Hedgespoken – A Travelling off-grid Storytelling Theatre

 

HEDGESPOKEN is a travelling off-grid storytelling theatre run from a 1966 Bedford RL lorry, converted to be a home and a go-anywhere stage. Storyteller, mask-maker and writer Tom Hirons and internationally-respected artist, puppeteer and musician Rima Staines tell tales and spark imaginations from the Hedgespoken truck wherever they can, from busy festivals and family camps to quiet laybys and secluded forests.

Hedgespoken specialise in retelling East European and British folktales and also stories from the wide world of the Traveller and Gypsy communities.

As mentioned in my article, My Life as a Vagabond, I have lived more or less as a bum for 36 years. This of course shows in my dreams, where I still experience life on the streets. However, my life as a vagabond was caused by my kundalini awakening. The second phase of the kundalini process therefore also began to show in my dreams. Lately they have attained a rather strange character. They have attained the color of icons. Something otherworldly is mixing in. I´m still experiencing life on the streets, and my engagement with other bums. But there is an extraordinary feeling of sacredness. Strange people are mixing in, people from traveling caravans, street entertainers, bohemians, gypsies, vagabonds, and some more strange creatures, half animal and half human creatures, so-called shapeshifters. I was therefore quite fascinated when I discovered Hedgespoken.

I have told about Hedgespoken in my article, Seiðr Shamanism and the Art of Song Healing. This article is part two of the above-mentioned article, My Life as a Vagabond. In the latter article I told about that I, as a Grail Seeker, is on a quest for so-called “Pirate Utopias”, or “Autonomous Zones”. Hedgespoken is clearly such an autonomous zone.

Also see my Vagabond Photography of autonomous zones: Copenhagen 2020: Freetown Christiania, and, Aalborg 2019: Limfjordsværftet and Fjordbyen.

Hedgespoken is also related to my booklet, The Runes of Rold Forest. I see my divination with The Runes of Rold Forest, as attempts of creating a map which shows the Grail Seeker pathfinders and trail markers, as well as dangers and pitfalls, on his or her quest for such pirate utopias. For example, The Spirit of Nature Oracle (which I use as a part of The Runes of Rold Forest), has the substitle: “Ancient Wisdom from the Green Man and the Celtic Ogam Tree Alphabet”.

The Green Man is a spirit, perhaps the spirit of all green and growing things. He is nature in manifest form. He has been present, in one form or another, since human beings lived in caves and walked among the trees of the great primeval forests of the ancient world. It is in places which still retain something of their original primitive aspect that we may encounter him still – in tracts of ancient woodland or in the few remaining places in the world that have not been overrun by humankind in our restless search for somewhere new to conquer and colonize.

The Green Man, from The Wildwood Tarot.

You can find his “signs” in art and in storytelling all over the world. You can find his face carved in stone on Cathedrals. In Tolkien´s Middle-earth he is Tom Bombadil. He is Robin Hood showing you the way to his pirate utopia in the Sherwood Forests. He is Peter Pan leading the Darling children to Neverland.