Family Sunday Fun at the Phoenix

Hello! We are The Story Exchange, and its lovely to see so many excited faces. And I believe you're here to hear some spooky story telling? Great. Well, you've come to the right place, because stories are what we do best. Now, Freddie, do you have the story? No? Oh.........



Luckily for us, our audience turned out to be story telling experts (wish they'd have told us THAT sooner) and together we penned (and performed) a terrifying tale of kind witches, nasty witches, enchanted trees and bubbling cauldrons. Our story began in a spooky house on the stroke of midnight, complete with necessary rustling trees and hooting owls, and our friendly any-kind-of-witch is hard at work, brewing potions.


Nearby, however, a coven of ghastly nasty witches (with fantastically scary faces) are also hard at work, brewing evil potions that can turn people to ice. All ends happily though, with the help of a magical moving tree, some beautiful flowers and a very convincing cauldron, and the nasty witches become really rather friendly, just in time.

This was the barrows first outing to the Phoenix, and we had a wonderful time, and hope to return in the near future! Thank you to all our expert story makers, monster artists and wish bird owners, and to our lovely back row of enthusiastic adults who offered up some marvellous sound effects.


Next stop for Belinda the Barrow and the Exchange staff- Ruth and Dan's wedding!

All photographs by Chris Jones, www.chrisjonesdop.com

Fail. Fail Again. Fail Better

an uplifting picture of a leaf

Fail. Fail again. Fail Better. This was the title of our Kaleider lunch time talk, borrowed from Mr Samuel Beckett, and setting the theme of the hour. At first glance, it sets a rather sombre tone. In the context of looking back at our years' work, it could suggest that we have achieved..well... very little and that we are feeling a little blue about Theatre Rush. But, no. We used today's opportunity to take an honest and challenging look at the way we've done things in the past, allowing us to take stock of the present, and more importantly perhaps, to look forward to the untold possibilities that the future might hold. We have been through a time of transition. At times, we have been slogging through against the rain, with soggy trousers (nothing worse), but we have found ourselves starting out on a spring morning, with a little mist starting to lift, and it all looks rather nice out there. (The full version of this analogy, featuring a wagon and a horse, can be obtained from Miss Chloe Whipple's wonderful brain. Maybe buy her a peppermint tea with a spoonful of honey, and she can tell you all about it.)

a slightly less inspiring, but none-the-less apt, diagram

Now Chloe and I are not natural public speakers. Despite our willingness, nay, enthusiasm, to get up on stage and say and do all manner of things, we find the prospect of speaking, lecturing, speech-making rather terrifying. So, early in our preparation for today, we decided that THAT is what we're about. We can't hide that. Like the absurd honesty that delighted some of our audience members in FLUSHED, we agreed that the only way to give an honest appraisal of ourselves and our work is to discuss our vulnerability, to declare how awkward we feel, as quite self deprecating human beings, with the mantle of any kind of 'expert' and to face head on that niggling brain worm that drills into our grey matter with the very helpful doubt, 'why would anyone be interested in what YOU have to say?'

a mushroom= hidden depths & connections

So we used the tools we use in our work, and began the session by asking everyone to write a compliment to someone else in the room on a slip of paper. There were no strangers, but there were people we knew well, and others less so. We encouraged people to write something specific to someone of the latter. And after the 'talk', we played a game of consequences and generated some bizarre tales and a lot of laughter. (You can always tell a good game of consequences, when people make THEMSELVES laugh with their own ideas). We like to do this. No, we love to do this, and on a very basic, simple level, it is right at the heart of the work we have made, and that which we dream of making next.

We were blessed with a wonderful group of kind and like minded individuals today, sandwiches in hand, who allowed us to blush and bluster our way through, and there was a lot of blushing. On a complete tangent, if anyone can explain to me the genetic point of blushing I would really appreciate it. And at the end of it, despite the theme of failure, and the deep exploration of the things that hadn't quite worked over the past year, we left the Kaleider office today with a spring in our step and a sense of stomach tingling optimism.

We are so very excited about all the opportunities that this year could hold. Already things that we have grafted for, and that have seemed burdensome and onerous, are starting to open up and we find ourselves surrounded by choices. In sharing with others our enthusiasm, our love for making people happy, the joyful interruptions we have created, we have started to rekindle that passion in ourselves. So thank you Kaleider, for giving us the platform to speak and to listen and to question, and to come out feeling like we CAN do it. And we will.