WORKSHOP Carrying Stories Across a Threshold

A workshop with author Sally Bayley and animator Suzie Hanna. Part of the Poetry Film Festival in Bristol. Starts at 10.45 ends at 13.15. Author Sally Bayley and Animator Suzie Hanna will teach you to use a uniquely designed method for development of plot and storyline for creating an original micro drama. They will show you how to arrange your story around a threshold space in order to produce a moment of dramatic change; this process will enable you to create a rapidly compressed plot summary. The aim is to enable your story to arrive through one dramatic moment carried across a threshold. They will lead you through a series of exercises using methods related to touch and texture using simple folded shapes and templates. These will help you to begin to arrange relationships between character and object; character and place; character and time and encounters between characters as you build a set of emotional pressure points or tensions. Your physical paper world will allow you to conceal and reveal narrative elements in a flexible moveable format, encouraging a non-linear approach to the creative process. The workshop also includes consideration of sonic elements to further define the world that you have created. Participants will select from a choice of prompts to build their own micro plot. The workshop will be framed by some miniature performance pieces as Sally explores words, colours, shapes, rhythms and sounds drawn from her own writing. Please note that the venue does not have step free access. Sally Bayley is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. As a child, she absorbed the sounds and rhythms of poetry, ballads and folksongs, and these patterns inform the structure of her story-telling. In 1990, Sally was the first child to go to university from West Sussex County Council Care services. She studied at St Andrews university, and then went to America, where she taught aesthetic education in midwestern schools and universities and foundation arts courses to adults in inner city Ohio. She is interested in the Liberal Arts model of education and believes anyone can think or write to a high level with the right encouragement and practice. One reader has described her books as rhapsodies which means ‘to stitch a song.’ Sally is currently a Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. She also teaches on the Sarah Lawrence visiting programme at Wadham College, Oxford. From 2018-2020 she was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University. Suzie Hanna is Emerita Professor of Animation at Norwich University of the Arts. She is an animator who makes independent and commissioned films in collaboration with academics, artists, scientists, poets and musicians. Her numerous short films have all been selected for international festivals, TV broadcast, curated shows and public service platforms. Recent work includes theatrical and architectural projection and live improvised VJing. She contributes to books, journals and conferences and was Chair of the National Association of Higher Education in the Moving Image from 2016 to 2019, continuing to work as a PhD supervisor and international examiner. She runs creative workshops on many aspects of her research and practice, and plays the violin and the musical saw.