Well, another year and February has it’s cold damp filaments lurking around your extremities, the Accountants of Gloom are clattering away at their spreadsheets, there is a surplus of Grey and even the windows look like they want to pack up and go home early. The instinct to hibernate inside the Boneyard is strong; curl up under a pile of old rags and nestle in to the rusty treasure, pull a bin lid onto your head and style it out like a sleeping Clanger. While we’re here we’ll tidy up the Boneyard a little, throw out the rotting unidentified bits and buff up the precious things. You never know, if we save up enough old screws and nuts and bolts for the Iron Chicken, she might lay an egg for us in the Spring…

Below: Design for a Machine to Ward Off the Accountants of Gloom

Burning Bright – An Illuminated Bestiary
We are looking for partners and co-conspirators to help develop new work for processional performance. Burning Bright: an Illuminated Bestiary; is one such idea.
We envisage this project as ranging from small to large scale work:

• An intimate, touring show inside the mouth of a Leviathan: with live soundtrack and music, puppets, video and illuminations. Watch as the Ghost Zoo is born from the Belly of The Beast and join in a mini parade of animated detritus, as it emerges from the Leviathan’s nether regions…
• A grand street delirium summoning giants, creatures and beasts from the edges of science and the wild lands of the imagination… From the forests of the night and the sinews of the heart is forged a totemic menagerie: A Paleolithic Whale-Ark of Shadows; The Mudskipper Chorus; The Bioluminescent Ghost of an Elk; The Last Industrial Tyger in Britain; The Owl Carousel; A Constellation of Deep Sea Horns; and others yet unknown…

We want to engage directly, viscerally and generously with audiences, and have ideas we would like to research & explore around: high intensity animation and performance of beasts, puppets and devices; mobile sound sources and generation; LED, electro-luminescent and other low voltage lighting; integrating fire, pyrotechnics and special effects into parades and much more.

“it is vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves…it is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive in us, that inspires that dream” Henry Thoreau
 

“One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea monsters and mighty plants live in the bed rock of our spirits” Ben Okri

Welcome to the Isle of Noise: Tim Hill’s ongoing investigations into the history of noise, celebration, protest and outdoor music making.

Having finally clawed and crawled our way out of Hibernation in the Boneyard, we’re unleashing a raft of fantastic new business ventures on the unsuspecting year.
We’re starting off with our new  Dental and Oral Hygiene service for Processional Beasts, Giants and Creatures (see below)

Coming soon:

* Bespoke Ark design, build and consultancy services – with a special emphasis on the locating, saving and safe keeping of mythical creatures

*Bonsai Fireshows – in an Age of Austerity, miniature is the new Big

*Bone-Heads – a new concept in hats

We’re in the midst of creating our new show, the Without Walls comission Bone Yard Tales – here’s a sneaky peak into the chaos of the build. In order to create the ‘Bone Yard’ we’ve had to indulge all our latent scrap collecting, hoarding and scavenging tendencies, and let loose our inner Wombles. Here’s the evidence…

Bone Yard Tales tower the first

Piles of Stuff awaiting transformation…

More piles of Stuff in the Rag n Bone workshop

and yet more Stuff…