Artistic Director Rebecca Mordan is looking ahead to a Christmas with a difference…
I sat down to put together our upcoming Salon de la Vie special recently and realised just how much lovely work we’ve collated or commissioned over the years around Christmas. Happy revelation! This probably reflects my own insane enjoyment of the season – you get presents, you give presents, you eat food, you share food, you drink, you are drunk, you drink more! Of course, this can lead to what I have come to think of as the Fire Triangle of Festival Family Fallouts where the combo of expectation, emotion and alcohol can very quickly flare into raging flash fires…but you know, worth it!
But it also reflects the ability of the writers, musicians and artists who make up the world of the Scaries to invent, invert, innovate and inspire around what should be well trodden if not even somewhat hackneyed ground.
Christmas lights, and in fact modern tech and electricity themselves, are reimagined in radically human and tender glory by Anna Maria Murphy and LH Trevail in some of the stories they wrote for our Mousehole storytelling walks (I know I say this every year but I promise when we can all get out of this and be together again we WILL run these again). And I don’t know if it’s a Cornish or a Scaries thing (probably a bit of both) but we love to big up the old folk of Cornish myth and folklore – noone who hears about Maggie Figgie and her piggy or Garfield Jackson’s Mermaid by writers TJ Holmes and Pauline Shepard will forget these pipe-smoking, wise-cracking, arse-kicking seasonal, seasoned favourites.
But what would celebration be without each other? We don’t, at the point of writing this, know exactly what lies ahead for any of us and what company will be possible, but Team Scary have spent 2020 overcoming our (my) digital phobias and wrestling with long distance performance, live streaming, recorded and live footage combo events and we swear by every festival deity from Cailleach Bheur to Bona Dea we will bring us all together somehow for a night of stories and songs, merriment and misrule!
Here are a few things we’ve got up our faux fur-lined sleeve
A Festive (J)Uke Box (me and the ukealady) which will do its best to play your requests on the night (song sheets will be supplied in the run up to the event so you can chose what you want and join in).
A hilarious new look at carols with the Hyrrs Not Hymns!
Tech tricks that will allow you to feed directly into the fun while you watch inc live chat and an online message board so we can take your requests and as host I’ll be trialling for the first time a piece of costume that you can influence from your homes…!
Your Sparkly Seasonal Selfies and yes, there will be a prize if you can beat me in the glitter stakes!
So line up your treats, warm that grog and hang up those stockings – we plan to fill them with a night of scary little high-jinks because we’ve all been bleddy great this weird, bad year and it’s time to get naughty and nice!
The Salon will be on the 16th December – find out more here!
