Jamie Crawford at Newhaven, December 2011
'No one Ive seen surpasses June's warmth of manner and eclectic imagination, qualities she manifested to consummate degree in the premiere of a new show that collages traditional and personal story in moving and extraordinary ways.
We begin with a moment of Proustian clarity when, emerging from Westbourne Park Underground Station, June hears someone dropping their handbag and the sound takes her back into a realm of buried childhood memories, memories that segue into a funny and touching account of learning to reconnect, through knitting, singing and CBeebies, with a mother suffering from dementia.
These first episodes flag up the show’s main theme of remembrance in all its bitter-sweetness. We follow June on a storytelling tour of South America that culminates in the Mexican Day of the Dead and its own peculiar deity, La Santa Muerte. Her encounter with a culture so different from our own opens up a way of dealing with bereavement In the process, June offers us some beautiful stories of loss and retrieval from Mexico, Africa, Germany and Britain.
I particularly enjoyed a little-known Huitchol tale of a girl, who having forgotten to include her dead grandfather’s beloved flute among his grave goods, sets off with it in search of the other world – a joyful story with fascinating parallels to other land-of-the- dead myths from Old World cultures.
Indeed there is nothing mournful in this delightful, reflective show. June engaged us with ease and humour, played some exuberant fiddle and added further colour through the many and varied props that accompanied her. To my eye, these objects served a double function. As well as illustrating the ways in which significant memories can be physically recorded (as in the symbols carved into the eponymous Welsh lovespoons) they seemed to be pnemonics for June herself, reminding her of what to tell us next (an adaptation of a classical rhetorical technique for remembering th aprts of a long speech by mentalluy associating each part of the speech with a visualized object in an imaginary house). As someone who knows first-hand how much harder a medley of personal and traditional stories can be to recall aright than even a very long single story, I was interested to see this kind of mapping put into practice.
As for the extensive audience participation, originally deployed on bored Spanish speaking school children and now applied to English adults, well, I sat there thinking : this is so wrong and yet so right!'
We begin with a moment of Proustian clarity when, emerging from Westbourne Park Underground Station, June hears someone dropping their handbag and the sound takes her back into a realm of buried childhood memories, memories that segue into a funny and touching account of learning to reconnect, through knitting, singing and CBeebies, with a mother suffering from dementia.
These first episodes flag up the show’s main theme of remembrance in all its bitter-sweetness. We follow June on a storytelling tour of South America that culminates in the Mexican Day of the Dead and its own peculiar deity, La Santa Muerte. Her encounter with a culture so different from our own opens up a way of dealing with bereavement In the process, June offers us some beautiful stories of loss and retrieval from Mexico, Africa, Germany and Britain.
I particularly enjoyed a little-known Huitchol tale of a girl, who having forgotten to include her dead grandfather’s beloved flute among his grave goods, sets off with it in search of the other world – a joyful story with fascinating parallels to other land-of-the- dead myths from Old World cultures.
Indeed there is nothing mournful in this delightful, reflective show. June engaged us with ease and humour, played some exuberant fiddle and added further colour through the many and varied props that accompanied her. To my eye, these objects served a double function. As well as illustrating the ways in which significant memories can be physically recorded (as in the symbols carved into the eponymous Welsh lovespoons) they seemed to be pnemonics for June herself, reminding her of what to tell us next (an adaptation of a classical rhetorical technique for remembering th aprts of a long speech by mentalluy associating each part of the speech with a visualized object in an imaginary house). As someone who knows first-hand how much harder a medley of personal and traditional stories can be to recall aright than even a very long single story, I was interested to see this kind of mapping put into practice.
As for the extensive audience participation, originally deployed on bored Spanish speaking school children and now applied to English adults, well, I sat there thinking : this is so wrong and yet so right!'