Monthly Archives: June 2018

The horror movie witch’s cottage

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Sketching the Hansel and Gretel witch’s cottage again today. It’s taking quite a horror movie turn, evolving into one of those houses that are alive, but evil, or haunted; houses that lure unwary victims to gory deaths (cue Vincent Price evil laughter). I love these kinds of films, although, as my friends know, I get easily scared and can’t watch them on my own! But movies like The Haunting, Poltergeist, or The Changeling are some of my favourites, I just need to watch some Disney afterwards lol.

This house is definitely not a place you want to spend any time in, and if you stumbled across it all alone deep in a forest you’d probably give it a wide berth, it looks demented. But if you were hallucinating through starvation you might not notice the rather sinister detailing to the architecture, you might just be desperate enough to knock on the door. And if the house was inhabited by an evil witch, who was using all her spellcraft to entice you to her door you probably wouldn’t stand a chance, like poor Hansel and Gretel. The witch is half blind you see, so she’s put some of her magic into the fabric of the house itself, which has become quite alive. The little attic window has turned into a huge cyclopean eye, an eye that doesn’t sleep and endlessly peers into the forest, searching for prey. The chimney has morphed into a strange and complex organic structure; it can act like a nose to smell out young children, and it can also pump out sickly sweet aromas to intoxicate weary travellers. The whole house is like a sticky fly trap for unwary lost souls.

And the witch has also imbued the trees around her home with magic, so they direct victims to her door, moving silently to block the way out of the forest, or shifting paths so that they all lead to the witch’s lair.

Some more sketches and the model, made out of children’s toy building blocks, for the new stage production of Hansel and Gretel I’ve been working on. The witch in this production is not evil in the usual, fairy story way; Simon Armitage’s reimagining of the tale is a much more nuanced and more contemporary version of the story, but she is still a nasty piece of work and no mistake – you wouldn’t want to end up in her house for any money!

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Forest music

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‘Out of the Mid-wood’s Twilight’, acrylic and paper collage on panel, 30cm, 2018

A whole series of forest inspired programmes and features are being broadcast on BBC Radio 3 this week; right up my street, especially as I’ve been working on a new stage adaptation of Hansel and Gretel recently where the forest looms large.  The programmes have been great, full of beautiful music and fascinating stories; there’s a link to the Radio 3 website here. This series of programmes really is a treat and I think you can listen to them on the BBC Radio iPlayer for a few more weeks yet.

Wonderful new music has been composed for Hansel and Gretel by Matthew Kaner. Matthew says of the project:

‘Simon Armitage’s poetry is an inspiration to work with. It’s a helter-skelter journey from ghostly foreboding horizons to a pleasure park of sweet feasts. It’s pushed my music into new territories.’

I heard some of the music in rehearsals a few weeks ago and it’s spine-tinglingly good. There are only a very few tickets left for the premier in Cheltenham, but tickets are now on sale for the following venues up until Oxford, with tickets for the the later shows to go on sales shortly; follow the links below for information and tickets:

I’ll be going to the Cheltenham, London and Canterbury shows – see you there if you’re going!

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I’ve been cutting and glueing paper collages this morning, starting to put some ideas down that have been evolving while I’ve been working on Hansel and Gretel. Collage has been a real friend to me in the last couple of years. While I’ve been juggling a busy ‘day-job’ to make a living, time in the studio has sometimes been very limited and with collage you can quickly get something down, move things around, try out compositions and generally have a play about. The last month has been hectic as I’m coming up to finishing a work contract with a local authority. It’s been a dash to get as much as possible finished and ready to hand over. So, with the first bit of time to do something in a while this weekend, it’s out with the scissors and glue. The collage above is on a circular panel which I thought i’d try out – not sure, lol – compositionally, it’s tricky!

With the scraps I made a little illustration of the witch’s cottage I designed for Hansel and Gretel, a model of which will be appearing on stage:

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My collage, though, is based more on sketches of the model by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, who has been working as visual director for the stage production. You can see his beautiful drawings and other terrific Hansel and Gretel images at his Instagram site here.

And finally, here’s my model of the cottage, and a Lebkuchen version I made for an animation sequence too. I’m all for experimenting with new media and now I can add  fake iced gingerbread to my toolkit 🙂

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Hansel and Gretel is coming!

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A first peek into the world of the new Hansel and Gretel stage adaptation touring soon –

 

The production is a dark reimagining of the traditional folk tale, premiering soon at the Cheltenham Music Festival on July 7th before touring the following venues:

  • Cheltenham Festival WORLD PREMIERE, 7th July
  • Lichfield Festival ‘book at bedtime’, Lichfield Guildhall, 13th July
  • Lichfield Festival matinee, Garrick Theatre, 14th July
  • Three Choirs Festival, Tomkins Theatre, 29th July
  • Oxford Contemporary Music, St Barnabas Church, 14th September
  • Jack Lyons Concert Hall, York, 3rd October
  • Barbican Milton Court Concert Hall LONDON PREMIERE, 12th October
  • Canterbury Festival,  Colyer-Fergusson Concert Hall ,21st October
  • Bath Spa University, Michael Tippett Centre,  24th October
  • Letchworth, Broadway Theatre,  4th November
  • Cambridge Music Festival, 24th November 2018

I’ve made table top models for the production, as well as images and animations to be projected onto a screen on stage, working with an extraordinary bunch of creative talents. Here’s a link to the Goldfield Ensemble webpage with details of everyone involved.

 

It’s been a tremendous pleasure and the resulting performances will be magical; come and experience it if you can!