Saturday, October 23, 2010

A New Haunt
31st October, 2pm-6pm, Watling St. near St. Paul's Cathedral



Regular readers of this highly irregular blog may remember when I briefly mentioned taking "Fighting Fantasy" storytelling to the streets - this is now happening.


image of the flyer - see it at the website for a secret club

For The House of Fairy Tales a secret club has developed a ghost story. The original brief said "treasure hunt" but this was the perfect opportunity to play around with the format and this one also offered the chance to include a progressional making-experience - participants are basically applying for a Permission to Haunt and must go on a quest to learn the necessary skills and to fill out their application form.


some of the stubs, forms, appendices and marks applicants will meet

The format is a story - participants are presented by a series of texts, but because we're mainly dealing with children and want this to evolve throughout the day, some passages are played by actors and "readers". Kid (of all ages) who play are informed that they take part in a story, they have a couple of choices that exclude some activities and I think that this will be interesting to observe. I still want to explore this method of delivery further and am thinking of a time-limited run in that format.

It is great to finally have formalised these activities as a secret club and we are going to throw a lot of things at you in 2011. We have learned a lot from our collaborations with The House of Fairy Tales and we share their idea of teaching things that schools tend not to value.