Now we've washed the mud off...

Well that was our first ever Larmer Tree Festival and what a stonker it was!

Thank you so much to everyone who came, munched, mused and shared Chocolate Stories with us last Friday and Saturday. It was a real pleasure to spend an hour away from the mud discussing our historical love affair with chocolate with some very game Larmer Tree festival goers!

We'll update with pictures soon and for those of you who took part in Chocolate Stories we'd love to hear your feedback so please do drop us a line.

We were lucky enough to hear some brilliant new chocolate stories to add to our ever growing repertoire; my personal favourites include finding out I'm not the only person to become homicidal with rage when people put the empty After Eight wrappers back in the box and learning that rodents of many species like chocolate - honestly chocolate really is the gift that keeps giving.

Bye for now!
Bea & Anna

Larmer Tree

The sun is (briefly) shining and Anna and I are happily packing up our Chocolate Plant and heading to the fabulous Larmer Tree Festival. 


In a new bespoke performance we'll be setting up our very own production line in the heart of the countryside and delving into some of the tastiest chocolate stories we've collected on our travels.


We'll be in the Theatre and Film tent:


Friday 13th July: 11 am - 11.45 am
&
Saturday 14th July: 3.30 pm - 4.15 pm


So if you're Larmer-ing this weekend then please do come along and join The Plant!

 Chocolate Stories presented by Harvest Films

Join us on the production line at this unique storytelling event led by professional heritage theatre artists Anna Farthing and Bea Roberts. You’ll be packing chocolates by hand, talking, tasting, sharing and sampling from the tempting selection box of Chocolate Stories past and present, personal and public, historic and hidden. Where did it come from and how has it shaped our tastes, our waistlines and the face of global trade? 

Happy Easter from Anna and Bea!

What a cracking start (sorry) to the easter weekend and a great first day of the Bristol Chocolate Festival! 


M Shed was packed with Easter egg doodling, some vintage films, sniffables, edibles and some wannabe Fry's Angels (see gallery below for our top picks!) A huge thanks must go to all the fantastic M Shed volunteers and to all at Frenchay Village Museum. Alan and his team bought along some egg-ceptional (sorry) treasures from the incredible Frenchay archives including vintage Fry's games, beautiful reproductions of the Easter egg catalogues from the 1930s and their wonderful replica of one of the oldest chocolate bars in existence - a block of Fry's chocolate from 1851. To see the real thing and for all things Fry then we couldn't recommend a visit to Frenchay Village Museum or a scroll through their online archives more highly and if all that chocolate history has piqued your interest as well as your taste buds than grab a copy of Alan's brilliant book. 





Whilst there were was stalls and music and the Easter bunny cycling about Bea was leading the Egg-strodinary Stories Walking Tour, through forgotten alleyways and Georgian streets we had a great day sharing some chocolate and chocolate history. Again, special thanks must go to Anne Colley and her husband Jack for joining us on the first walk; it's been a real treat to share the fantastic story of Anne's famous cousin, Elsie Griffin for which we have Anne to thank and a particular pleasure to blast out a bit of opera around the dank industrial streets of the Pithay! If you missed the tours today there are still spaces on the walks tomorrow at 11am and 2pm departing from the ticket office at No.1 the Harbourside, tours last approximately one hour, £5 adults, £3 for children, free for Fry's Angels! 


If you'd like to find out about booking your very own Chocolate Walk, have any bits of chocolate history you'd like to share or would like to send your thoughts about our Easter activities then please do email us.


Happy Easter everyone! 

Bristol; The Chocolate City

Come and see us over Easter at M Shed. 

We will be running some family friendly activities in the M Shed studio for Love Local Events and The Chocolate Festival. 

Share your favourite chocolaty thoughts, recipes, imaginings and memories, get messy with art and craft, see the development process from bean to bar, handle the raw materials, and watch fascinating archive film from the Bristol Records Office. We will also be offering a guided walk and talk around some of Bristol city centre’s chocolate related sites. 

Easter weekend, 7^th & 8^th April, M Shed. Bristol

http://mshed.org/

To see what else is happening at The Chocolate Festival

http://www.festivalchocolate.co.uk/festivals/bristol/whats-on/

Update on the creative development work.

Tobacco Factory, Prototype 

On Sunday 4th March we presented 15 minutes of material as part of the Tobacco Factory Theatre’s Prototype programme. Following previous feedback from audiences at Exeter Bikeshed and the international Challenging Histories conference (see below) we decided to focus on the emotional content of the piece.

The extracts we tested were quite deliberately a collage of styles. They included a ‘brand awareness’ game, verbatim text from interviews, life moments featuring chocolate from christenings to funerals, a micro media documentary, a song, and some physical/visual theatre.

Jack Price of Studiofilm filmed us rehearsing for his blog, Act Bristol, and asked us what it was all about. You can watch the film here.

http://studiofilm.co.uk/actbristol/2012/03/the-choclate-plant-protoype/

You can listen to the song, a Polish lullaby, here

http://katykaty.wrzuta.pl/audio/8SVm00xQF8g/

Is Chocolate a Challenging History?

On 25^th February we presented some work in progress to an international audience of over a hundred academics and heritage professionals attending The Challenging Histories Conference at The Tower of London.

We asked for feedback. Here are the questions, and just some of the many interesting responses.

What elements of the story speak to you?

I really enjoyed it moving backward and forward between small scale and large analysis. Paying attention to the value of chocolate – normally something you would ignore.

I found a parallel between Cadbury’s in UK and Bata in pre WW2 Czechoslovakia. Very concerned about the increasing contradiction between the global village on the one hand, and the lack of human relationships on the other

Good to see female industrial heritage and personal stories. Community and company relationships resonated with me, from personal experience. 

What is your most vivid chocolate memory or experience?

Waiting for real/really good West German chocolate being sent to us (by friends) in East Germany….

Chocolate Letters in Netherlands connected to Zwarte Piet (Epiphany).. Chocolate as a love food. Bed food.  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Imaginative.  Ypres Battlefield tour with tourists that were only interested in buying chocolate

I remember photographs of my childhood covered in messy chocolate (but not the experience of it).  Opening Kinder Eggs with the toy!  Multi-layered Mum’s Chocolate Cake.

Thinking of Bridget Jones. Hearing from Grandfather about getting Fry’s chocolate and amazement of experience.  At a wedding with a chocolate fountain and grumpy ‘chocolate officer’. At Maison du Chocolat in Paris having a chocolate drink with spices – amazing.  

When I was a child I remember jellies in chocolate and I hated them. We always had them for Christmas. Also the Kinder Egg, we asked the shop assistant to weigh them so we could buy the heavy ones!  I remember I loved (larder?) bars, and when my parents were buying if for me, I was hiding them under my bed so my sister couldn’t find me

Draw your impression of what you see in our work. 

Really revealing! We’ll add the doodles to the blog when we have scanned them. 

"These are the boxes that single ladies get and the married ones dream of" 

Sweets for the Sweet narration, 1934

Yes our choco research has led us down a glorious British Pathé route which we thought was too wonderful to keep to ourselves. Now that the archives have all been digitised, anyone is free to search  Pathé and dig out some treats! I warn you though, subsequent link clicking may lead to spending several hours watching old adverts and giggling...

Sweets for the Sweet, 1934. A glimpse into the early Somerdale plant featuring some wonderful narration; "modern wrapping machines are amazingly clever; they handle the chocolate bars as dextrously as a conjuror and as gently as a woman"

http://www.britishpathe.com/video/sweets-for-the-sweet-1/query/chocolate 

And since we're nearing Easter a rare treat from 1931, Those Easter Eggs, showcasing the handmade decoration of Easter eggs which were invented in Bristol don't you know.

http://www.britishpathe.com/video/those-easter-eggs/query/chocolate

"Now there are scenes of the greatest activity!" It's all go in the Nigerian Cocoa Trade in this busy little film from 1949.

http://www.britishpathe.com/video/nigerian-cocoa-aka-nigerian-cocoa-trade

Enjoy!

Well things are steaming ahead with The Chocolate Plant after a brief hiatus for Christmas and Bea's play, And Then Come The Nightjars at the Bristol Old Vic (more details on her blog)

We're kicking off 2012 with our own session on the bill of the International Challenging History Conference on the 25th February, a  It's a great line up and we're looking forward to bringing chocolate to the discussion (perhaps literally but definitely metaphorically) and seeing what comes out.

The next stop after that will be a work in progress showing at the wonderful Tobacco Factory's Prototype season on March 4th. We'll see if we can get a flavour of all this chocolate research into our 15 minutes but I must admit, the more you delve the more fantastically rich detail emerges.

We are also delighted to be welcoming a new addition to our team, Beshley Bwye Turner. Currently studying for an MA in musicology at the University of Bristol, Beshley is a specialist in West Country music and has kindly volunteered her services in helping us dig out some authentic music for the show. I can't wait to see or rather hear what she retrieves from the archives.

Talk of which neatly brings us on to a very special mention; you may have read in the news that Elsie Griffin was commemorated with a blue plaque at St. Michael's On The Mount Primary School where she was a student in the early 1900s. If the name is unfamiliar you are sure to recognise her as "the voice of World War One"; Elsie was a Fry's Angel, an ordinary Bristolian factory girl who became an international opera singer and one of the greatest stars of her day. The beautiful soprano who made "Danny Boy" and "The Roses of Picardy" world famous is finally being recognised in her home city, not least due to the efforts of her cousin, Anne Colley, who has been kind enough to get in touch and tell us all about her family's remarkable story.

See, I told you there were fascinating stories in chocolate.

Scratched!

The Chocolate Plant received its first proper public outing as part of a Scratch Night performance at Exeter Bikeshed Theatre on Sunday 27th November 2011.

On a clear and starry night, Anna and Bea headed down the M5 to present some work in progress to an audience of Devonian strangers, people who would not be too close or kind to tell us what they really thought, and people who were not immediately connected to what had been going on in Bristol over the last two hundred odd years. As well as getting feedback on which direction to take, we wanted to test how the show would go down if it toured.

An audience of over a hundred people, aged from 15 to 80, squeezed into the theatre bar to view and comment upon four pieces of work in progress. We were third on the bill, and offered a 20 minute multi-media stand up presentation with an overview of some of the content that we are working on. We were clear that we were not demonstrating the form of our show (which will be a much more theatrical drama documentary, performed by actors, with music and media) but that we needed help grappling with the story.

We asked for feedback addressing these questions: What resonates with you? Which bits of the story should we focus on?

We got many useful suggestions from those who came up to speak to us. We were happily surprised by the range of ideas it sparked for people and it gave us an excuse to crack open a tin of Roses, well, it is nearly Christmas.   


Below are some of the comments from the feedback forms.

Very interesting and a real eye opener – as it was meant to be 

A really nice mix of humour and passion. 

It was great. You are great. Do more. It really sparked a debate.

You could hear the audience recognising the contemporary relevance. Those bursts of oohs and aaghs, and the occasional gasp.

I found the break up of families and the social histories the most interesting part. Hostile takeovers of profitable companies are so damaging. This story needs to be told.

Consumers should be more informed, and can then dictate. Why is it cheap? Where does it come from? These connections matter.

It made me start thinking about the riots, about youth unemployment, about the loss of those family companies. It’s scary.

If you can bring something like that to the stage, that’s fantastic

Having just been made redundant after 39 years I felt for these workers.

Unexpected and quite brilliant. Provided no end of thinking about riots, banks, care, the camps.

Really interesting – fantastic delivery Very well developed – I look forward to seeing the next version. Do bring it back.

We hope that these comments, and conversations with those who have asked to stay in touch, will support our creative development. 

Thanks to the Exeter Bikeshed Theatre for hosting us, and for providing such a varied and dynamic audience.


Now if only we could find a way to do the research without eating too much chocolate...