Tag: british museum

i scream for 11p lemonade sparkles

3 Comments

ice cream van
The irony about ice cream vans when we were kids is that they really kept us healthy. Sure they offered us Rocket ice lollies and Funny Foots and 99s with a Flake, but we got our exercise in running after them. We would hear the jingling of the bells (thinking about it now I can still taste vanilla on a humid July afternoon), and there would be a dash about the house, what do you want? Quick! Quick! followed by the mad scramble outside along with the other kids on the block, only to see the ice cream van which leave the bushy corner of Kirton Walk and head down towards Colchester Road. You knew it had a stop about halfway up there, so you ran and ran and ran, until you got a stitch and could barely breathe let alone order an 11p lemonade Sparkle. More often than not, we’d make it, and come away happy (and well exercised). It was an achievement, something Kids Today surely don’t understand, they probably download their ice lollies from the internet or something.

This one wasn’t going anywhere. It was parked outside the British Museum. It has a very happy face, doesn’t it? I think they should still make people run a couple of blocks before they allow them to buy anything though. It’s all part of the experience. We did also do a little sketching in the British Museum Great Court, which I hadn’t visited in years. I’d like to spend some more time in there sketching, really do a big one of the roof and go through all the great exhibits, but alas I live so far away these days. It’s such a great place to visit, and completely free to enter.

  
british museum great hall

its sculptor well those passions read

Leave a comment

25, british museum

#25 of 30. Nearly there folks! Yes this is lego. Baby-lego. Since my son got them, I have regained my incredible lego building skills. I’m not an architect, but I am certainly a legotect, and can build any manner of planes, trains and space-rockets with the stuff.

The British Museum…Yes, I did a bit of Interactive Theatre years ago, I was really into it, running some performance-and-games-based workshops, using the methods of Ali Campbell, the brilliant guy who taught me, and Augusto Boal, the brilliant guy who taught him (and father of the art). It’s something I was good at, but never did get back into. Anyhow, the Hidden Histories project was a major eye-opener; a series of workshops with inspirational performers from Shape Arts, a disability arts organisation in London, culminating in an abstract promenade performance among the statues, ruins and spectators of the Greek rooms in the British Museum. We were told (and it might even be true) that it was one of the first (if not the first) time the British Museum had been used to host performance art. It was themed around the histories that are hidden not only in the statues and stones, but also in the people you pass every day, able-bodied and disabled. One thing I learnt was that a lot of the people we were calling disabled were a great deal more able in so many ways than most able-bodied people.  I was involved with a few other projects with the Shape performers but this one was the most educational, and most fun.

As did the others, I kept a journal to document the process – not full of the sort of drawings I do now, but cartoony diagrammy stuff, notes, quotes, scribbles, quibbles. The journals were in fact displayed at the British Museum on the days of the performances, down in the education centre. I even made little plasticine figures to represent one segment of the performance. I recall, in the wine reception after the main show (and the press were there), a woman was browsing the journals and was spending a lot of time looking at my one, and she asked me (not knowing it was mine) how old the children were that made these. “Well that child was twenty-five,” I said. I was elated.