Folly! A Permission Slip to Be Foolish, Curious, and Human Again by Sam Williams

It seems we have forgotten how to dance.

It’s all connected somehow. And the answers are always somewhere just beyond our reach. 

It’s like my brain can no longer make novel connections because there is speed and ease and another way to do it for me.

We’re no longer drawn to the intricacies of human fallibility, instead automation has the answer for everything we need.

I am distracted by… everything.

It seems we have forgotten how to dance. How to think. How to dream. How to… imagine.

Our stories and words no longer imbue a sense of care – where has all the magic gone? 

Although I’m not fully sure yet how this relates to the development of Folly! It seemed that I needed to start by addressing the swirling in my brain. Folly (lack of good sense; foolishness) speaks to something at the core of my work. A sort of ‘well, why not?’ in physical form. ‘How did you ever dream that up / imagine that? Why does it exist? What is the point of it?’

The paradox of being a creative, and a creative who dreams in scale but who also cares deeply about nature feels heavier and heavier. It’s no longer possible to internally green-wash your approach to making work because the tangible impacts of the climate crisis don’t sit on the edges of barren motorways, they bubble up through the paved concrete of our psyches – anxiety pot holes just waiting to cave in. 

I am jumping around here… and for good reason. It’s no wonder my brain is considered to have a deficit of attention when we’re expected to consume, digest, produce and have it all done by 5pm. It’s not surprising that so many of us are reaching for the tools that are, seemingly, made freely available to us to speed up the process. Even as I sit here writing this I am consumed by a need to check in with AI – Does this make sense? Make this clearer – Am I rambling?

I am worried about our capacities to imagine. That we are all becoming an endless list of buzzwords and tick boxes. We align ourselves with the vogue narrative and then make ourselves in the image of that. How can we form our own opinions if we are shortening the gap between the question and the answer? 

I’m possibly getting a little off topic now. So to bring it back. 

For me – the pressing question is no longer about the perceived limits of human creation; what once felt like ‘well, why not?’ has become a question of necessity, a demand for justification: ‘why?’.

At the point that I received the news we had the Blueprint R&D grant, several things were co-occurring in my creative and commercial work. This felt like a real opportunity to explore and expand upon not just play and movement, but how this could be a vehicle for storytelling around care of our natural environments, nature recovery and human-nature connectedness. 

There is a pattern that appears to me as a tangible correlation between the many challenges facing our world and our disconnection from nature. And it’s not only nature in the sense of the other living world. But also in the sense of our own natural instincts. 

Play is one of the fundamentals of the human experience, yet it remains so little researched and understood. It threads through our history on Earth, from gladiatorial spectacles to ritual dances, circus feats to communal games. And at the heart of it all lies storytelling.

Even in the simplest act of play there is a moment of combined belief. The shared hallucination when we are making a game together has the ability to inspire and transport us to a new state of existence. We can be anyone, anywhere with whomever. As long as we are buying into the shared set of game ‘rules’ or ‘beliefs’ we can begin to act out new modes of being, and test potential new realities.

Herein lies the human ability to remake the world in the narratives we create.

What if Folly! is unfinished – it’s a show that is never done changing. The artwork is in the process of its creation and it evolves with each visitation and outing. A never ending story so to speak. 

We may have built a pilot structure, invited people in to play, explore and give us feedback but I’ve come away armed with a sketchbook full of thoughts; more questions than answers – and for now, that feels exactly as it should be.

I am incredibly grateful for the creative generosity of Tamati Samson and Kellie York of Blue Moon Circus, our eternally calm producer Ellen Booth and to our session performers (EM Williams, Sophie Halstead, Helena Bryant and Alice Chapman). Blue Moon Circus school students and everyone else that helped make something weird and wonderful in a cold warehouse in Lewes, and of course to Without Walls for granting us the opportunity to explore the possibilities.