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NOTE<\/strong>: This post is to introduce you to the 50th episode of Fran\u00e7ois Matarasso\u2019s and my monthly podcast, \u201cA Culture of Possibility.\u201d It will be available starting 21 March 2025. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher<\/a>, iTunes<\/a>, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net<\/a>\u2018s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud<\/a> and find links to accompany the podcasts. <\/em><\/p>\n The second issue of The Miaaw Review<\/em> will be out soon. The first edition included an essay by me and shorter pieces by Owen Kelly and Fran\u00e7ois Matarasso. You have to subscribe to receive it. It\u2019s free, you won\u2019t be spammed, nor will your email be shared with anyone. Just enter your email here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n On Episode 49, we looked at the future of this podcast<\/strong>. One of our ideas was to talk about books and other resources that could be very useful to listeners. For Episode 50, we plunged right in, focusing on a 1983 book called Engineers of the Imagination: The Welfare State Handbook<\/em>, focusing on the work of an extraordinary English theater group of performers, visual artists, and many others skilled in conceiving and executing spectacular events in community settings. Welfare State<\/a> had wide influence; in the podcast, you\u2019ll hear how I came to learn of the group in California and how Fran\u00e7ois became and admirer and then a friend of cofounders John Fox and Sue Gill. We grew more and more enthusiastic as the episode wore on, and ended it by dedicating it to John.<\/p>\n That recording happened a couple of weeks ago<\/strong>. On March 11th, we learned that John had passed away. Fran\u00e7ois recorded a new introduction, saying \u201cShortly after we recorded it, I heard that John had died. He had been open with his family and friends about his terminal illness, writing a last book of characteristic humour, courage and poetry. John had been pleased to hear we were going to talk about Welfare State and I wish he could have heard this conversation. He was a dear friend and will be missed by many, many people. John Fox\u2019s radical creative spirit will continue to inspire us in the years to come. He did some good in this world and we are all the better for it.\u201d<\/p>\n Let\u2019s start with Fran\u00e7ois\u2019s description:<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cWelfare State was a theater company founded in Yorkshire in 1968 by John Fox and Sue Gill and several other people. Sue and John grew up in Hull, a city on the east coast of Yorkshire, and were childhood sweethearts and have lived their whole life together in creative and personal happiness, I would say. In the 1960s they\u2019d both been to art college and had set up the company, establishing themselves in several caravans on a municipal refuse tip (i.e., trailers in a dump site) in Burnley in Lancashire. From those perhaps inauspicious beginnings they created a company that became the most influential and perhaps the most original arts company of the last third of the 20th century in the UK, initially doing a lot of outdoor performance work, street theater, but going on to do very large-scale, festival type events where they would use structures, fireworks, bonfires, giant puppets, music, theater performance. <\/p>\n \u201cAt its height, they did an event called Parliament in Flames<\/em> in 1981 in South London. That was a kind of turning point. They felt that with an audience of 15,000, they had gotten as big as they they wanted to be. They made a decision then to move back to the northwest of England. They based themselves in a town called Baycliff in South Cumbria. They then became a very rooted company, and the second half of their of the company\u2019s existence, from the mid 80s until it was wound up in 2006, was very much in that part of rural northwest England. <\/p>\n \u201cTheir work was very influential and had a big impact on many people\u2019s thinking. I first encountered them when I was working as a community artist on a council housing estate in Nottinghamshire in the English Midlands. I\u2019d been working there since the end of 1982, and in 1983 this book came out called Engineers of the Imagination<\/em>, and I got a copy. It said, this is a workshop manual. Break its spine, bend its pages, draw on it. It\u2019s not a book to put in your library and keep pristine. And I have to say, as somebody who does not normally break the spines of his books, I did do that. My copy got very tatty, and I don\u2019t know where it\u2019s gone. I\u2019ve now got a copy of the second edition, which came out in 1990. From it, I got a huge range of ideas, The Welfare State Handbook opened up possibilities of doing fire shows, making giant puppets, doing spectacle. Over the next three years, we did three fire shows and several other outdoor events, and had a whale of a time. One of my favorite memories was doing a version of Shakespeare\u2019s Tempest<\/em>, which, of course, used none of Shakespeare\u2019s text. We did it in the Methodist church hall, and we took the audience on board, we shipwrecked them, we brought them onto a desert island, and then we served a three-course meal, which was entirely cribbed out of the combination of theater and food and ritual that I\u2019d been reading about in the Welfare State Handbook. It was a joyous gift to people like me.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m trying to keeping this blog from being too long because I really want you to listen to the episode in full<\/strong>. You can buy the book in lots of places. Check Bookfinder.com<\/a> for many used copies. Here\u2019s Fran\u00e7ois describing the book: <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s edited by Tony Coult and Baz Kershaw. Tony Coult was a playwright, Baz Kershaw a design engineer, and both them edited the book together, but there are contributions from maybe a dozen different people involved with Welfare State, and they range in style and and tone. For instance, there\u2019s a long interview with John Fox, who talks about the company and its commissioning process and so on. There are other text pieces talking about music, food, street and outdoor performance, and so on. There are descriptions of some of the big events. But the core of the book is hand-drawn by different Welfare State artists, and it\u2019s called Core Techniques. It tells you how to do shadow puppets, how to make a fire show, how to set off fireworks safely and legally, how to make lanterns, fixed structures, costumes, ceremonial food, and so on. <\/p>\n \u201cI love that these are very practical and they\u2019re all different because they\u2019re all done by different artists. It\u2019s the voices of different people approaching their subject in their own way. For me, that\u2019s one of the most important aspects of the book. There is no one hero figure. There is no one visionary artist who is celebrated here. The collective spirit is one thing that I think is really important. And for me it\u2019s part of why this was called community arts in the first place, the sense of being a community, creating community, and working with a community, was intrinsic to that sense of of shared creativity. The other thing that I think is is central to the book and to its importance is generosity, this wish to share ideas, to say this is how we do it. You can copy this, or you can take it and adapt it. They even put at the back lists of suppliers.\u201d<\/p>\n Tune in to hear<\/strong> about how I learned about them in California in the 70s, how they transcended categories that are usually compartmentalized, such as art, spirituality, political awareness, political action and relationship, the respect they embodied for the people and places with which they worked, and the deep wisdom the book offers on building relationship with audience members. One thing that greatly impressed me is how they planned meticulously, seriously, and at length, and were nevertheless open to whatever emerged in the moment, to being in dialogue with everyone involved. Fran\u00e7ois and I touch on deeply embedded vernacular traditions of theater, music, and movement that underpinned this work emerging from a radical experimental spirit in the 60s, and how a deep commitment to risk drove the work. <\/p>\n We ended the episode by wondering aloud if\u2014for very different and far less positive reasons than in the 60s\u2014these may turn out to also be catalytic times when some of what Welfare State offered, even down to using found materials and doing things as inexpensively as possible, may once again spur creativity. <\/p>\n \u201cIron Man<\/a>,\u201d taken from the 1978 album Welfare State<\/em>. <\/p>\n