Category: ClowningPage 1 of 2
I’ve been writing this week about when is and isn’t a good time to optimise. And also about the way a street theatre clown uses feedback to keep…
In street theatre, the clown lives for the audience. I’m not talking here about the stereotype of the kids’ entertainment performer, but of the much older sort of…
I heard this line in a BBC audio adaptation of King Lear for kids. “If I’m the fool, then what does that make you?” It struck a chord….
The daily traffic jam on my local high street has inspired me to think about a way to turn a traffic jam into an opportunity to a way…
Inspired by Tom Lehrer’s The Elements, I wrote the Structural Elements Song to be an itinerary to an educational world tour of structural form. Like The Elements, it…
Today engineers completed work on a major new irrigation channel to bring drinking water to a major new coastal development on Sand Bay, near Weston-Super-Mare. The 60-metre-long new…
So many things that I am working on at the moment lead me to the conclusion that there is power in the gaps. But I feel like for…
Last night I attended the panel discussion of the excellent Clowns in Crisis conference, hosted by the Online Clown Academy, hosted by. Here are some things I took…
The fault I find in our journalism is it forces us to engage with some fresh triviality every day whereas only three or four books give us anything…
Boring post alert. Sometimes you need to be boring to be creative. This is a really boring post about something I find myself doing lots and lots: setting…
It wasn’t what I was expecting but volume 5 of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time ends on a cliff-hanger. It is incredible how such separate threads from…
I sit in my current preferred cafe bolthole and the jacket of the person opposite me catches my eye. It’s a slightly faded turquoise, not unlike a jacket…
I’ve realised that quietly, in the back of my mind I am waiting. It hasn’t happened yet, so I just have to wait a bit longer. I am…
Yesterday I was feeling particularly sad about the loss of live music during lockdown and the stories of musicians who just don’t have any work at the moment….
Yesterday my daughter and I left the house and flipped a coin. Heads for left, tails for right. Right it was, then left, then left again, et cetera….
30 minutes of uninterrupted dawn chorus Hazel Hill Wood, recorded at the end of March. Hazel Hill is woodland nature reserve and education centre helping frontline staff develop…
Yesterday our household returned home from an imaginary holiday. Despite being in lockdown, we realised that we could imagine going on a trip anywhere in the world. Our…
Across all the of the projects I’m involved with we are working out what can go ahead and what must be postponed. A significant factor in whether to…
I spend most of my time designing creativity training for engineers. In this episode we flip the format. Alexie Sommer, Independent Design and Communication Director and collaborator on…
Readers of this blog will know I started a project a couple of years ago to write a book called ‘Analogue Skills‘, a re-examination of the pre-screen skills…
My Dad and I talk about chords. How would you get from one key in a piece of music to another? To onlookers, it might seem as though…
My daughter is now seven. I have been trying to remember what being seven was like for me. Memories start to become more frequent around this time. Some…
This afternoon I headed to We The Curious with my daughter for a summer holiday treat. The highlight was the giant sheet of bubble you can make there…
For my birthday this week my partner Mary gave me Alistair Humphreys’s inspirational book ‘Microadventures’. According to Humphreys, a microadventure is an adventure that is short, simple, local,…
I just read this great paragraph on the debilitating impact of false modesty on judgement.
Graphic designer Jack Bardwell and I used to be colleagues at the Useful Simple Trust, he bringing alive the many wacky ideas I have had about how to…
Journalist and author John-Paul Flintoff is this person who inspired me to start this podcast. He talks passionately about how to get people started on their creative projects…
Bristol Swing Festival is unique among swing dancing festivals because it offers the chance to learn circus skills alongside learning to dance. One of the things that I love about…
Ever since I was a kid my Dad has been sharing musical composition strategies with me, so I think music has been a lens thorugh which I’ve thought…
This is the second workshop I have run in the ‘Everyday Creativity for…’ series, this time for blues dancers in the London blues scene. A huge thank you…