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Hugh Lupton

Hugh Lupton
www.facebook.com/Hugh-Lupton-118872867873

http://www.hughlupton.com

Hugh Lupton’s interest in traditional music, in street theatre, in live poetry, and in myth, resulted in him becoming a professional storyteller in 1981 (there were perhaps half a dozen in Britain at the time), working largely in schools.
In 1985 he formed the Company of Storytellers with Ben Haggarty and Pomme Clayton with a view to taking storytelling to adult audiences (until that point it had been perceived as an art-form for children).
For twelve years the Company toured Britain, running workshops, performing at Arts Centres and theatres, organising festivals, and working in education. They were deeply involved with the National Oracy Project. Their work was instrumental in stimulating a nation-wide revival of interest in storytelling. Their performances included The Three Snake Leaves, an exploration of the dark face of the Grimms stories, commissioned by the South Bank Centre for their German Romantic Festival in 1994, described by the Independent as ‘a wonderful, intricate piece about storytelling and the possibilities of redemption.’ And I Become Part of It an imagined mythology for Mesolithic Britain (commissioned by the Arts Council, Eastern Arts and East Midland Arts) reviewed in the Times Educational Supplement: ‘The Company held a Purcell Room audience spell-bound for two hours… the stories - dwelling on the perennial themes of hunger, love, renewal, transformation, sex and death – overlapped and complemented each other, seeming in the end to all be part of one story.’ Hugh Lupton has also, over the last twenty years, worked in collaboration with singer and composer Helen Chadwick, with musician/songwriter Chris Wood, with percussionist Rick Wilson, and with artist Liz McGowan, widening and challenging the possibilities of the form. His celebrated The Horses (with Chris Wood) was reviewed in the Times: “In this ‘funeral oration that never happened’, folksong frames the two stories that weave a whole life around you, bringing the hard world of the late 19th Century farm back to life. You hear the voice of the farmer ‘husky with the early morning’, on the day that the horses were stolen. You hear the horseman speaking ‘more in song than in words’ as he calls them, ‘the sweet high whistle’ that turned the working team on the plough, ‘the secret trill that urged the geldings on, with loaded wagons up Royston Hill’. You feel the warm rubbly breath, the hard curve of the nose-bone, smell the must of the stables, the sweet harness soap, and, as you journey deeper into the world of imagination, the tears start slowly to well up inside you and spill’.
Hugh and Chris have also toured widely with their exploration of the life of John Clare: On Common Ground.
Simon Kovesi wrote in the Independent: This novelisation of a year in the life of the poet John Clare is a testament to a lifetime’s groundbreaking commitment to folk culture. Lupton knows Clare… as well as anyone and reconstructs Clare’s times with a rare conviction. The context, landscape, language and texture of Clare’s life are re-imagined in enchanting and accurate detail.

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