Despite fancy printing
presses, digital media and the internet, story-telling is fundamentally an oral
tradition. It’s the way people connect.
Story-telling is also
generational. For as you get older you
fondly remember the stories grandparents, parents, aunties and uncles used to
tell you… whenever possible passing them on to the next generation of little
ones.
Generally speaking my
sister, Rebecca, and her partner Michelle, let me take care of their children’s
musical theatre education (they don’t do musicals, unless I’m in them). So I had to introduce little Harry and
Frankie Jean to The Wizard of Oz and Mary Poppins. They were easy converts, quickly singing the
songs and dancing with me around the lounge-room. FJ likes me to sing-along with Somewhere over the rainbow, but Harry says
“be quiet please Aunty Julie, I can’t hear the girl”. Everybody’s a critic. But I let him get away with it – it is Judy
after all.
There must be something special
about Danny Kaye though, for Rebecca has often sung classics like Thumbelina and The Ugly Duckling to her kids - having heard them from our Dad at
not infrequent intervals - and in my experience there isn’t a child alive who
doesn’t lap up such stories. Hans Christian
Anderson was a national Danish treasure and a genius children’s author, so if
you haven’t read the full text of The
Ugly Duckling, before the story was turned into song in Hollywood
The reason this comes back
to me is because yesterday the BBC presented The Ugly Duckling in their slot with Mr Bloom on CBeebies. Designed with Northern Ballet with the
intention of engaging children’s interest in story-telling through dance, I
thought it a highly successful and valuable venture. Imaginative without being
complicated, polished without losing innocence, simple, organic, attractive and
engaging, it ticked all an audience’s boxes (child or adult) while contributing
to the arts in a legitimate way. Well
done BBC.
As a bonus it left me
pondering (on the train as I made my way back from Shropshire to London
What are we, really? Who are we, really? And where, or with whom, is our niche?
It is far from just a
children’s story. For we must all forge
through the winters when the answers are not clear… when we’re in transition…
or waiting for some project or goal to blossom.
We all ask, in our own way, what the Northern Ballet suggested… am I a
duck? Am I a frog? Am I a cat?
Am I a fox? We are all at risk when
the fox manipulates our confusion or takes advantage of our vulnerability. And seasons pass, as they did so beautifully
in this little ballet, with Autumn leaves falling… before we journey to a place
where we find the answers we’re looking for… where we get a fuller sense of the
person (or professional) we are best equipped to be… where we find new support,
new and satisfying roles to play… where our changing needs are assessed, met
and (hopefully) comforted. So the sigh
of pleasure we share as The Ugly Duckling
turns up in the final scene in a glowing white tutu and delicate wings, to
be welcomed by the Queen of Swans into a new world with friendship and
security, is actually a primal and ageless sigh of satisfaction. Children express it the loudest, with
unadulterated freedom and joy, for it’s the happy ending they are geared to
expect. That’s one of the reasons we
adore children – for their safe and enthusiastic expectation of a happy ending. It’s what we should, actually, remember to cherish
in them and foster in ourselves.
For wouldn’t everything be
so much better if we trusted, like children, that after waddling and quacking
and enduring “winter in his lonely clump of weed” that the rescue party would
arrive? Wouldn’t it be better if we
trusted after passing through a crucible, or emerging from a chrysalis, that we’d
all be butterflies?
It would certainly be good
if, on days like today, when I’m struggling to get off the starting blocks
because I’ve returned from the pretty countryside to find, for not the first
time, I have no hot water or heating in my expensive London apartment… if I trusted
after some hours (please God, not days) in this frigging freezing
flat… (there are those f's again)... that there will be a reliable HAPPY ENDING?!
With that thought, I am
going to stop grumbling and swearing under my breath, I am going to stop waiting
for the plumber and feeling frozen, and I am going to hum the following tune
and go around the corner to a warm café and order a huge brunch. And by the time I’m finished, maybe, just maybe my happy ending to today’s challenge will be a little closer…
I’m not such an ugly duckling
No feathers all stubby and brown
For in fact these birds in so many words said
‘Xchk’ the best in town,
No feathers all stubby and brown
For in fact these birds in so many words said
‘Xchk’ the best in town,
‘Xchk’ the best,
‘Xchk Xchk’ the best
‘Xchk Xchk’ the best in town.
‘Xchk Xchk’ the best in town.
Not a quack, not a quack, not a waddle or a quack
But a glide and a whistle and a snowy white back
And a head so noble and high
Say who’s an ugly duckling?
Not I!
Not I!
But a glide and a whistle and a snowy white back
And a head so noble and high
Say who’s an ugly duckling?
Not I!
Not I!
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