Barking Spider and Heide Gallery
Barking Spider Visual Theatre has been creating many and varied hybrid theatre-art workshops and events for Heide Gallery over 2011.
Most recently, we custom-made the event entertainment around celebration themes “Art, Architecture & Landscape”, for Heide 30th Birthday Celebration Weekend which took place in November 13th, 2011.
We created the “Biggest Birthday Card”. Entry to Heide and all three Galleries was free and over 2000 people came along to enjoy the day. Pictured are Barking Spider Visual Theatre artists, Dan Goronszy, Penelope Bartlau & Sayraphim Lothian dressed in 1950′s-style frocks. The artists facilitated the communal creation of the Heide Birthday Card, and all the chatter, play and socializing around it.
- The enormous card was created on a large roll of kraft paper, which was continuously rolling, with evolving and changing and transforming images created by everyone who wanted to have fun and give it a go. People could choose from a wide range of materials – crayons, conte, chalk, textas, oil pastels, ink pens etc with which to create. The Heide Birthday Card was a magnificent focus point at Heide that day. People – of all ages – came together to draw, create, chat and reflect.
- The giant card is to be kept as part of the Heide Collection.
Author and Artist Veronica Grow wrote a great review of the event. Here’s an excerpt:
“Yesterday I the pleasure to meet a person excellent at conversation. Her name isPenelope Bartlau, Artistic Director of Barking Spider Visual Theatre. I suppose her theatric training and skills do help! But Penelope certainly knew how to evoke conversation. How? First of all she made sure that she had something to talk about. In this situation, her and her colleagues were creating a huge mural at the entrance to Heide, to commemorate the 30th Birthday. I liked this idea, because the mural in itself was a conversation about the day, the place and the time. So the Mural gave Penelope something to talk about. So helpful tip number 1 for the art of conversation is that Its always a good idea to have something engaging to talk about! Penelope introduced the mural, and she was also a good listener, and put people at ease by listening attentively to them, and also by encouraging them to make art on the mural, despite their fears. She made everyone feel safe and comfortable, by paying attention to what they were making and educating them about the beauty of their mark making”
- Click HERE to read the full article.
