conversations with an elephant

8/14/2019 Conversations With an Elephant

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Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 1

Conversations with an Elephant

A report by Richard Ings which the charts the emerging themes and conversationsstarted at Lift's How many elephants does it take..? conference held at theSouth Bank Centre on Monday 8 May, 2006.

All photographs in this report were taken by Susana Paiva.


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IntroductionNot so much a Conference than a New Conversation

What is missing from the world is a sense of direction, because we areoverwhelmed by the conflicts which surround us, as though we are marchingthrough a jungle which never ends. I should like some of us to start conversations

to dispel that darkness, using them to create equality, to give ourselves courage, toopen ourselves to strangers, and most practically, to remake our working world, sothat we are no longer isolated by our jargon or our professional boredom.- Theodore Zeldin's idea of the New Conversation, from Conversation: How TalkCan Change Your Life(1998), p. 97

The arts world is not short of talk. Not simply the talk of the so-called chattering classesdebating the merits of this play or that exhibition, but increasingly the professional talk ofarts practitioners and policy makers at conferences and seminars. Stick a pin anywherein the calendar and you will find people are gathering somewhere to talk about somethingto do with the arts. So, the event held by Lift, the London International Festival ofTheatre, on Monday 8 May, 2006, in a large room at the South Bank Centre was, on theface of it, yet another arts conference, attended by 150 people drawn from the creativeindustries, from funding bodies, from theatre companies and so on, and including artists

of various disciplines and persuasions. This time, however, there were some notabledifferences.

The theme, for a start. Instead of focusing on, for example, arts and social inclusion ordeveloping new audiences, this meeting set out with a curiously challenging title: Howmany elephants does it take..? The dots presumably stood in for 'to change to world' -or perhaps ' to change a light bulb', in the spirit of an ancient elephant joke. Either way,the purpose of this day was not to present papers or show films or otherwise educate thedelegates. It was held, in part, to celebrate and memorialise the remarkable goings on ofthe past weekend, when London and much else of the country was held in thrall by theunexpected appearance of a gigantic time-travelling elephant and a little (but twenty-foottall) girl from outer space, bang in the heart of the capital city.

More about this in Bringing The Sultan's Elephant to London page 4 >>

Angharad Wynne-Jones, Director of Lift, set the agenda for the day:

We're here to think about how the impossible becomes possible. I think theElephant and the Little Girl are impossible objects, yet they were moved to andthrough this city by the collective will, the extraordinary imagination and the sheerlogistical virtuosity of a group of people brought together because of thesemechanical puppets. But it is really in the response of the public that the eventlives, and will continue to change and charge our perceptions of our city and ofeach other.

For conference veterans particularly, the quality of this day of talking was unusual. First,rather than grappling with issues in the abstract or at second hand, every delegate

brought with them the material for the conversations which began almost immediatelyafter Angharad's welcome. We had all been there and done it and were wearing themetaphorical tee-shirt. The only 'experts' wheeled on during the morning were membersof the small and heroic team that had made The Sultan's Elephant project happen. Noone else had privileged information, for everyone had witnessed the wonders of theweekend and had their stories and reflections to share.

Caoimhe McAvinchy, curating the day on behalf of Lift, jettisoned the old conferenceroutines: keynote, plenary-with-panellists, Q&A and breakout sessions, followed by final,weary summing up and that last interjection from the floor, from the embittered delegate


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who always seems to be there at the end of such events. In place of all that, we weregiven some numbers that led us to one of many tables to meet with, most likely,strangers and were all given a set of navigating questions to talk about. Where did youexperience The Sultan's Elephant? What did you see? What did you hear? How did youfeel?

More about this in Reflections page 6 >>

Although many of us may not have realised it, we had been presented with a version ofthe famous menus for conversation that historian Theodore Zeldin hands out at his'conversation dinners'. As his own, unscripted talk, given in plenary that afternoon, madeclear, Theodore is passionate about talking - not for the sake of passing the time orimpressing the dinner party guests but to change our lives, no less. His pocket book onconversation contains the following memorable mini-manifesto:

The kind of conversation I am interested in is one which you start with awillingness to emerge a slightly different person.

In this instance, we had already been softened up to be slightly different people, thanksto our wordless encounters with an Elephant. As the day progressed, we moved from

reflections on what we had seen and heard and felt to f inding out just what had made thisweekend possible and what the implications might be for our future work in the city andbeyond. By now, our conversations had moved closer towards a place where, asTheodore puts it, we were using them 'to give ourselves courage, to open ourselves tostrangers, and most practically, to remake our working world.'

The arts world, as part of the working world, is riven with conflicts, and no one is quitesure whether there is a common direction we might be taking. Too often, as theatre criticMichael Billington in his now notorious Guardian blog, Elephantine Infantilism, haplesslydemonstrated, we are trapped in a particular way of thinking, in particular definitions - isthis theatre, anyone?- and in particular jargon. What The Sultan's Elephant achieved byproxy on this day of talking was the start of new conversations that might dispel thatparticular kind of darkness. One delegate, who described himself as a dance scientistand consultant from the North East, put it this way:

We are hoping that not only will artists possibly have been inspired to create workon a larger scale and have fantastic ideas, but that the people of London will goaway and approach their working problems and their personal lives in a differentway - and believe in the possibility that things can change.

The last task of the day for delegates was to go back to our tables to consider aloud twofinal questions: What impossible things should be possible? What needs to happen tomake them possible?Caoimhe urged us to follow in the wake of the Elephant, which hadleft 'a great big footprint on the cultural landscape of London', taking whatever tangentswe liked off that path. For only when we start imagining 'baby elephants', could they havea chance to grow and become real.

What will you yourselves be willing to do in your own lives, and your owncompany, and your own organisation? Tomorrow, what will you be willing to doyourselves, and what will you do with it? And how? That is what one needs to findout. And when we know that, there will be seedlings everywhere.- Theodore Zeldin's final words at the conference.

More about this in Can we do the impossible too? page 21 >>


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Chapter 1Bringing The Sultan's Elephant to London

Never doubt that a small group offorceful committed people canchange the world. Indeed it is theonly thing that ever has.- Winston Churchill, quoted bySarah Weir at the conference, Howmany elephants does it take..?

The story of the small group ofpeople who brought The Sultan'sElephant to London is a long andinspiring one, perhaps similar to the

Sultan's own trek through time andspace.

More about this in Reflections page 6 >>

Those that were able to attend the conference, How many elephants does it take..?included Helen Marriage and Nicky Webb of Artichoke Productions, who dreamed it all up.What follows is just a taste of how their adventure began.

Once upon a time, around twenty years ago, Helen first encountered the work of Royal deLuxe.

It's the best company I had ever seen. It is the most moving work that I've ever seen;it breaks down every barrier. And it always struck me as very weird that they were ableto travel to China, to Mali - where they lived for six months, to South America and allover continental Europe, yet their monumental work had never been seen here.

Some years later, she and Nicky took their children over to France to see the company'sshow, Les Chasseurs des Girafes (The Giraffe Hunters)

With Royal de Luxe, everything has to be authentic. That means that when you areworking with an elephant it travels at, if you are lucky, perhaps one and a halfkilometres an hour. But when you are working with giraffes, they travel at the speed oflight. The audience was pounding along to try and keep up with this giraffe, which was

as high as the Elephant. I had my daughter by the hand and she was being sort ofhorizontally towed by me - I dont think her feet were on the ground - and she lookedup and said, 'Mummy, I will give you all my pocket money if you can bring this toEngland.' (She is a very smart child - she knows about arts administration and therelation of pleasure to money!)

Five years ago, negotiations began to bring the Girafes over to England.

The process took such a long time that, by the time they had agreed to bring an eventto London, they had done that show five times so they decided that enough was


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enough. So, we had to invest in the co-production of a new show: The Sultan'sElephant. This was a celebration of the centenary of Jules Verne last year,commissioned and co-produced by the cities of Nantes, where Verne was born, andAmiens, where he died.

As the project took shape, Artichoke began to realise just what a financial risk they were

taking.

It is quite hard to convey how frightening this was. The costs of bringing the companyhere were huge: we have just had 102 French colleagues here for nearly a month. Youhave seen the scale of the performance, but the scale of what led up to it wasimmense. The elephant arrived in three pieces - three 'abnormal loads' - closing roadson its route from Dartford to Battersea. The head got lost. It took a wrong turning andwent under a bridge in Fulham and had to be retrieved. That set the schedule forassembly back, so the crane hire bill went up and so on. Some way further down theline, with our costs steadily rising, we agreed with the company that our contribution tothe actual creation of the work would not be needed but we remained part of theplanning process with the other partners.

For the project to stand a chance of succeeding here, local hearts and minds needed to bewon over. Numbers of key players, including John Gardner of TfL London Buses and Liftstaff, were ferried over to Nantes to see Royal de Luxe perform and then it was all underway,at last.

It's taken us five years to get this show together and 90 per cent of that time has beenspent persuading people that we should be allowed to do it. Before Nantes, the planwas essentially to go from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square. We had been offeredPiccadilly and that was a huge thing - to close Piccadilly. But, after Nantes, we all wentout to dinner, and I had the tough job of saying, 'OK guys, now youve seen the show,closing Piccadilly isn't enough. They need to explore. This show is a living thing andthey need to do what people who visit London do: they need to walk about andshuttling back and forth isn't the answer.' It was a very quiet dinner that Sunday night.

On the following Tuesday morning, I had a call from Trevor Jenner of the Met, whohad been at the dinner. 'You re talking to the Metropolitan Police,' he said. 'We're acan-do force, so give me your wish-list!' It was the best moment because I realised thatpeople like Trevor wanted this show to happen as much as I did. There are threethings needed to make something like this happen: faith, hope and love. For me, themost important of these is - and here I'll probably cry, as I have for most of theweekend! - love.

A postcriptThis visit was hugely important for Royal de Luxe, not least in practical terms, as there were

delegations visiting from other cities, including Tokyo, who were here to see how it waspossible to make something like this work in a city that is as complicated as this. But whatthe company really responded to was the people here. They said that, when they turned thecorner from Lower Regent Street into Pall Mall, the world was black with people. They hadnever seen an audience like this. It was everything they had ever dreamed of.

Almost everyone says, 'Why would anyone let you do that?' And of course theanswer, the only answer, is: 'Why not?' - Nicky Webb, Artichoke Productions


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Chapter 2: Reflections

The only choice you ever have to make is to decide to go and see it. There isnothing else to know.- Helen Marriage, Artichoke Productions and lead producer of The Sultan'sElephant

We felt the whole piece allowed all kinds of perspectives from the peoplewatching. Those who wanted to get close, those who wanted to get wet, those whodidn't want to get wet, those who wanted an ending, those who didn't care if it did.Those who watched the narratives on the balcony of the Elephant, and those whodidn't care to. We were aware that nobody could see the whole thing, and you hadto accept that this was the deal: you all saw a little bit - and we loved that feeling.

Independent theatre-maker Sue Mayo's summary of her conference conversation seemsan unconscious echo of that old joke about the elephant in the darkened room. Eachperson touches a portion of the animal and comes to a different conclusion as to its sizeand nature. No one guesses the whole picture. So, too, with trying to identify theenigmatic animal that was The Sultan's Elephant - not the mechanical mammoth itselfbut the whole project, and not just the single May weekend when people witnessed it but

the aftershocks first described on the following Monday's conference and that stillcontinue in our thoughts.

The How many elephants does it take..? conference could be seen, therefore, as asharing of impressions in a darkened room - the rain had, inevitably, set in that Monday -and perhaps as a first attempt to describe the whole enchilada. The initial navigationquestions set by Lift were: What did we see? What did we hear? What did we feel?

There were, of course, as many answers to these questions as there were people. Eachperson had had a unique encounter with The Sultan's Elephant. Yet, certain themesbegan to coalesce as we talked and as we remembered things seen, heard and felt overthe weekend. In going over all of this material again, I have tried to set down thosethemes and ideas that have most resonance now as we begin to take up the challenge

that this remarkable project has set us.So - what did we see, hear and feel?

We saw an Arrival O brave new world!on page 8 a Wonder Falling for an Elephanton page 9 and an Act of Theatre A sense of theatreon page 11

and we heard the Creation of Stories A crowd of storytellerson page 13 and Liberty trumpeted in the Streets The streets of Londononpage 15

and we felt Intimacy in the epic Crowd The epic and the intimateon page 17 and Sanity in the Madness The sanity causeon page 19

Each of us had had a unique encounter and each of us created our own version of TheSultan's Elephant. If I had to choose what was the most significant aspect of the projectfor me, it would be its sense of play and the way in which the Elephant and the Little Girlawakened the child in all of us. One observer who saw a theatre critic's claim that thisproject was not 'adult' enough, responded by quoting C.S. Lewis, author of TheChronicles of Narnia, Oxford Fellow and Cambridge Professor of Medieval andRenaissance Literature:


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When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I hadbeen found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a manI put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to bevery grown up.- On Writing for Children

From the sewing of cars to the road where they were parked to the sight of a giganticElephant peeing in full view of Buckingham Palace, this project was a child's undilutedtriumph over the adult order. It was the world turned upside down, like revolution orcarnival, but above all it was as if some amused god of the old school had grantedeveryone permission to let go and - play.

Only a few pooh-poohed the fun of it all. A blogger called ideaswoman suggests thatperhaps we should listen to these critics and their warnings about the 'brain-shrinkingperils of fun'. Then, she continues, we can all get on with the serious business of notenjoying our art, keeping the pavements free for charging crossly from A to B andstanding aside for London's smoothly-flowing traffic.

Indeed.


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O brave new world!

Noah wriggles through the crowd to the wire barrier. I keep one eye on him and the other onthe crane that is about to open up the rocket that has landed, mysteriously, smack into thetarmac of Waterloo Place. The odd jet of steam still percolates up from the impact of thenight before. Two large vehicles moved into the square a few minutes ago. One is a truckdoubling as a stage for a four-piece rock band that finally launches into a loud, stately,looping riff as the other, less orthodox vehicle approaches the rocket. Figures in - I think -eighteenth-century footman outfits of scarlet and gold are all over this odd-lookingcontraption, a kind of baroque, Heath Robinson precursor of the modern crane that is nowfinally raising the lid of the rocket. The music swells as some of the more daring andacrobatic figures climb down inside and attach ropes to whatever is down there. Finally, all isfixed and ready. As we hold our breath, the Little Girl slowly emerges. Once two assistantshave removed her leather flying helmet, her head swivels to take in the scene. She bats hereyelashes and shakes her hair loose. I am, not for the last time this weekend, unaccountablymoved.

Like much else of this extraordinary project, this particular event worked on a number of

levels. At one level, I was reminded of Miranda's famous lines from Shakespeare's play, TheTempest, when she encounters a large group of strangers for the first time in her life:

O wonder!How many goodly creatures are there here!How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,That has such people in't!

In the same way, this innocent arrival in our world offered us a trusting face, seeming to gazein wonder at our 'goodliness'. This resonated so strongly perhaps because, in a politicalculture infused with near-paranoia over illegal immigration and the threat of foreign-inspiredacts of terror, the immigrant is a particularly vulnerable figure. How do we make strangerswelcome here?

I believe that humanity is a family which has hardly met. One of the best ways it canmeet is for our traditions of family hospitality to be revived; that is where conversationswith strangers can first fully begin.- Theodore Zeldin, Conversation: How Talk Can Change Your Life(1998), p. 44

At another level, being there was like being present at a birth - again, this is the emergenceof innocence into a fallen world. Like expectant relatives we had waited and were finallyrewarded.

And at another level, it felt like a gift.


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Falling for an elephant

One Friday morning this year, a fantastic sight greeted Londoners. Hundreds gathered towatch and cheer, clicking cameras and using mobile phones; some brought their lunchalong; others spoke excitedly to television cameras that had also been drawn down towitness this invasion of the strange. According to the BBC, accountant Shameen Khan wason a shopping trip on New Bond Street when she got a call from a friend.' I was headingsomewhere else', she said, 'but then I thought: you just live your life. Youve got to go andsee that whale.'

Fanciful stories flew around the streets and into cafs and family sitting-rooms and evendrifted onto news desks until the calm voice of marine biologists silenced them with scientificfacts - explaining that, in fact, the appearance of a whale in our great, long-domesticatedriver on January 20 2006, though unusual, was no portent or sign of ice-caps melting and notan appeal for our intervention to 'save the whale' - or the world. But, still did allthose storiesvanish? All those dream-like connections with what the sea washed up here, in our capitalcity?London, of course, had the chance to see another Wonder this year, on the first (long)

weekend of May. Judith Knight of ArtsAdmin reported from her conversation about anelephant that:

People were struck by the wonder ofit. That's why they surrenderedthemselves, following the Elephantdown the streets. In Horse Guards'Parade, it looked magnificent, butwhen it was in places like Haymarket,the sheer scale of it against thosebuildings was completelyunexpected.

The Sultan's Elephant was veryunlikely to fool any kind of biologist orany onlooker over the age of three,with its impossible size and thevisibility of the levers and gears andthe people who operated them to

move the great mammal along, yet there was still a sense amongst many in the crowds ofbeing privileged to witness a unique naturalphenomenon and one which you would be a foolto miss. That slippage was expressed by both Erica Wyman, from Northern Stage inNewcastle, and Angela McSherry, freelance arts consultant, in reporting back theirconference conversations:

We were very struck by the strange nostalgia and romance of the Elephant. Someonesaid that it was as if it was an event that they didn't think they were going to be able tosee in their lifetimes - the sort of thing that doesn't happen anymore, where somethinghappens and everybodyhas to go and see it.- Erica Wyman

We just pondered on our sense of awe, and we wondered what it would be like to besomeone in the 19th century who saw an elephant for the very, very first time. And,hey, we know that feeling. We saw an elephant for the very first time; we had theprivilege of that feeling.


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- Angela McSherry

A substantial part of the magic of the weekend was the curious way in which two giantpuppets, openly manipulated by teams of people, not only appeared sentient but alsoseemed able to develop a personal, even tender relationship with crowds of strangers. Onedelegate recalled looking behind him to check that the Elephant was ok and only when he

turned back did he then realise how dafta thought that was. This instinctive concern wasbrilliantly illustrated by an anecdote retold by panellist Alan Jacobi, Production Manager forThe Sultan's Elephant:

Jeff Long from London Ambulance on Saturday night said to me, "Oh, youll neverguess what happened today. An 80-year old woman came in and she was rather tired.We started talking to her because she looked a bit distressed. When I asked her whatthe problem was, she explained that she had been chasing after the Elephant becauseshe had brought him some buns." And it was absolutely true - she had the bag of bunswith her.

This might seem an extreme example, but Elspeth McLaughlin, from NVA, an environmentalsite-specific company based in Glasgow, reported that:

People actually waited in the rain for two and a half hours watching a sleepingElephant, - as you do. And we all felt that sense of gratification when the Elephantfinally woke up. It was worth the wait.

The same kind of thing happened with the Little Girl, whose gamine charms many of ussuccumbed to. For Bill Gee, an independent producer, the fact that she was so innocentlyflirtatious made her 'very real' - indeed, 'the animation just kept it all very real for all of usover the three days.' Jocelyn Cunningham, of Creative Partnerships, was also moved to seehow even the police and security people seemed to consider the characters real, 'saying tothose that asked that - no, they didn't know where the Little Girl was'. Sue Mayo, a freelancetheatre maker, reporting back from her conversation, described how this illusion of life wasachieved partly through the attention to detail:

We saw people looking and marvelling at the Elephant's eyelashes. We saw one ofthe company just very gently pulling up one of the Girl's ankle socks. There was thatkind of detail. Set against the massiveness of the whole project, we thought that wasan incredible achievement.

Alan had another good anecdote that illustrated the way that people had willingly suspendedtheir disbelief and invested their own imagination in what they were seeing, just as a childmight:

On Thursday, when the rocket was discovered, just across the road at the bottom ofRegent Street there is a large private bank, and at lunch this chap came out who was

obviously one of the managers. Actually, the only thing that was missing was thebowler hat. And he was standing there, chatting away to people and was overheard tosay, 'I study space and that kind of thing in my spare time - it's a hobby of mine', andhe walked around the rocket and stroked it and said, 'Yes, I can verify its authenticity!'It's made out of French railway sleepers. 'Oh no, it isn't! It's a 1905 rocket that arrivedyesterday'.


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A sense of theatre

As we gathered near the stepsleading up into the NationalGallery, a single file ofdetermined older people wormedits way through the hard press ofonlookers in the direction of StMartin's-in-the-Field, ignoring thegrand sight of the Elephantholding court over TrafalgarSquares thickening crowds.Several seemed quite anxious athaving just been redirected awayfrom where the Elephant hadbeen cordoned off. One womanexplained, half-complainingly, tome: "We're tryingto get to the

theatre."

What relationship is there between The Sultan's Elephant, which was co-produced, after all,by the London International Festival of Theatre, and the West End? Both claim to be theatrebut, for many people, theatre is usually thought of as a very specific kind of activity in a veryspecific kind of place. As someone heavily involved in organising the Elephant project, AlanJacobi of (aptly named) Unusual Productions, found this problematic:

It's interesting that one of the difficulties I had - more than any other - was trying toexplain the context for what we were doing. As far as we were concerned, it was atheatre gig, but people didn't understand. They think that the theatre is four walls, a bitof black paint, some lighting, a bit of sound maybe, a bunch of actors in a confinedspace. They understand ceremonial events - military parades, commemorations and

all that - which happen in large spaces in central London, but this was the first timewhat I would call real theatre had been done in a wide open space.

Helen Marriage of Artichoke Productions, and lead producer in bringing The Sultan'sElephant over to London, was scathing about the failure in this country to place a value onwork which happens outdoors rather than 'in darkened rooms sitting next to strangers you'llnever see or speak to again.'

We have carnival, but we toleratecarnival. We don t celebrateit. We don t reallyinvest in it in the way it should be invested in, because it's free, because it doesn't fitwith a British sense of hierarchical values. And, for me, this is a huge tragedy, becausethis is the way in which one touches the most people - it's not just about 120 people

sitting in a black-box studio. The real power of this work is about being out there on thestreets and experiencing your world.

It was not just a handful of coach-party punters who failed to see that the Elephant and theLittle Girl were, indeed, a form of theatre. The Guardian's veteran theatre critic MichaelBillington's disenchanted view of the event, Elephantine infantilism, questioned whether 'thiskind of diversionary spectacle could really be classified as theatre'. As several of the manypeople who responded to Billington's Guardian blog pointed out, the only practical use thisurge to classify and box things up achieved seemed to be a conservative and somewhat self-serving one.


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To be fair, Billington was brave enough to declare what he believes theatre is: 'a public eventthat affects the mind and heart as well as the eyes, and which does something to change thehuman situation'. This definition is, interestingly not far off that made by conference speakerTheodore Zeldin of what makes significant conversation - talk that can change your life - andfew of the many critics of Billington's article took exception to it. What they did object to was

his failure, couched in the tone of a Grumpy Old Man, to recognise that this public event didindeed affect the mind and heart and, for many, did change 'the human situation', if onlytemporarily (one wonders how much theatre changes it permanently). Billington's principledstand against a 'spectacle' looked to many more like a form of snobbery and was rather sad,too, particularly in its denigration of the urge it inspired 'to become little children' (exactlywhat Picasso had argued artists should do).

Defining theatre is, in any case, a minority sport and probably doomed to inconclusiveness.Erica Wyman, from Northern Stage, summed up the majority opinion:

We were very struck by the fact that it was theatre and that it wasn't - and it didn'tmatter whether you thought it was or not.

However, Jane Ripley, a freelance carnival designer, reminded delegates of the dancers andactors that had cavorted endlessly around the Sultan's palace carried by the Elephant, andmade this further observation from her conference conversation:

We loved the fact that the Elephant was not only a performance, with the road as astage, but was a stage in itself. There were performances within performances.

So perhaps it was theatre, after all, and perhaps London's - or all the world's - a stage. As forthat coach party - perhaps not all of them remained oblivious of the Elephant in theirdarkened room. Someone calling themselves 'joyelephant' wrote this in reply to Billington'sblog:

Well, I had tickets for a matinee yesterday afternoon - for a play to which MichaelBillington gave 4/5 - and I didn't go. The Sultan's Elephant was so profoundlywonderful that I couldnt tear myself away.


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A crowd of storytellers

One of the more unusual aspects ofThe Sultan's Elephant was that

almost no one really knew about ituntil they saw it, unless they wereone of the thousands who turned upwhen someone who had seen ittexted or phoned them to 'just comeand see what they were seeing'.There was - deliberately, it turnedout - only a trickle of publicity beforethe weekend, though enough tocause a tremor of interest in themedia. When we stood watching theLittle Girl emerge from the rocket onFriday morning, the square was

only lightly crowded and it was nothard either to get close to the Elephant, still sleeping on Horse Guards' Parade before hisfirst perambulation. By Sunday, the final day of the project, there were - it is estimated - closeto a million people swarming over St James's Park and the streets around Piccadilly, tryingto get a glimpse of what had become a national phenomenon, featured in full colourthroughout the broadcast and print media.

Even then, though, there was still not much information about what was actually going onand what these extraordinary visitors were up to in our capital city. Most gathered the gist ofthe story - a time-travelling elephant owned by a Sultan searching for a mysterious little girl -and a few picked up the Elephant & Echo, a newspaper published for the event, which gavemore details of the project along with an insert of four editions of The Jules Verne(one foreach day). These densely-printed free illustrated supplements contained a tale by Verne(whose centenary this project celebrated) that seemed to mimic the long, rambling and exotic

journeys of the Sultan; I for one have still to reach its denouement.

In reporting back his conference conversation, composer John Webb remarked that this lackof information forced people to create their own stories:

People not knowing what was going on was really important. It meant that you had tofind different ways of engaging with it all - you had to discover it as you went along.We'd heard, for example, of a policeman who wasn't going to tell a family the route ofthe Elephant and give the game away. But there were other officials who really hadn'tbeen told what was going on, like the parking attendant who didn't quite know whetherto give the rocket a ticket or not when it appeared!

This point was taken further in Erica Wyman's report back:

We also talked about how the crowd were given confidence to react in whatever waythey wanted to. Every single little action and detail that was added to the experienceallowed us to decide how we wanted to react and tell our own stories.


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The interactive and participatory aspect of what, to a superficial observer might have seemedsimply a spectacle to gaze at, became increasingly clear. Jane Ripley noted how the pacingof the event helped generate a kind of drama in the crowd:

There was enough time to hang around and anticipate, and then something elsewould happen and you wouldn't know what that was, and then you'd rush off

somewhere to see what was going on.

News travelled fast, the crowd passing on information to each other or phoning friends whowere just arriving. As one delegate told it, a game of Chinese whispers gathered momentum'in terms of what this elephant did, whether it walked into town, whether it didn't walk intotown, whose party it gate-crashed...'

Nobody mediated the event for us, so we became the storytellers. Lucy Neal, one of the co-founders of Lift, remembered one such transformation:

I heard a father yesterday in St James's Park, who had obviously spent hours gettingthere, with his kids asking and asking, and he said, 'Shush, we have got to be really,reallyquiet, because I think I can hear some really, reallybig footsteps!

Now that the event is over, is it any easier to define in its entirety? And, therefore, isn't it justpossible, as one of the Lift Trackers thought, that the stories generated by The Sultan'sElephant will one day 'become something like Greek mythology that we have to try andfigure out?'


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The streets of London

One more extraordinary aspect ofthis extraordinary project was the

way in which the symbolic heartof our capital city was entirelyopened up for the Elephant andthe Little Girl, their entourage andus. The loud trumpeting of theElephant on Horse Guards'Parade must have interrupted theconversation from time to timeover in Downing Street, wherethe Prime Minister was chewingover the latest local electionresults. And the Little Girl walkedas far as the gates of

Buckingham Palace, which sheprobably could have climbed overif the spirit had taken her.

In her summing up of the morning's reflections at the conference, Sarah Weir, from ArtsCouncil England, pointed out that the project's location in Westminster was indeed verysignificant:

Make no mistake; this was a very political piece. It was chosen to be held in thosespaces and in those streets. Not just outside the National Gallery and such places, butalso down Pall Mall with all those gentlemen's clubs - different symbols of authorityand power, confronted by the anarchy of the Elephant coming down those streets.Those spaces are actually quite private - I'm not sure I've actually walked down that bitbetween The Mall and Friary Court, and I've lived in London all my adult life. Therewas a sense of reclaiming those spaces for people, so that it became ourcity.

In The Practice of Everyday Life(1984), cultural theorist Michel de Certeau describespedestrians moving through the streets of the city as writers of a text. Although there is anofficial 'syntax' that should be followed, ordinary citizens have the power to f lout it by creatingtheir own 'indeterminate trajectories'. In this way, a 'migrational, or metaphoric, city... slipsinto the clear text of the planned and readable city, which is one way of describing whathappened over this weekend.

Reporting back from her conference conversation, Jane Ripley, a freelance carnival

designer, talked of the liberating impact of seeing such official and over-prescribed spacesbeing transformed in this way:

We loved the sheer anarchy of closing off central London, digging a hole in the road[for the rocket] and tying cars to the tarmac. We reckon we can do anything now.

Being a mischievous child, the Little Girl had stitched a row of cars parked along Pall Mall butthe mischief had extended well beyond that, as Lucy Neal pointed out, ultimately resulting inthe changing of the Queen's plans and the Trooping of the Colour. Just as radical was the


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impact on traffic in the centre of our capital city, diverting it from normally busy streets, asJocelyn Cunningham, of Creative Partnerships, remarked in her report back:

Never mind the Elephant and the Girl, we were very moved by the reclamation of thestreets - just the way that we were able to walk along the road and turn a corner,knowing that we had all that space without cars being there. There was a sense that

this was for us personally.

This remark touches on a much wider feeling amongst urbanists and people who live in cities- that we need to find a way to make our cities more intimate and manageable. In hisinfluential book, Cities for a Smaller Planet(1997), architect Richard Rogers argues that'cities have grown and changed into such complex and unmanageable structures that it ishard to remember that they exist first and foremost to satisfy the human and social needs ofcommunities'. Instead, most people think of city life in terms of 'alienation, isolation, fear ofcrime, or congestion and pollution [rather than] community, participation, animation, beautyor pleasure' - aspects of the experience that The Sultan's Elephant seems to have brought tothis city. It is worth noting here that among the specific changes to London's cramped andprivatised spaces he recommends is opening up the Mall onto St James's Park, to 'create abeautiful and animated walk between Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace'. Public

space like this is safe and comfortable and conducive to a sense of creative and tolerantcitizenship.

On Friday night, having watched the Girl being helped into her nightdress and settling downto sleep alongside the Elephant on Horse Guards' Parade, we walked slowly back up RegentStreet in the dark. A car or two edged along and the theatre and cinema lights winked andgleamed as if settling into a well-rehearsed theatre-land routine. Then, passing us in awhoosh of colour and speed, came the London Skate, a sinuous battalion of inline-skaterssliding over the streets and streaming into Piccadilly Circus and on to - who knows where?Perhaps fanning out in all directions to proclaim the streets of London open for all? Aftersuch a day of wonders, it might be true.


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The epic and the intimate

The epic and the intimate hasbeen talked about quite a lot atthis conference, and it's a themethat runs through everything - thesense that this was somethinghuge, but even at such a scale, itfelt as if it was just for you.

This theme, articulated here bySarah Weir, was echoed throughthe day's conversations.

Elspeth McLaughlin, reported that her group had been talking mainly about big moments andsmall moments, epic and intimate moments in the same breath:

There was a huge sense of community on the bigger scale, right down to just hearingwhat your neighbours were talking about.

Temple Morris had recalled:

an immense amount of thinking about your place in the world, of thinking a lot aboutthe people who weren't witnessing this - people who hadn't necessarily been thoughtabout for a while but were being thought about here. That sort of individual response

coming out of something so communal was incredible.

For Sylvan Baker, a freelance theatre-maker, a key factor was the intimacy that developedbetween the crowd and the Elephant, which seemed to encourage an intimacy within thecrowd itself.

Street corners were special. It took the Elephant a while to get around a corner, soyou had a good long time with it. It was mesmerising. It was somehow intimate on amassive scale, which seems a contradiction in terms. Then, a weird thing - strangers inLondon talking to each other. You'd see someone later who didn't know where theElephant was and you told them or, if you'd lost track of it, they'd tell you.

It was, another delegate concluded, impossible to be detached in this environment - therewas total engagement on every level, connecting people to emotions they dont normally getin touch with. The emotional impact on individuals was one of the most remarkedphenomena of The Sultan's Elephant project. That was why Angharad Wynne-Jones, currentDirector of Lift, opened the conference by asking the question: how many people cried in apublic space over the weekend?A forest of hands shot up, including mine.Sarah Weir described one of the many moving encounters conference delegates had had:

We have said a lot about how we connected to ourselves - how we had a sense ofconnecting to emotions within us that may be asleep a lot of the time. At one point


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during the weekend, there was a big burly guy in front of me and I was aware, out ofthe corner of my eye, that he was lifting something up. I assumed it was a child, but itwas a huge, shaggy Labrador. Really huge. He had got it up into his arms and he wastrying to get it up onto his shoulders. The dog, as you can imagine, was all over theplace - until it saw the Elephant when it suddenly calmed down, transfixed. It was soperfect. Then, this guy, a big bruiser, put the dog down and turned round. The tears

were just streaming down his face, tears everywhere.

It has always been difficult, Helen Marriage told the conference, to explain the emotionalpower of Royal de Luxe's work to people who haven't seen it. It's not enough simply to talk ofthe size of the Elephant - 42 tonnes and the height of Admiralty Arch - because that does notbegin to convey the visceral impact it has on those who actually see it.

Founder Jean-Luc Courcoult's fear is that people will think of Royal de Luxe as acompany of big machines, but any of you who have seen a show know that it is not

just about the machines, but about the tenderness and the relationships that can becreated out of what are essentially giant moving wooden structures.

The crowd reflected that tenderness in the deft and good-humoured way it made way for the

Elephant's procession through London's tight streets. The police and security staff seemedfaintly startled by the lack of aggro. There were also very few injuries considering the sizeand duration of the event. The emergency services reported a mere '5 and 15' - that is, fivepeople over the weekend went to hospital, and only 15 others had to be treated by one of theambulance crews on standby.

Pippa Bailey, associate director with World Famous Pyrotechnicians, noted telling evidenceof the crowd's extraordinary gentleness:

There were a lot of daffodils in the park, some dead and others still in bloom. Thedead ones were walked and trampled over but the live ones were left standing.

The whole event was the size of a demo, as Sue Mayo put it, but we weren't in opposition toanything. It was more about healing. It reminded Ali Campbell, theatre maker and teacher, ofa puja- a Hindu festival - in the temporary nature of so many people gathering and in itsecho of rituals of cleansing and its essential solemnity and spirituality.For others, its effect might have suggested a more political potential - one delegatementioned the sense she had had in the crowd of people power. In his book on conversation,conference speaker and historian Theodore Zeldin sees:

an affinity of those who are impatient with the slow pace of change in public life, andwho, while waiting for politics to increase the amount of justice - which may takecenturies - believe that ordinary people can make big changes by improving the waythey relate to each other in daily life.

The intimate, then, may be the new massive.


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The sanity cause

Sanity may impress us but it has never been made to seem attractive; sanity may be agood thing, but it is somehow not desirable. The terrifying thing - and it is only theterrifying thing that is ever glamorized - is madness; and, as ever, it is the frighteningthing that seems real. Violence in the street is more likely to stay with us, to haunt us -to, as we now say, traumatize us - than, say, the more ordinary kindnesses ofeveryday life. We may be unaccustomed to valuing things, to exploring things that arenot traumatic. Sanity may be one of these things.- Adam Phillips, Going Sane(pp. 47-48]

I took a break from following the crowds and the Elephant on Saturday and popped into theICA bookshop where I found a title by Adam Phillips that I hadn't come across before. He s apsychoanalyst by trade and a provocative thinker; his style is highly readable and this newbook, Going Sane, looked typically unputdownable, being an exploration of why madnessseems so appealing and is so widely and interestingly written about, whilst sanity is hardlyexamined at all. I recalled the passage quoted above when John Gardner, the bluff andlikeable chief of TfL London Buses, began his account of his involvement in The Sultan's

Elephant project:

The first time I met Helen, and Nicky, I thought she was quite out of her tree, I reallydid. She came to us and said, 'I want to bring a 40-foot elephant to London, and take itthrough the streets of London.' Which magic mushrooms did you feed on today?

And also when Hilary Carty from Arts Council England recalled her first encounter with HelenMarriage, thus:

I thought, So you're going to take a big elephant through central London, down PallMall. Mmmm, right. My God, this woman likes a challenge! But when we saw the filmof the company's work, we were hooked. We felt it might just be possible - and Helenseemed, dare I say it, sufficiently mad to make it happen! So we got on board.

John, too, of course, got on board - literally as well as in spirit. Once he had been over toNantes to see Royal de Luxe in action, he drove back to France in a Routemaster bus thatwas to be adapted there for touring the Little Girl around London. He then volunteered to dothat tour himself, chuckling at all the dropped jaws around town. All this from a man who hadonce firmly told Helen and Nicky from Artichoke that there was absolutely no way he wasgoing to re-route the No. 38 bus for a mechanical elephant. It was a mad idea - but then thewhole thing was a mad idea. Another member of the team, Alan Jacobi of UnusualProductions, had been too polite to say as much to Helen when she put the proposal to him.Like the others, he had succumbed but he was keen to point the finger at the main culprit -the founder of Royal de Luxe:

Jean-Luc Courcoult. Now, thereis a very good example of what is fundamental to thiswhole thing. He's a complete nutcase. Some of you will have seen him with his funnyglasses, and funny hat and so on. But he is a fantastic talent. All of that stuff came outof his jumbly-jumbly head. But let us not forget, he is just a theatre director, he is justlike Trevor Nunn or Andrew Lloyd Webber - they all shout and scream when it goeswrong, but they have immense vision. People don't understand that - it is not becausehe is French, it's because he works in the theatre.

The old Romantic notion of the artist linked creativity to a kind of madness, but in this casethe apparent madness of the artists behind The Sultan's Elephant (and those otherwise


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sober citizens they converted to it) made a lot of sense. It helped Londoners, who after allhad been badly traumatised by the terrorist attacks of July 2005, to value and exploresomething that was the opposite of traumatic and perhaps gave those who witnessed it anunaccustomed sense of what a public state of sanity might feel like.


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Chapter 3: Can we do the impossible too?

I don't think that events like this in the future will have any trouble getting sponsors.John Gardner, Transport for London, London Buses

Is London a can-do city?As the conference panellists explained, it took a lot of negotiation to make it possible for TheSultan's Elephant project to happen here.

More in Bringing The Sultan's Elephant to London- page 4 >>

Not the least of the challenges was London itself.

Royal de Luxe is used to a much easier ride in France, as Alan Jacobi of UnusualProductions and Production Manager for The Sultan's Elephant explained to the conference:

The French have a different system. Their cities are run by a mayor, so they have oneperson who calls the shots. No matter what Mr Livingstone may think, it s not like that

in London. There are many, many different people who call the shots. Everything youtry and do here affects all kinds of people's lives and the way they go about theirbusiness.

Just how many people - and institutions - was itemised by another member of the UK teambehind the visit, Tim Owen, who is responsible to Westminster Council for event planning:

The Royal Parks Agency; various departments of the city council, includingenvironmental control; street-trading; all our contractors, who you might have seencutting a tree down - several traffic lights came out, and the lighting poles removed,and there was, of course, that bit of 'ground-breaking' in Waterloo Place. Then, there isTransport for London and not just the buses - there's the London ContingencyPlanning Section, London Traffic Control Centre, London Underground, British

Transport Police. And the Metropolitan Police, in various disguises and variousdepartments. Plenty of motorbikes around as well. Transport for London also has anetwork assurance team which tries to keep traffic moving around. It has a streetmanagement team, which deals with the complexities of how the highway works inWestminster. London Ambulance Service co-ordinates all the first aid, backed up bythe voluntary sector at St John's Ambulance. London Fire Brigade was part of ourplanning, too, because they have a statutory response time of 7 or 8 minutes to get toa location, and there are four or five fire stations in this area.

Hilary Carty from Arts Council England, another member of the team, hit on a perfectly aptanalogy for this complicated machine that makes London work:

We all know that London is one of the most complex places to do anything becausethere are so many layers of infrastructure, so many different bodies that you have tonegotiate with and navigate. There I was, looking at the Elephant, trying to work outwhich lever was actually making the trunk move; I had managed to discover who wasmoving the tail. I watched the operators sitting in their bucket seats and I wonderedexactly what each of them was doing and what their responsibilities were. I felt rathersorry for the person who was flapping the ears, because it looked like a really hefty

job. All our government institutions are very much like that, a whole bundle of us insidethe elephant and some sitting outside, but all having to work together in harmony tomake this big elephant move.


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What this event has shown is that it can be done - the Elephant can actually be moved.

Pulling out the stops - and the traffic lightsThis one story tells you everything about these fantastic people, said Helen Marriage,describing how the impossible had been made possible - over and over again - by peopleworking together in London.

Some do the things we are dealing with you can't imagine. The company had beensurveying the parade route for two years but, on the Wednesday before the showstarted, they came back to Alan Jacobi very late in the evening and said that theElephant wouldn't go down Haymarket. We had originally assumed that it would godown the right-hand side of the road, which, if you look at it carefully, has a camber. Ifthere's a 20cm camber and you are a 12 metre-high elephant, by the time you get tothe top you have a two metre lean and you weigh 42 tonnes - everybody concludedthat, however unfortunate it was, this was a safety issue we couldn't risk. We had twodays to go. So this wonderful man [Tim Owen from Westminster Council] phonedsome remarkable people. And we decided that we had to ' take out all the traffic lightsin Haymarket', in order to send the Sultan's parade down the middle of the road.

Physically taking out a traffic light is in itself a difficult thing, but it also usually requiresa six-week order - and there was the cost, too. But what were we going to do - stop theshow? David Mayo, one of Alan Jacobi s colleagues, went and met with all thecontractors and everyone else concerned. The digging started on Thursday morningand, by that afternoon, the traffic lights and a whole wedge of central reservation hadgone.

Is it just a French thing?The French seem to have a particular thing about the street, from taking to the barricades ofthe Revolution to taking on the State again in les vnements of 1968, and from the streetperformers juggling outside the Pompidou Centre to the recent spectacular immolation ofvast numbers of cars in the Paris suburbs. The street is a theatre for the French. So, is it forus?

Alan Jacobi told the conference about an interesting conversation about street-based theatreand performance work he had had with the director of culture in Nantes, where Royal deLuxe is based:

He said, 'Of course it all started in Britain.' I asked him what on earth he was talkingabout. He said, 'In 1968, I went to work for John Fox' - who is, of course, the founder ofthe legendary Welfare State International. The French street theatre tradition hasflourished in the way that ours hasn't because culture minister Jacques Lang andothers since him decided that things like circus and street theatre were important andneeded to be funded as well as, say, the Opra de Lyon. It's about all cultural values.

Alan also suggested a more amusing way to translate this French enterprise:

Our production team were always talking about things like le petit gant, and lecamion de musique. Aren't they romantic-sounding words? They must meansomething quite fantastic - but they are just French words! So, if we ever createsomething like this in England, we have got to create a romantic set of words for all thebits of kit - cranedoesn't really cut it, does it?


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Can we learn to stop worrying, just a bit?If The Sultan's Elephant project as a whole broke a few taboos about just how you can treatthe centre of London, there were also challenges to our perhaps overdeveloped concernsabout health and safety. Hilary Carty from Arts Council England was not the only one to spotthe risks being taken, nor was she alone in finding it liberating to be trusted to handle them:

When we went to see the cars stitched to the road, which was the funniest thing I'veseen in a long while, there was actual broken glass within easy reach of youngchildren. This is so un-British. It's not something we are ever allowed to do: to be withintouching distance of anything slightly, possibly, potentially dangerous. It waswonderful!

Several people had noticed, too, that small children had somehow been allowed to ride in theLittle Girl's arms. And that some of the Elephant's entourage didn't seem to be wearingharnesses at all times. In fact, the latter probably wasn't true and it seems that health andsafety was taken very seriously - but not in a way that impeded the impression of risk andexcitement. For example, one of the funniest aspects of the Elephant's progress was the wayit would pause now and then and lift its trunk to spray gallons of water over anyone nearby -a safe and gentle form of water cannon to control the crowds.

The lack of barriers and heavy-handed security was much commented on, too, but againreality told a different story, as Alan Jacobi explained:

Somebody said earlier on today that there were no barriers. Well that's fantastic,because there were. You just didn't notice them. That means we did our job properly.

Given the way that the Notting Hill Carnival is often depicted more as a potential crime sceneby some in the media and elsewhere, one hope is that this event might show how we cansupport free outdoor performances with a bit more courage and imagination.

Are we talented enough to do this?There are two elements within the company. Jean-Luc imagines the stories; he's adreamer. He explained to me in great detail what this whole show would look like fouryears ago. But there is another extraordinary man who is never really given much ofthe limelight, called Francois de la Rozire. You might have seen him as the chiefElephant controller, walking in front of the Elephant. He is a very quiet man, who justmakes tiny movements with his fingers, and is constantly talking to all themanipulateurs. Francois is not the chief elephant driver, though - he designed it and hebuilt it. He has a workshop in Toulouse and another in Nantes. He has a hundredpeople who work for him and, when they started making the Elephant, it took 18months to construct with 35 people working full-time. It is the combination of Francois'technical genius and Jean-Luc's absolutely extraordinary imagination that make thiswork so powerful.

So the first question is: do we have artists like these in this country who have that kind ofimagination? Of course, we do. But the next question is: Are they let loose in this way,supported through the years? No, they arent.

The truth of Helen Marriage's observation about how - and whether - we support such artistsand such ambition was widely acknowledged. Jane Ripley, as a carnival designer, amongstothers was conscious of how the sheer detail and exuberance of the craftsmanship ondisplay matched the ambition of the French company's artistic vision - and that this musthave meant that there had been an equally visionary long-term investment in the work.


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We also discussed our amazement at the time and money that had been allowed, andto work in such serious materials. We're used to having to work in things like fibreglassand polystyrene and kite fabric. People were allowed to work in metal and wood andserious materials. They'd taken a long time to do the research, they'd studied themovement of the elephant - all that is an absolute luxury, to be allowed the time to do

something really well, really properly.

How much will it cost?There is no doubt that Helen Marriage and Nicky Webb of Artichoke took an enormousfinancial risk in producing this show. Just as the decision-making process here was muchmore complex than in France, the costs in London are around three times that over theChannel, where the municipal authority takes the risk, as Helen explained:

In London we've never had that sort of protection - the risk in both financial andinsurance terms sits with us. And I think the French think we are a bit mad to take thaton. The costs are so enormous - we were even going to be charged for every parkingmeter that was suspended until we managed to agree a deal on that! AlthoughWestminster has been extraordinary operationally, and the Mayor's office has given us

some money, there hasn't been that sense of a civic buy-in that happens in Amiens orAntwerp, when the company performs there.

The total cost of The Sultan's Elephant in London was 1 million. This seems to Helen to begood value.

When journalists interview us, they keep saying, 'It's such a lot of public money, was itworth it?' And you have to say, 'Well the easy answer is that a pound a person seemscheap to me'.

If she would say that, further support came from the delegates and from at least onetaxpayer whom Jocelyn Cunningham from Creative Partnerships met in Trafalgar Square onSaturday morning, when the Elephant was lying down in front of the National Gallery andpeople were preparing the official speeches of welcome:

This older man came up to me, pointed his finger at me and said, 'If this is how ourtaxes are spent' - I was waiting for it - 'then this is the right thing to spend it on!'

But where will the money come from?The Sultan's Elephant project was created out of faith, hope and love - and it looks likely thatfuture projects will need those same intangibles in order to persuade funding bodies tosupport them. But the signs are good. For one, Arts Council England, in the shape of HilaryCarty, was unequivocal about future support, having been an early adopter of the Elephant.

This has been a really perfect example of what the Arts Council is striving to do. We

want to present the most innovative, the most creative, the most diverse ofcontemporary arts and that includes outdoor art, street theatre and carnival. We haveprioritised more investment in this area because we must continue to support it - Iknow for a fact that Grants for the Arts is going to go bust on street theatre, and no oneis going to limit it to 30,000 anymore! We're going to be challenged over and over andover again to match the ambition of what we saw this weekend. And I think it is anabsolutely welcome challenge. We have the creativity but we don't yet have theinfrastructure or the sense of permanence. The big question is: when is the nextSultan's Elephant? There is no question of there not being a next one.

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