HELENandJOHN are currently touring the Librarian, Janet and occasionally OVID.
For more information please contact boxobits @ hotmail.com
★★★★★
★★★★ "Make sure you see this one" FringeGuru
★★★★ "Janet is truly bizarre" Northwest End
"The play was a giggle and a joy from start to finish" Buxton Fringe Review (Janet)
The Librarian is a celebratory tale of libraries, books and stories, a unique cultural and educational experience for young people. Available to tour for theatres, libraries, community centres and schools.
Directed by John Mowat
Performed by Helen Ainsworth.
Janet is a lump of bread dough. Her mother is a bag of flour. Her father is a rusty water jug. A collection of everyday kitchen utensils provide an eccentric cast as Janet struggles to her defy the seemingly inevitable and embrace her unique individuality. The result is a hilarious, idiosyncratic and strangely compelling show, which questions our prescribed identities and the true nature of destiny.
Suitable for over 14s. Research and Development supported by Proteus as part of the Performance Lab.
Directed by John Mowat
Performed by Helen Ainsworth
Occasionally OVID uses live-hand puppets to explore the darker side of the human psyche inspired by three stories from Metamorphoses by Ovid. Each story involves characters with unpronounceable names doing unspeakable things with humour, compassion and acute observation.
Suitable for over 14s. Research and Development supported by the Puppet Centre.
Directed by John Mowat
Performed by Helen Ainsworth
Productions have been invited to (among others) Beverley Puppet Festival, UK; Brighton Fringe, Camden Fringe, UK; Manchester Fringe, UK; Newcastle Puppet Festival, UK; Skipton Puppet Festival, UK; Buxton Theatre Festival, UK; Brest, Belarus; Warsaw Puppet Festival, Poland; World Puppet Carnival in Łódź, Poland and Nur-Saltan (Almaty), Kazakhstan; FOMe Festival, Faro; Angara, Açores, Leicester, UK; Shambala Festival; Cluj Puppet Festival, Romania; Draper Hall, London, UK; Baixa Street Fest, Faro, Portugal.
August 2024 The Librarian Hilldrop Commuinty Centre, Islington HAF
August 2024 The Librarian Aston Manfield Commuinty Centre, Southwark
August 2024 The Librarian Lambeth Libraries
August 2024 The Librarian Newham Libraries
Sept 2024 Janet Mariofa Festival, Madeira, Portugal
May 2025 Puppet Making Workshop Colet Court School, London
HELENandJOHN create bold, playful and provocative theatre. We trust in the power of art to ask questions, inspire and connect people. We create a supportive environment, we welcome all relations to education and all classes and all backgrounds. Our theatre comes from our diverse lived experiences and trust.
John Mowat was born in and brought up in London, where he still occasionally lives. After being asked to leave school at the age of 16, he became an apprentice fitter/welder in the heating and ventilating industry. He then went on to study sculpture and subsequently attended the Royal Academy Schools in London. His career in theatre began in 1980 when he performed his first one-man show and in 1994 he co-founded Oddbodies Theatre Company in London. As a performer and director his highly visual style of comedy has toured over forty countries throughout the world. He first worked in Portugal in 1992, where he performed and taught at Chapito. He began working with Companhia do Chapito in 1998 and has since devised and directed numerous pieces with them. Mowat is now co-artistic director of the company. Mowat continues working on a variety of projects in the UK, Portugal and Brazil.
My first experience of puppetry was in my local park at the age of two, where every summer we sat on a moth eaten blanket and watched Punch and Judy. After this introduction I played with puppets and toy theatres throughout my childhood and experimented during my university studies. It was only in my early twenties, when inspired by the colours and sounds of an eye-opening trip to India, I came home and constructed a set of obscure and grotesque characters which formed the basis of my first public puppet presentation. My theatre work explores the re-interpretation of story through the acute observation of character within movement on the stage. I believe the craft of puppetry should not be limited to traditional design nor infantile application, nor rules of presentation. I approach the construction of the puppet as a sculptural object, but one imbued with the mysticism and magic which lies at the primaeval roots of puppetry – in iconography and religion. My work explores the influence of constructional matter and form on the analysis and presentation of the puppet character on stage and the investigation through play of the theatre that thus ensues. But above all I hope to celebrate theatre as enlightenment through live entertainment. I have worked all over the world in many aspects of theatre. After training in theatre design I travelled to and worked in places as diverse as Wolverhampton, Portugal, Hungary and India constructing and designing sets, creating posters and running youth theatre education projects. During my life I have spent time living in a tiny remote hamlet high in the Portuguese mountain ranges, a studio on the Regents Canal and an old palace in Lisbon, I have played clarinet in marching bands in the great "Marchas" of Portugal, studied yoga in India and cycled around the Iberian coast, I have had the privilege to work with Punjabi school children, inner London youths and centenarians from villages who only 30 years ago connected to the national grid. All these life experiences, and more, enrich my work and sustain my inspiration and my dedication to theatre as a relevant, worthwhile and exciting art form.
Helen Ainsworth is co-founder of the charity Cut Moose who have run mixed media, puppet, art and film workshops weekly at Hilldrop Community Centre for 2 years. Our work has also included funded workshops running Creative Dinners groups for vulnerable families; coordinating Walking Art sessions for physically impaired elderly people over 4 years and producing a youth film competition for Camden New Town Community Festival over two years.
Helen Ainsworth also led a ten-week course of Emotional Resilience at Robert Blair School, Islington. Object-puppet workshops involving staff, carers and pupils is funded by Islington Council, exploring how techniques in object puppetry can expand metaphors and emotional vocabulary around healthy relationships and emotions.
Teaching by HelenAinsworth includes Rose Bruford College, co-ordinator of the object Manipulation School at FOMe Festival of Puppets, Portugal. Mentor and lecturer with Dr Cariad Astles and Dr Nenagh Watson at Central School for Speech and Drama. Manipulation and construction workshops have been delivered in London for (amongst others) Bubble Theatre; Institute of the Imagination; Islington Council Camden Council and the Queen’s Theatre.