, cinematographers supreme!

'What It Is?' #3 - What a Thing It Was!

So, last night Monday 27 June 2011, at Readings bookshop in Carlton, we delivered the third show in the category-busting series that IS, 'What It Is?'

In this case, the 'we' was me and

Alex McDermott, whose latest book

got published recently. So we launched it, there and then, with the three 'Huzzahs' normally reserved for the launch of a comic book (if you'd been there, you'd know why I consider Alex's weighty yet extremely toothsome tome to be an honorary comic book) and then we got into the show, kicking off with a kamishibai about the Australian career of the 19th century natural historian Wilhelm von Blandowski (yes, THAT Wilhelm von Blandowski - the one who I took on a Victorian roadtrip last year - read all about that here)

The kamishibai WAS to have been 'narrated' by a song called 'The Curious Man', by calypso artist 'The Death Adder', of Berlin, but various technological barriers meant that the recording could not be played, so I ended up speaking the story.  The song however is magnificent, a sprawling calypso epic of high romance and utter desolation, and I will find a way of posting it.

Wilhelm at the Port of Adelaide in 1849.

He loves it here.

But 7 years later, 200 miles up the Darling River, he has an experience of the sublime.  And from that point, his career in Australia starts to unravel.  Our argument was, he SEES something out there...

Something...

oooooooo000000000000000ooooooooo

We then went onto the story of Redmond Barry, a big statue of whom stands outside of the State Library of Victoria:

Our proposition was, you can't really understand Redmond (or Melbourne) without the vital piece of information that he was actually a

centaur.  And, as a centaur, it is unsurprising that he spends quite a bit of time on his 1839 voyage over from Ireland

amidships, as it were, with one Mrs Scott, which Mr Scott, and eventually the entirety of the rest of the passengers, finds quite off-putting (thank you to the puppetteering hands of Stephen Mushin (Barry the centaur and Mrs Scott and ocean) and Colleen Burke (boat and ocean).  When they get to Sydney?  He's really frozen out of the social scene there.

Anyway he eventually makes it to Melbourne and makes it in Melbourne and, in the end, makes Melbourne (State Library, Melbourne University, Art Gallery).  Well, you know:

he's a centaur.

ooooooo000000000000000ooooooo

Our coda to the night was an imagined 1859 meeting

between Blandowski (me) and Barry (Alex), in which Barry identifies what it is that has followed Wilhelm back from the interior, and indeed what it is which will tail him all the way back to Silesia.  All the way back to his death.

And you too can see it, here.

THE NEXT 'What It Is?' (and final in this series): songster Marin Martini and I will puzzle over, sing about, and draw about, the mysterious and ancient connection between comics and songs.  Monday 25 July. 8pm. Readings Carlton. See you there!

THANK YOU: to Jackie Kerin again for the loan of her kamishibai box, and for all the photos dotting this post.  Soon I will post the youtube episode of last night's 'What it Is?', which, as with the other two, was shot and is presently being edited by the skilful Dan Hayward.