small is ... real
Tinkin' inside and outside da box
GreenBean spent the best part of today with his head up a girl's skirt.
Helping out Small World Theatre with their contribution to the Cardigan River and food festival has become a more or less annual fixture. The festival takes advantage of the town's best asset.. the river. Somewhat neglected as a resource in post industrial times, the teifi estuary has been one of this island nation's busiest ports, shipping out grain, slate, new world migrants and being mid-wales's maritime link to bristol and liverpool. These days the quayside is crumbling or a supermarket carpark, the mill's a visitor centre or potential luxury apartments.The coal yard had a breif run at being a community arts workshop but now its begging for the land value to rise so it can be turned into a culturally functional space.
The festival itself is a post-industrial or even post-agricultural event. An august holiday focus it's timing juggled with the eistedfordd, cilgerran fair and the tide being high in the middle of the day so festival hoppers turn up and it all looks pretty. All the diversified farmers and food producers are invited along to sell their organic lamb burgers, bara brith, buffalo-milk ice cream, rare breed flesh, pastry pies and of course olives in brine and fresh (locally) ground coffee. Cambrian organics cleared up 4 years ago with their organic lamb burger, finally filling a market void, but his year i lost count of how many stalls griddling up patties. Tell me, is it true that organic wild-boar-cross burgers will fall apart without 3% rice flour? At least its gluten free. There was more than 3% flavour missing, i was dissapointed. Taste of Wales bring it all together with a flashy cardiff chef making haute pate and the like. I loved the biligual serving suggestions... 'av (sic) it either on biscedi or fresh localbread (sic). A beautiful yet not even vaguely appetising combination of oldspeak and newspeak.
euro-Welsh food culture is not doing it for me. I think my family and freinds think i have no appetite because there is no spagetti or something, they are wrong, you can keep all that salt for as long as you like. Mum got it yesterday when she said "are you staying here for bangers and mash this evening?" and i melted. I love the fact that granny's new blueberry jam is so good, that the last jar has been hidden, rationed. Beer is at its best to think when home brewed by an expatriate german. and it almost makes me weep for subversive joy that after a year of working to facilitate cultural capital on healthy eating with community theatre, my pupeteering freinds celebrate the performance with... chocolate bars and a cup of tea.
And thats the most wonderful thing about cardigan's festival. The river and the food are pretty artificial notions, sit round a table and thats what you'd come up with. The beauty is the way the the community is using the space to build cultural capital. It's the dead-pan tomo on the P.A., the lifeboat showing off its kit, the cancer research plastic duck race, the wierd guy grinding his organ. It's not cohesive, its wierd, and my little corner is with small world.
working in a small way in the big world is their speciality, they take a message and play with it in the commmunity thats trying to talk to itself. Reforestation in Sudan, Aids awareness in Uganda, telling voters what an election is in new democracies, refugee and migrant mediation in South Wales. They take an artificial, funded, campaigned, buzzed message and make it real by making it a game, acting it out... a moment of life in the suspended and astonishing disbeleif of community theatre. Stretched far and wide, in demand for their skills, Bill Hamblet and Ann Shrosbury are working close to home too.
Helping out Small World Theatre with their contribution to the Cardigan River and food festival has become a more or less annual fixture. The festival takes advantage of the town's best asset.. the river. Somewhat neglected as a resource in post industrial times, the teifi estuary has been one of this island nation's busiest ports, shipping out grain, slate, new world migrants and being mid-wales's maritime link to bristol and liverpool. These days the quayside is crumbling or a supermarket carpark, the mill's a visitor centre or potential luxury apartments.The coal yard had a breif run at being a community arts workshop but now its begging for the land value to rise so it can be turned into a culturally functional space.
The festival itself is a post-industrial or even post-agricultural event. An august holiday focus it's timing juggled with the eistedfordd, cilgerran fair and the tide being high in the middle of the day so festival hoppers turn up and it all looks pretty. All the diversified farmers and food producers are invited along to sell their organic lamb burgers, bara brith, buffalo-milk ice cream, rare breed flesh, pastry pies and of course olives in brine and fresh (locally) ground coffee. Cambrian organics cleared up 4 years ago with their organic lamb burger, finally filling a market void, but his year i lost count of how many stalls griddling up patties. Tell me, is it true that organic wild-boar-cross burgers will fall apart without 3% rice flour? At least its gluten free. There was more than 3% flavour missing, i was dissapointed. Taste of Wales bring it all together with a flashy cardiff chef making haute pate and the like. I loved the biligual serving suggestions... 'av (sic) it either on biscedi or fresh localbread (sic). A beautiful yet not even vaguely appetising combination of oldspeak and newspeak.
euro-Welsh food culture is not doing it for me. I think my family and freinds think i have no appetite because there is no spagetti or something, they are wrong, you can keep all that salt for as long as you like. Mum got it yesterday when she said "are you staying here for bangers and mash this evening?" and i melted. I love the fact that granny's new blueberry jam is so good, that the last jar has been hidden, rationed. Beer is at its best to think when home brewed by an expatriate german. and it almost makes me weep for subversive joy that after a year of working to facilitate cultural capital on healthy eating with community theatre, my pupeteering freinds celebrate the performance with... chocolate bars and a cup of tea.
And thats the most wonderful thing about cardigan's festival. The river and the food are pretty artificial notions, sit round a table and thats what you'd come up with. The beauty is the way the the community is using the space to build cultural capital. It's the dead-pan tomo on the P.A., the lifeboat showing off its kit, the cancer research plastic duck race, the wierd guy grinding his organ. It's not cohesive, its wierd, and my little corner is with small world.
working in a small way in the big world is their speciality, they take a message and play with it in the commmunity thats trying to talk to itself. Reforestation in Sudan, Aids awareness in Uganda, telling voters what an election is in new democracies, refugee and migrant mediation in South Wales. They take an artificial, funded, campaigned, buzzed message and make it real by making it a game, acting it out... a moment of life in the suspended and astonishing disbeleif of community theatre. Stretched far and wide, in demand for their skills, Bill Hamblet and Ann Shrosbury are working close to home too.
They've been working on the Ridgeway project for more than a couple of years now. Greenbeen was impressed that food and it's issues are being incorporated into the project programme. This years theme for the pageant performance was healthy eating. The centre peice giant, 12ft tall puppets were a big fat ugly couch potato guy slouched in a chair, adorned with yucky teeth, bits of pizza, cans of beer, a cokroach or two and a tv remote control. His counterpart was a clear skinned beauty, jaunting down the street waving her blond hair, off to the gym with her sports bag and i-pod (loaded with greenbean, himself under her skirt holding her up and gb radio on the ipod!). The kids and families that took part had built a whole load of imaginative, colourful and appetising individual costumes... from fresh strawberries, hats as plates of fried eggs, burgers... a chicken with real feathers... some super outfits. So we all danced off round the festival until we came to the judges. They ummed and ahhed until all the bad food went and danced around him, while sporty girl boogied on with an entourage of healthy food.
green bean
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