The Front Page

Eight familiar faces, and a village still growing

There is something lovely about seeing our eight First Threads characters together. After years of making, researching and imagining, their arrival from our partner, Hawkey Studios, put familiar faces to the village we had been building in our minds. At last, someone could interrupt Jules in person.

Each year, our village needs a shared goal we can gather around: purchasing a full cast of characters from the studio. For First Threads, welcoming those first eight was an important beginning. Bringing together the complete cast of 24 is every bit as important, because it will change where and how we can practice.

With enough puppets, students will be able to take one home and spend time getting acquainted between gatherings. We can then arrange online practices, with characters meeting across kitchen tables and living rooms instead of waiting for everyone to reach the same studio. A little scene could become part of an ordinary evening.

While we work toward that, there is plenty to explore with our own hands temporarily unoccupied. A character has a voice, a history, opinions and habits. How do they answer a difficult question? What makes them laugh? What are they certain about that everyone else finds slightly puzzling? Learning those things is puppetry work, too.

Over time, we want to know a character so well that we can choose to become them. The puppet gives that person a visible body; our preparation gives them something to say. The new biography cards in this week’s Study Box are a way to begin that acquaintance.

Our big ask: help Festivus travel

The First Annual All Puppet Festivus is our invitation to the wider region, and this is where we need everyone’s help. Please spread the word across Vancouver Island: to puppeteers, theatre friends, arts groups, college programmes and anyone who might enjoy an afternoon in decidedly unusual company. A personal invitation from you can reach someone who would never find us on their own.

There will be an Airing of Grievances and Feats of Strength, with room for puppets of all persuasions. Surely someone out there has a small companion with a large complaint. Help us find them.

And someone to record the occasion

Among those introductions, keep an eye out for our Master Bard/Engineer—the person who would rather find the shot than wear the puppet. We have equipment, a simple green-screen studio and a cast with very little camera shyness. A connection at Camosun or UVic, or a friend who enjoys filming, could help us share what happens here with people much farther away.

Around the Village

Good company for a walk

A book can come along while we take a walk, fold the laundry or settle into a chair with no particular ambition to get out of it. That is part of the appeal of building some of our village learning around Audible: study can find a place in the day we actually have.

For some of us, hearing a voice opens up material that feels heavy on a printed page. Others like to keep the text or a notebook nearby. We can slow the narration, mark a passage and listen again when something catches our attention. Nobody needs to absorb the entire book on the first trip through it.

Our Learning with Audible guide introduces three companions for the journey: Stephen R. Covey’s work on habits, The Japanese Art of Reiki by Bronwen Logan and Frans Stiene, and Anthony Jacquin’s Alter Your Experience. Choose the one that belongs to what you are learning now, and give yourself time to try what it offers.

Then bring a little of it back to the village. “I heard something interesting” is a perfectly good beginning to a conversation. So is “I tried this and got nowhere.” Someone else may have found a different way in, and the discussion over a cup of tea may be where the lesson finally makes itself at home.

Around Manzer Commons

The students are helping us ask better questions

The study of Manzer Commons is underway with Sahhara, Trixie and Sneha, our University of Toronto planning student team. Following our meeting, they have set out the work for a Planning Due Diligence Report.

They are examining the land-use policies that apply to the property, heritage and environmental considerations, and the surrounding developments, community facilities and services. From that foundation, they will identify possible next steps and planning questions. Their report is expected during the week of December 1, with a meeting to walk through what they find.

For those catching up, the intention behind Manzer Commons is an enduring neighbourhood community and resource centre, including a home for our puppetry work and a healing place. The students’ contribution helps us move from that intention toward a clearer understanding of what the site can support and what decisions lie ahead. There is plenty still to work out, and it is good to have thoughtful company doing it.

Your Two Cents · Jules at the café

The morning when everything was different

Some mornings we wake knowing the world we went to sleep in has shifted. With B.C.’s October 24 provincial election, that feeling may be close at hand, though neighbours will have very different hopes and worries.

Jules has a question that reaches beyond the ballot box. What was your morning? A move, a loss, a new person in your life, an opportunity you hadn’t expected? You need only share what feels right.

Then there is the other kind of turning point: the day you did something that changed the direction of your life. Perhaps it looked very small at the time. What did you do—and what became possible afterwards?

Bring your two cents to Freyja’s Café. Listening to the answer matters as much as asking.

A Moment of Practice

Two doorways into practice

Whatever we are studying, we bring more than an intellect to the lesson. Attention, imagination, sensation and habit come with us. Learning becomes interesting when we begin to notice how those parts of ourselves take part.

Anthony Jacquin’s approach to self-hypnosis invites experiment through self-enquiry, breathwork and guided exercises. It offers a contemporary language for exploring experience: try something, notice what happens and become more familiar with your own responses.

The art of Japanese Reiki offers a traditional path, with the Gokai and daily practice providing a form we return to. We do not have to invent the whole journey each morning. Repetition gives us an opportunity to discover something within a familiar action.

I sometimes think of Anthony as teaching in a kimono of a different colour. The traditions have their own histories and explanations, but I recognise a familiar invitation in both: bring your whole self to the learning. You may find one doorway easier to enter just now.

This week, choose a short practice from the path you are following. Give it your attention, then leave a little quiet afterwards. What did you actually notice? Bring that observation to your next conversation with a fellow learner.

The Study Box

All ready—and what do we say?

The space is set up. The puppets are ready. We look at one another, waiting for a scene to begin, and discover that a surprising amount of silence fits into a room full of possibilities.

Our new biography cards belong to a growing range of resources for that moment. They give us somewhere to start: a life to draw on, relationships to explore and reasons for a character to care about what happens next. We can begin speaking from inside their experience while we are still learning their ways.

Try an ordinary question. What was breakfast like at their house? Who would they call for help? Let the biography guide the answer, then listen to what another character says. A small exchange can tell us more than a long stretch of trying to invent a whole performance at once.

The updated lessons support that exploration. Voice Found, for example, offers listening references and exercises for developing a comfortable character voice. Chōsa Study carries the Craft and Troupe work; Hōshi Service follows its own path of contributing to our shared programme.

Keep the monthly releases together, with September separate from October, as the character, skit, business and prop collections grow. Use the cards for recall as well as conversation: learn the meaning, practice the wording and work toward reciting the set text verbatim. What we know well is there when we need it, leaving us freer to enjoy the person on the other end of the scene.

A Little Play

A word hiding in the café

Jules has written five words on a napkin. Find one word that can go before every one to make a familiar word or phrase:

DROP · COAT · FALL · BOW · CHECK

No rearranging the letters, and no borrowing a different answer for each. You may, however, refill your cup.

From the Troupe Guide

Something steady to stand on

After waking up each day for more than seventy years, I have a healthy respect for the difference between what we expect and what the morning brings. Some days unfold quietly; others bring news that rearranges everything before we have finished breakfast. Either way, we find ourselves deciding where to begin.

I think about self-reliance in much the same way. It is the steadiness that lets us look around, take stock and find a useful thing to do when events have rearranged the day. Sometimes we can manage that ourselves; sometimes the sensible first move is to call someone who knows more than we do. Being able to ask is part of being capable.

Covey’s circles of Concern and Influence help me keep my bearings here. There is a great deal in the wider world that matters to me, and a smaller part of it that I can affect. When I spend the whole morning circling the news, the things within reach may get no attention at all. Yet a conversation with a neighbour, a letter to a representative or a promise kept can move something, even when I cannot see very far ahead.

That is where our village comes into the picture. On my own, I can prepare a lesson or make an invitation. With other people, that work can become a rehearsal, an event or a place where someone discovers an ability they did not know they had. Our influence grows through the relationships we tend, while our centre stays in the choices and commitments we can actually make.

So when everything seems to be changing, I come back to something quite ordinary: what is mine to do today, and who might I do it with? There may be time for a cup of tea before we begin. The world is unlikely to have sorted itself out while the kettle boils, but we may be a little more ready to meet it.

— ChrŸs, Troupe Guide