Carole Gray (CG): The
introductory session involves the Lab Director, Susan Benn, PAL;
the textile designers and designer knitters from Shetland including
Margaret Hamilton, Hazel Hughson,
Norma Anderson, Sanna Isbister and Mary Thomson; artists
and designers including Gordon Burnett, Christine Arnold,
Freddie Robins and Stephanie Tristam, Frankie or Frances
Geesin, as well as Heather Delday and myself from Gray’s.
Everyone,
without exception, is nervous – some very reluctant
to describe what they do. However, we all say something and connections
begin to emerge.
Susan Benn (SB): I am very conscious
on this first evening of how helpful it is to begin every
Lab with
the benefit of a completed
Welcome Dossier. (This is the first time this document has
had to be a work-in-progress affair). The mix of people and
skills
and experience is balanced despite the way the group came together
at the last minute. Better pre-lab communications between Stephanie,
Maggie and I and the participants and a longer lead in time
after choosing the participants to secure the biogs for the
Dossier
would
have sorted this problem. But it is a small group and I feel
confident people will get together in it in a few days. I feel
I too want
to make things here. Stephanie is not keen I do this as she
feels I would be neglecting my duties as a Lab Director.
I debate this,
but not for long.
CG: The
pressure is taken off us for a while by the storyteller’s
session. Mary Blance, in a fantastic Shetland dialect, reads
us a number of poems and stories –intriguing things
about the ‘allover’ (Shetland
jumper), and another one about sheep. We are entranced – like
children again having bedtime stories read to us! Heather
recognises lots of Orkney words especially ‘riven’ (torn
physically and emotionally), also Mary tells a ‘selkie’ (seal/human)
love story from Orkney and she speaks very highly of Tom
Muir, the storyteller there. We ask her if she invents her
own stories.
She doesn’t but she would like to. Susan suggests that
maybe Mary could tell contemporary stories, current affairs
and so on.
This would be good because folk tales are always so old.
New folklore and stories need to be created. Both Heather
(Delday)
and I are
struck by the ‘visual qualities’ of the storytelling
that connect us with Mary (B). Christine (Arnold) asks the
storyteller about the tradition of laying the brightly coloured
textiles onto
the croft landscape.
It’s been a long day – everyone
travelling (some 600 miles) and coming together at last.
SB:
The atmosphere is predictably promising
by the end of the evening with a good meal and fine story
telling.
The
idea of
contemporary
story telling spawns a new idea for me for a future Lab
on the island led by Mary (B) with some of her fellow
journalists, playwrights,
poets, filmmakers with other story tellers from the islands
to develop current events through the storyteller’s
medium. Great idea for children and for artists too to
draw narrative sketch
books while the stories are being told.
I am very pleased
that we invited Frances Geesin as she fits in perfectly.
click here to go to the following day
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