Magenta Monacle’s Magical Masquerade

Our artistic team is a collaboration of Morecambe creatives from the Good Things Collective, the Nib Cib and Creative West End. The team was provided with an art grant to produce a community outreach project that combined the visual arts with the written word. After much tea, deliberation, head-scratching and more tea, we decided that a play performed at the August art market seemed like an exciting destination to aim for. A play where we invite local community members to create the characters and perform a small part in the final production. To allow time for character selection and playwriting, we created the characters at Creative West End’s May Network Party and at the May More Than A Market. Over the weeks running up to the network party, we amassed a wide selection of fancy-dress items from generous donors and Magenta Monacle was hard at work creating a plethora of props, hats and outfits. We decided to create characters in two different ways, with written and visual composition. At the network party people were invited to create characters by selecting a unique combination of hats, masks and props and writing a short bio, poem or prose about their fictional character. For the market, we had prepared a section of larger props and several painted backdrops that when combined will be the backdrops for our final play. We decided to draw people to create characters by operating a free Polaroid photobooth, giving away images with each character creation. As Polaroid photos are a unique one-off image the characters were also recorded digitally. The images that follow are digitally created Polaroids while the originals proudly adorn the fridges of Morecambe. The play will be performed on Saturday 12th August where many of the characters featured here try to come up with a solution to an ongoing dragon problem.