Transition Culture

An Evolving Exploration into the Head, Heart and Hands of Energy Descent

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I no longer blog on this site. You can now find me, my general blogs, and the work I am doing researching my forthcoming book on imagination, on my new blog.


21 Jan 2009

Saturday’s Transition Tales/Wondermentalist Cabaret Podcast Now Available!

We had a fantastic day on Saturday with the first Transition Tales and Wondermentalist creative day, held here in Totnes.  Wondermentalist is a local poets/performers collective, who do monthly cabarets in Totnes, which are quite wonderful.  Matt Harvey, one of its founders, can be seen today, on BBC South West at 7.30pm, doing a piece about Transition for a programme called ‘Inside Out’.  For those of you outside the South West (or within the South West but with no telly, or who are in the South West and do have a telly but who have an important appointment at 7.30), it will be available on the i-Player.  I’ll let you know, and we’ll try and get it onto YouTube as soon as we can.  Anyway, back to the workshop, which was fantastic…

During the day a group of 30 or so gathered and spent 4 hours writing material for the evening.  The theme was Totnes in 2030, and we started with writing our hopes and fears, and then writing a piece inspired by the idea of being in 2030 and trying to explain to someone who had no experience of now what it was actually like.  Then we took newspaper headlines from this week’s Totnes Times and made up stories in 2030 based on them, as well as coming up with Offered and Wanted ads for the small ads column.

The last activity was to write a ‘Day in the Life’ from 2030, from someone waking up in that time. The diversity of output was fascinating, and some powerful stuff was created.  It was something that really galvanised people.  It generated a lot of great material for the Totnes and District Energy Descent Plan.  Here is the one that I wrote which I rather liked, which was in response to the ‘A Day in the Life’ exercise.

“It’s hard to leave this bed, all snug and spooned with you,

The one we’ve shared for 40 years and I hope for 40 more.

But there are hens to feed and peas to week and comfrey brew to make,

And canes to raise for beans to climb about 4 weeks from now.

I really must leap from this bed, the sun’s now shining bright.

There’s work to do, it’s market day, that chard won’t sell itself.

There’s bikes to mend, and there’s our friend, the one who needs a hand,

And Paul next door borrowed my saw, and you know how he forgets.

It’s hard to leave this bed today, even with so much to do

But the world outside can wait today, I’m snug, and spooned with you”.

Later that evening, at the Barrel House, we held (well, I say we, my wife had gone down spectacularly with Totnes Tummy, so I had to stay at home) a Wondermentalist/Transition cabaret, without Matt Harvey (who had similarly come down with something unpleasant), but ably hosted by Liv Torc and Beryl the Feral (see left).  You can hear the podcast of the evening by clicking on the embedded podcast below..

…or the cabaret divided into parts here.  It is well worth a listen, it was a great evening with some brilliant material.  It is being typed up at the moment, and some of it will appear in the Totnes EDAP.  You can also read Carl Munson’s account of the day here.

Many thanks to Matt, to Ros and Liv for so ably covering for Matt, to everyone who participated, to Jacqi for the photos of the evening Cabaret, to the Barrelhouse and to Carl for creating the podcasts.