Educating Kings: Slapstick and Slaughter

We have had such a varied day today. We attended 4 separate events from the MK IF Fringe Festival. Two of the things we saw are worthy of a post in their own right. So I will write about the Slapstick and Slaughter street performance (and a catch up to date of things we have done today and yesterday) and Pentalum separately.

Slapstick and Slaughter is performed by artists working through the 'Desperate Men' company http://www.desperatemen.com/slapstick-and-slaughter/ It was free and we had planned to see it since we saw it was on a few weeks ago. We cycled down from Monkston with the trailer and got there early so got good seats :)

We could see the 'stage' set up ready. Caden and Miles with their lunch in blue.

The performers came out and moved the step ladder about fussily which was quite amusing.

Then they did a funny sketch where they would both hide behind the large poster and move it about like it had feet. The boys liked this stuff.

Then the poster would move from side to side, leaving a different performer stood there each time, looking rather solemn.

Miles enjoying it.

Various photos from the performance.

The kids particularly like this one where the man behind the poster board bounced the other man as if he was a bouncy ball by pushing his head. It was very clever and I wondered if it was meant to portray how we are controlled by government and ideology. We are not free to move in the way we think we are.

There were some very beautiful parts to the performance. Both men sang in harmony, a love song. It gained a round of applause.

It was hard to know exactly what was going on but it could be that this was representing people seeing airplanes in the sky. There were certainly adult themes that were lost on the kids, a scene where Merde and Scheissen were shouted, clearly representing the argument and name calling between the French and Allies and Germans/Austrians at the time.

Lots of comedic walking that was very entertaining to watch.

A very interesting scene where words were read from a biography of Karl Marx and the other performer ripped out pages from the book which drew gasps from some watchers.

The boys loved this, where it looked like there was only one man with a huge body, the performers synchronised their movements so it looked possible.

Another funny and surprising scene where the trousers were ripped off one man to reveal funky long johns.

Some really marvellous, seemingly random vocalisations in almost harmony and very, very funny. It could have been improvised or practised. It was really well done.

This was a very moving part where one performer was carried as a dead weight on the back of the other. Then he was laid down on the floor as if he were a casualty of war. There was a gramophone playing and it was very moving. Caden and I talked about this and the human cost of war later in the day.

We all really enjoyed this performance. I chatted with one of the men after it had finished and we talked about home education. He was very supportive and said he believed that for boys in secondary school particularly he considered home education to be important because they need properly humbling, a concept I wholeheartedly agree with. Many teenagers are so focussed on exams and nothing else that they do not learn social responsibility or community values so much any more. He suggested that perhaps they should swap places with African children for some time so that both could benefit.

After this performance I took the boys for a picnic lunch at a sculpture Caden requested to visit. They played hide and seek and looked for the year I was born in the posts. The posts have dates with memorable events on each. Caden reads them to me, though I don't know if he found my year of birth.

Other things we have done include some creating. Caden wanted to make different plants from his plants vs zombies game, they are colouring in pea shooters here.

We also made blueberry muffins. Caden's reading challenge was to read out all the steps of the instructions on the packet. He consolidated the word oven and learned about degrees celcius.