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 is a night-time procession for street, town & festival sites. From the forests of the night and the sinews of the heart comes a scrapyard menagerie of illuminated beasts & creatures accompanied by musical towers, performers, lights, & pyrotechnics. Forged in the wild places of the human imagination, Burning Bright combines high intensity animation of beasts & puppets; live music and sound and dazzling, atmospheric pyrotechnics. This is a bestiary that roars out from the page and onto the streets in a constellation of energy and delight.

Contact Us for more detail, pricing and tech specs.

Tatterdemalion Grove is a world to wander in day and night, a wasteland garden of kinetic sculptures and animated detritus, for green or empty spaces, festival sites, abandoned car parks and urban wastelands. The installation features the Umbrella Tree, an absurd mechanical contraption of motor driven umbrellas and the Hurly Burly, a mobile sound sculpture, sonic amusement and junkyard delirium.

Inside the grove we will be a menagerie of small synthesizer and sound making devices; a collaboration with Farmer Glitch, creator of bespoke hand held electronic instruments. These will be hanging from carousels & structures and with both portable & static speakers we will create an ever changing live soundtrack & audio playground. The Grove will involve workshop and interactive elements, for example culminating in a noisy Wassail and communal performance every evening.

Contact us for more details, pricing & tech specs.

Skimmity is a processional delirium of wild music, mobile towers & sound sculptures, pyrotechnics and performers. Drawing on traditions of noise in ritual and celebration, free jazz, street music and sound art, Skimmity brings a right riotous racket to your streets.

“Strange noises fill the air: the skronk of the saxophone, the thunderous funk of percussion, the parping of horns, hooting of sirens, clanging of bells and wafting columns of coloured smoke announce the arrival of Skimmity…”

Contact Us for more detail, pricing and tech specs.

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

The Ghost Horn from Rag and Bone on Vimeo.

We’ve recently posted some newly found footage of one of our favourite shows from the last few years onto Vimeo. The Ghost Horn was a watery lament and processsion held in 2 locations in Taunton and Bridgewater in 2012. We think it has further potential and we’re keen to re-invigorate and revive it for other locations – canals, rivers, marinas and lakes.

The final bow

MintFest was the final outing for Bone Yard Tales this year. Now the Bone Yard must creak and groan its own dusty lullaby, fold into itself like a hibernating clock and settle into it’s barn for a Winter of rusty snoring, musty  autumnal dreams and occasional scrapyard flatulence.

A hearty thank you to everybody involved – without you all it would not be possible.

We have our own specially unqualified Quack Doctor who will be checking up on the sleeping BoneYard during the winter months and will let us know when the first stirrings and rumblings start in the Spring.

Horns of Fire, our musical fire garden collaboration with Pa-Boom  is available and taking bookings for this Autumn and Winter. It was first commissioned for the Huddersfield Festival of Light in December 2012.

The installation lasts for up to 5 hours, and can be configured in many different permutations to suit different locations and events. Musically it also comes with several different options:

• PA and pre-recorded soundtrack with DJ/sound engineer (samples of the sound of the fire itself a speciality!)
• Lone minstrel wandering the flickering pathways, playing reeds and sax.
• 3-piece brass and percussion ensemble
• Large (7 piece+) brass, reed and percussion band
• Any combination of the above…

Contact us for further information and booking details.