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Arts Festival 2010 – ‘Storytelling’

The 2010 Charterhouse Arts Festival was held on Friday 5th March. This year the theme was ‘Storytelling’. The ability or need to make sense of all aspects of life through narrative is a key feature of human existence, and pupils have been set the challenge of responding to this most fundamental cultural traits.

The Arts Festival celebrates Carthusian creativity across the arts, with a wide variety of visual works (painting, drawing, sculpture, animation, mixed media etc), music (classical to drum ‘n’ bass) and an anthology of themed writing, with live readings and performances.

The Musical Programme and examples of works exhibited at 'Storytelling' are available using the links below:

In keeping with the storytelling theme, we were delighted to welcome professional storyteller Ben Haggarty to the School to perform the epic of Gilgamesh to pupils.

 

 Programme for 'Storytelling' included:
  • A continuously looped screening of stop-frame animation Einsamkeit by Raphael Leon (H) – stills from which have been on posters and invitations around school – on large screen, accompanied by one of the supreme examples of unified musical/dramatic/literary storytelling, Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde
  • Exhibition of visual art by Pupils and Beaks
  • Recordings of compositions of film score & other music by:
    Alexander McLean (R), William Mallin (W) and Xavier Hetherington (G)
  • Recording of Schubert’s Erlkönig (The Erlking) to illustrate a text on musical storytelling by Head of Academic Music, Russell Millard
  • Winners of the Literary Prizes and commended entries will read from their work:
    Prize, Under School: ‘There is an Endless Plain’, Robert Harding (H)
    Commended, Specialists: ‘What is and what might have been’, Naomi Bentley (B)
    Commended, Specialists: ‘Jumpsuit’, Samuel Shepherd (H)
    Prize, Specialists: ‘The Rise and Fall of the Human Chest’, Robin Cowie (G)
  • Performances of songs set by students:
    Jonathan Pacey (V):  When all thoughts are exhausted (Pacey – voice, MNS – piano)
    Hugh Parsons (G): Birthday Tango (Parsons – violin, Edge – piano)
    Natalie Krzywkowska (G): Land of forgotten dreams (Alice Jones (S) – voice, Krzywkowska – piano)
    Callum Edge (S):  I so liked spring last year (Pacey – voice, Edge – piano) 
  • Gownboys band ‘Coach-House’ perform their own composition, ‘Twisted Ideals’:
    Oscar Bashall - lead guitar/vocals; Jake Tempest- guitar; Will Matthews – drums; Ed Roberts - bass guitar

 

We are creatures of story. Every aspect of our identity is contextualised within many different and yet entwined narratives (real, embellished, fabricated, illusionary).
Think of your life and you think of the story of your life: how you came to be you.
Think of your family and you think of your family’s story: how your parents met, what their parents did, where you came from…

Think of your town, your school, your country (or countries – and in the plural is a story in itself), you language(s) – all have stories, and those stories not only define them but they are malleable, and open to continual reinterpretation. The past is almost literally alive in the transmission of remembered events, words, emotions…

If there is one thing that I hope our week of hosting storyteller Ben Haggarty has given us, it is a sharpened and widened awareness of the extent to which story has been central to our creation of human culture in its widest sense.

‘One thing’? This itself is not entirely true: the deeply engaging and entertaining nature of story, drawn from the deep wells of human experience, is also something that we have been exposed to this week. If you have not had fun with it, in a sense it hasn’t worked (in stories the best tale-tellers are tricksters too).

Those who attended the performance of Gilgamesh will hopefully have discovered that the oldest recorded human narrative can also been the most entertaining when recreated at the hands of a skilled teller; and this is something worth knowing.

Mr Haggarty has been telling us throughout this week to examine the ways in which we automatically and all the time are moulding and shaping our experiences into story: in our communications with others, in our own heads, in our perception of the past as it recedes from the present and our futures as they loom towards the present.

Understand the stories around you, and you can start to shape them.

   

Artwork by pupil, Raphael Leon (Hodgesonites)