Leaping on and off the page and back on again.

Leaping on and off the page and back on again.

Charting the journey of ‘Redhair and Daffodil Friend’ from a devised starting point to a children’s chapter book.

I have an uncanny feeling I have come full circle, beginning all over again. Selling a children’s book direct through word of mouth, through my website and via a workshop programme reminds me of booking a theatre tour. I will gradually step by step earn back the initial outlay, but it will take some time and the process of persuasion is challenging.

This journeying is marking me due to me stubbornly adopting a devising process over a writer’s process. It has challenged me in the many quarrels with producers, administrators, scholars, editors and fellow creatives navigating an ‘outside of the box’ approach. But ultimately, it has led to a pathway that brings me home and back to myself. So, I thought it might be useful to unpack here what has been enlightening practical learning during this process.  This is the first article in a series of two I am offering that explores a persistent obsession I have with a story that has refused to leave my being and continues to offer up challenges and opportunities for expression.

Beginnings

I first began working on what has now become the illustrated children’s chapter book Redhair and Daffodil Friend (1) back in 1988. Its embryonic form became my debut performance-research offering. It was part of a body-based devising process for Triangle’s first and only T.I.E. (2) (Theatre-in-Education) programme The Fairy Tale Project.(3) During that initial process the director, Nigel Stewart and I were experimenting with a leaping dramaturgical structure in relation to the fairy tale (4). I would leap from moment to moment, landing like a cat with a new idea for the story. We drew on the work of Vladimir Propp (5), Bruno Bettelheim (6) and Jack Zipes (7). I made the work on my feet. Not a word was written down until I had conceived and learned the physical score.

I had completed a deep exploration of The Ramayana as part of my physical theatre training (1986-1988). This included studies in Asian dance forms including the dance drama form, Kathakali. Through these studies, I had landed on a project idea based around folk and fairy tales. This seeded a lifelong fascination with storytelling. Myth and fairy tale subsequently provided a therapeutic healing framework around personal stories that have become the underbelly of a lot of my performance work.

In the early stages of devising, we presented the complex physical text which we called Redhair in an open laboratory setting. The creative team shared physical and vocal exercises to develop material. This approach was to serve a writer’s process. It consisted of a learnt physically embodied score underpinned with spoken text operating like captions, that captured the essence of what was happening in the space. Tracks from Enya’s Watermark (8) album accompanied. I was surprised when my fledgling story wasn’t adopted wholesale by the writer or the director. Instead, what was birthed was a more lyrically poetic text Omega and the Golden Water (9). I was to learn this text and put a physical score to it; the very opposite of what I had created in Redhair. This flummoxed me, but I didn’t pursue the deep questions I had about the process. I was such a novice in those early days. Yet, many years later, what had seemed to me a rejection of my ideas has served me well in developing the story’s current form. For that original rejection I am now very grateful. Besides in sifting through the archives of this work I am struck by how much the content of Redhair influenced Omega and the Golden Water (1989), and subsequently in revisiting how frequently Omega has joined the journey.

In some ways the process of moving the story from a physical text to a written form reflects a creative bumpy journey over more than 30 years. It seems aeons ago that I toured Omega (10), cutting my teeth as a fledgling performer in my early thirties. I offered the programme to schools and libraries supported by a strong network of teachers, mainly former colleagues, who booked the show and workshops for around £50. I had made the piece with £1000 paying each member of the artistic team £250. If I broke even, I would begin to earn something myself.

Today I am immersed in launching the book, Redhair and Daffodil Friend, not a performance, but a published book – a completely new process for me. I am a novice again and the lessons are similar. I have produced this book on a budget of £3500 and I am selling each book for around £16. The deal with the self-publishing agent that I am working with, Ingram Spark (11) reminds me of Edinburgh Fringe Festival promoters who take large cuts for themselves with very little left over for the artists. I wanted to make the most beautiful book possible, so I chose a full colour hardback. This has resulted in little profit unless I can afford upfront bulk printing and sell directly.

A short autobiographical digression

I have always wrestled with ‘the word or not the word?’ This has been one of my creative questions.  I was encouraged to pursue academic subjects at school. I was at heart a creative soul, so all my performance experiences inhabited a twilight extra-curricular zone. When I chose foreign languages above music, I felt guilty for not having pleased the music teacher. I felt resentment when they didn’t allow us to do Drama beyond the first year. That word do stands out, doesn’t it? Yes, we do Drama, don’t we? It’s something we do with the body.

At the end of my A’ Level studies I internalised a deep sense of failure, having performed in them miserably due to stuff going on at home and some clangers dropped by my teachers. Consequently, I never felt grounded in the raised bed of Higher Education I had chosen for myself. This meant I seldom participated in group discussion. I was a silent thinking wall flower. I felt like a seedling planted out to be hardened off too soon. If I opened my mouth, I spoke so much less elegantly than my colleagues. I recognised the limitations of my working class vocabulary and committed to improvement on all fronts over the next three years. I knuckled down and got on with progressing from the Cert.Ed. to the B.Ed., my reward forgaining straight A’s in all my modules in the first year of my teacher training.

My forte at this time was English Literature. I ensured I pursued modules in Shakespeare and Post War Drama along with a practical course in Drama and Combined Arts with some music under my belt. I was good at that stuff. I think herein lies the contradiction that presents Drama as playwriting, and Performance as devising. In those days to me they were mutually exclusive. The former could inhabit the scholarly as part of the English curriculum. The latter was more like doing a CSE, something practical. I think I fully embraced the latter as a teacher and a performer, turning my back on the writer, dissing Shakespeare, the canon, and anyone who wrote plays in what I mistakenly and cheaply referred to as an “ivory tower”. I know, it’s ludicrous. This was the customary way to critique academia in those days. I was young, opinionated, working class and didn’t go to a university. I trained for a proper job with the promise of a degree at the end.

My first proper job landed me teaching CSE Drama with a bit of English at my former secondary school in Coventry. My teacher training hadn’t equipped me for the practical drama teaching I was facing here. So I made it up as I went along. The seeds of an approach to theatre making ‘on my feet’ began to develop. I used Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights to teach my drama students Macbeth. Its strains echoed down the corridors causing the head to interrupt the lesson, “whilst it might be creative work Miss Waterfield, it’s driving me mad.” Her Scottish accent clipped my ears.

A short altercation with the concept of a National Curriculum plunged me into despair and depression. Then I discovered Physical Theatre. By 1986 I had moved to a Drama Coordinator’s post. I began an eclectic programme of intense extra- curricular training in body-based theatre practices. I greedily devoured anyone and everyone who made work with their bodies without a script. This led me to set up Triangle Theatre (UK) and to cook up my own work supporting myself by part- time and supply teaching. The next twenty or so years were spent making theatre rather than writing it. I worked for and with young people of all ages (12). Fortunately for me and the company, several scholars in Applied Theatre  have documented this work.(13)  Much of this helped with our funding bids I think, as well as the fact that we created work in a relatively deprived part of the country and the work was different.

Development

In 2001 Triangle was at the beginning of a 10-year residency at The Herbert Museum and Art Gallery in Coventry. I was drawn again to the internal body-based landscape of the Redhair performance text. It was unfinished business for me. Triangle had seeded a performance art group The Little Herberts (14). I had formed the Redhair physical score into a fuller written story of some 3000 words. I recall some of the gestural language from years ago still lodged in my body as I read it aloud to the group. This became The Story of Red Hair (15), a body-based project (16). The large-scale, immersive, live and digital interactive work was performed in the gallery in Coventry. It accompanied a series of character portraits on the staircase in The Herbert’s foyer. The children curated the work alongside one adult actor with input from a professional creative team. I had noticed in myself at that time a longing to write and to fully form the story for print somehow. However, the work we created with the young people was so exhilarating and satisfying I put the idea back in the drawer and we got on with our Immersive Museum Theatre work (17) in collaboration with The Herbert until 2010.

Appraisal

After an abrupt move north to the beautiful Sefton coastline of marshland, sand dunes and its industrial port skyline, the landscape of The Story of Red Hair became a reality before my eyes. Up it popped out of the drawer again. I live in Southport which might be described as ‘above’ but the short cut is always, ‘just north of Liverpool’. It was 2013. I was finding my way again creatively after a shocking collapse of Triangle and a swift boot out of The Herbert. The wider national financial collapse hit us hard. I was searching for assets. I had become used to an international playing ground. Why couldn’t a book do the same? I was hell bent on getting it published. Secretly I dreamed of it becoming something special. It was my pumpkin, and I wanted a golden coach. I sent The Story of Red Hair warts and all to The Literary Consultancy (TLC) (18).

I did this exercise three times.

Exercise 1.
6200 words
Redhair and the City by the Sea with digital illustrations created by one of the artists from The Little Herberts project.
Target: age 8+

Response:“It needs to be reshaped according to industry banding and conventions, as currently it falls between categories. My suggestion is to adapt it for slightly younger children, which does mean considerable editing and a reconsideration of some upsetting elements.” (19)

Outcome:
It becomes about word count. To be a picture book or not a picture book. It is all about agents, publishers and their preferred illustrators. It focusses on what is fashionable; what children like or don’t like and so on.

Exercise 2.
2300 words
Redhair and Daffodil no illustrations shortened. Target age: 5-7

Response:”There are some vivid, original elements to your modern fairytale, but I think it requires some more work before it’s ready to be submitted… The ‘clunky’ names of characters and places are strange. The intricacies of action don’t always make sense. The speed of the leaping logic is too fast. The cause and effect seem contradictory.” (20)

Outcome: Repeat.

Exercise 3.
2328 words
Redhair and Daffodil no illustrations adapted according to the report. Target age: 5-7

Response::“It occurred to me when reading that the intense and occasionally irregular pace of your narrative might result from the theatrically visual origins of your story. I often envisaged the tale as a puppet-show, in the way I could imagine a character jumping from one side of the stage to the other without any need for realistic action in-between.” (21)

“If traditional publication is your goal, then my honest appraisal is that you need to really hone and tighten this, focus on getting the logic working seamlessly, the story smoother, the action tighter, and the text working harder as a text-only work, even if eventually illustrations can add colour; the magic has to be there evenwithout to capture the imagination of your readership.” (21)

Response:
Navigating between the three reports I learned how far I was prepared to go to make my story fit into a box. I learned what I really wanted to do with it, and I found ways of following the helpful guidance whilst retaining my authentic voice.

This phase of the journey was very like the early days of Triangle’s work, battling genre, style, innovation, new ways of working, sitting betwixt and between. Children’s fiction has a very specific formula which I knew deep down I just wasn’t fitting. After all these years, I was still trying to find a square box for a Triangle.(22)

This all sounded very familiar to me. It reminded me of raising the funding to create a theatre piece for a tour and writing those dreaded Arts Council applications. I felt the manuscript appraisals were honest and nurturing but ultimately industry driven so I had to make some choices.

Once Upon a Time in Dorset

Since 2011 I have been making regular trips to Dorset to work with movement practitioner Sandra Reeve.(23) Her influence on my performance work has been transformational this last decade. Within that encounter I have had regular dialogue and exchange with Andrew Carey of Triarchy Press.(24) He is a regular participant at Sandra’s workshops. I explained to him my publishing dilemma. At his invitation I sent him all the TLC reports along with each version of the story including the original. He recognised the underbelly of my creative process that lies betwixt and between the world of the adult and the child, the world of dreaming.

His responses were:

“I think they’ve given you good technical advice in terms of turning it into a publishable story. But I think it’s still a long way from being a publishable story. It would need more simplifying, a tighter plot, different language and all the things they’ve said and that you’ve been valiantly working towards.

But I think they’ve given you bad advice in going along with your wanting to turn it into a published story. Because, by the time you get it into the shape they’re suggesting, it will have lost most of its sparkle and its madness, most of its spirit and its magic. It will make sense entirely and that will be a great loss.

To me it has the pure quality of a dream. Dreams don’t have narrative consistency, creatures do arrive in sevens, people’s motives are often incomprehensible and irrelevant, chronology and cause and effect fall apart, and nobody in their right minds would publish or read other people’s dreams. They’re a kind of madness (if they’re any good – if they’re dull, they’re awful).

Are you wanting it to be a book so you can make the play of the book? Is it that you can’t see a way to take it forward as a performance?

So that’s why I’ve been dreaming about it – because that seems to me the level it operates on. The level where it works best. Especially with its disembodied symbolism, its violations and violence, and its vomiting. I’ve been hoping for a parrot to shoot the answer into my ear. I’ve imagined Nick hobbling along the beach with one ear and an old window frame in our garden being propped up on a wall and a garland of marigolds leant against it so that nobody has to ask ‘why?’. I’ve been imagining all the movements, the bent doubledness, the hanging bodiless, the shooting off, the runnings away, the tidal waves” (25)

Outcome:
With that kind of feedback, I knew the way forward. I had to forge an independent route of course. I had to get back on my feet and draw on the physicality of the journey through imaginative walking in the coastal landscape.

I began to find a way through the thicket. It seemed to me that to retain the essential elements, self-publishing would be the way forward. It certainly chimed with my experience of producing my first show all those years ago. I resolved to allow an expansion of the writing rather than a contraction. I worked towards an illustrated children’s chapter book and the possibility of dual readership: children 8+ and adults. I chose images from Egon Schiele’s work.(26) I chose one image I had worked with in the original research version. These would form the basis for the style of illustration I was looking for. I was inspired by the wonderful skyline where I live: that flat land that is the Sefton Coast where you can see Blackpool and the Big Dipper far off in the distance where the houses on one level glint in the sun on a clear day, and I make my walking practice.(27) I made a mock up with the images and sent the reworked version to several Beta readers for feedback. I didn’t realise at the time how deeply affecting that location was for embedding my story in this relatively new creative location. Between 2016 and 2020, a political hopefulness which led me to stand as a Labour Councillor added a strong political edge to the story firming up the civic themes within the story.

“It isn’t a children’s story as it is. It’s the quest for (a) publishable children’s story that is driving TLC to get you to simplify it and make it consistent, etc.

Independent Publishing

In 2021 I was up for re-election. During leafletting journeys for the Labour Party, I began listening to Joanna Penn’s podcast The Creative Penn.(28) I bought Karen Inglis’ How to Publish and Market your Children’s Book (29) and made some serious attempts to find an illustrator.

I landed on a recommendation from an old and trusted friend who had done heaps of publicity for me in the early days of Triangle. I met Fruzsina Czech (30), a recent graduate from Belfast University online. She was kind enough to take on the entire project – book cover, illustrations and text formatting. The collaboration with Fru has been a wonderful experience with many challenges as we have learned together through the process towards getting a book published. At each turn it echoed my independent theatre journey that started in 1988.

Navigating a way back home.

Having set Redhair and Daffodil Friend to sail as a hardback chapter book just this last October, the responsibility of getting it on the right course is challenging. The machinations of mailing lists and social media platforms; the unknown territory of local bookshops and the long-lost memories of creative programmes for schools pre-occupy me.

I need a bridge to help me share the book. The bridge I had touring theatre performances was the workshop. I plan a couple of workshops around the book in Southport Market’s events space. The adult one goes well. The children’s one doesn’t book up. I send the workshop brochure to a list of schools recommended by the head of libraries in Sefton. “Not a Dickie Bird”, as my dad would say.

This fragile endeavour is cradled in a year-long project I have signed up to working in collaboration with eleven other creatives in Dorset facilitated by Sandra Reeve’s The Project Group. We are all working on our individual projects. Mine concerns all that goes into launching Redhair and Daffodil Friend but also a return to a physical embodiment of a potential prequel.

“Sandra, I think I will be launching, marketing, planning, writing, promoting, telling, sharing, demonstrating, remembering, workshopping and ultimately creating something new. I would be happy to present my book and read fragments in a slot this coming weekend session. In the 40-minute session I plan to dive into my book Redhair and Daffodil Friend with you as I work towards developing ways to share it through workshops for the public. I have some tentative commitments to workshops in Southport Market in April. For this first session we will look towards embodying the story to help me get ready for those workshops. I want to find ways to work with young people, young people and their adults and adults alone – so three versions of the workshop.”(31)

From my work journal

“My head is flooded with tasks:
Advertise the workshops through Mailchimp.
On twitter
Through WhatsApp.
As an event on Facebook.
Again, on Instagram.
Order 2 posters for the market.
Check up on the progress of the cultural strategy procurement process. Attend the NEU councillors’ briefing.
Attend the Wind Turbine meeting.

How do I gather people for the workshops at the market? I only need 10 children and 15 adults.
I have worked out the minimum to break even.
5 adults and 5 children.

Clear it out. Clear it out. Flush it out. Write it out.

What’s it about in 50 words?
What’s it about in 20 words?
What’s it about in 15 words?
Can you tell me in 10 or perhaps in 5? Tell me what it’s about.

Tell me what it’s about.”

I recognise the anxiety the mind can create in the body when grappling with sharing your creativity outside your own world. I can hear it in the journal extract. I hope sharing where I have got to on this road of return can act as a signpost to where I go next and a stimulus to those teacher-performers who are in the middle of their journey.

As I am putting this article on my blog having had it turned down by the National Drama journal I am at the end of developing a stage adaptation pilot of the story and it is 2024.  You can read about that in the next blog post.

Project website page Buy Book

Notes and references
1 Redhair and Daffodil Friend, Waterfield C. illus. Czech F. (CJ Waterfield) 2022
2 TIE (Theatre-in-Education) usually presented as programmes of work – in Triangle’s case, formed of performance, workshop and activity workbook.
3 https://carranwaterfield.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Triangle_Theatre_Archive_Catalogue_November2016.pdf 4 Using the basis of the jump and “sats” within the exercises that form plastiques to create images that become the devised material. See Barba and Grotowski.
5 Morphology of the Tale Propp, V. (1928, 1958, 1968)
6 The Uses of Enchantmen, Bettelheim B. (1976)
7 Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales Zipes, J. (1979)
8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watermark_(Enya_album) accessed 13 May 2023
9 Omega and the Golden Water Billingham, P. (1989)
10 http://triangletheatre.carranwaterfield.co.uk/omega.htm accessed 10 May 2023
11 https://www.ingramspark.com
12 A Poetics of Third Theatre -Performer Training, Dramaturgy, Cultural Action. Turner, J. and Campbell, P. Routledge (2021) 13 https://carranwaterfield.co.uk/writing/ accessed 10 May 2023 – see scholarly articles on Waterfield’s work listings.
14 The Little Herberts was a children’s performance art out of school project let by Triangle Theatre (UK) as part of their residency at The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum. They operated between 2001 and 2005.
15 http://triangletheatre.carranwaterfield.co.uk/redhair.htm accessed 10 May 2023
16 https://vimeo.com/showcase/8770700 accessed 10 May 2023
17 Triangle’s Work in Times of War DVD ROM Waterfield, C. and Talbot, R. (2000) 18 https://literaryconsultancy.co.uk accessed 13 May 2023
19 Report Applebaum, N. TLC (2013)
20 Report Russell-Williams, I. TLC (2014)
21 Report Paynter, B. TLC (2014)
22 https://www.academia.edu/9389912/Finding_a_Square_Box_for_a_Triangle_Visual_Art_in_Performance Waterfield, C. Arts Education (1993)
23 https://www.moveintolife.com accessed 13 May 2023
24 https://www.triarchypress.net accessed 15 May 2023
25 Emails Andrew Carey 2014-2016
26 Man with Sunflower Arthur Boyd (1943)
27 https://carranwaterfield.co.uk/current-projects/follow-the-stone/ accessed 13 May 2023
28 https://www.thecreativepenn.com/podcasts/ Accessed 13 May 2023
29 How to Publish and Market Your Children’s Book Inglis, K Well Said Press (2018)
30 https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/life/features/i-always-imagined-a-creative-future-and-really-loved- books/40942325.html Accessed 13 May 2023
31 Project Musings sent to Sandra Reeve November 2022