Crick Crack Club (try saying it fast!) is a UK-based performance storytelling curator and creator that was founded in 1987 – yep, pre-Internet! It programmes and tours public performances in theatres and art centres across the UK, as well as training and mentoring storytellers.
Well into their third decade of storytelling as an organisation, Crick Crack have worked with Rich Mix for over five years, bringing an always-eclectic and always-invigorating mix of spoken word, stand up tale-telling and theatre to our stages.
Read Kate’s interview below to find out how helping to register Crick Crack as a charity turned into running it, and why Kate believes “the story isn’t the words”. Intrigued? You should be!
Crick Crack returns to Rich Mix on Friday 20 March with Kali, a white-knuckle tuc-tuc of a spoken word ride.
Crick Crack Club at Rich Mix
Rich Mix: We’ve been told that you have an interesting history with Crick Crack Club – could you give us a potted history of your work with the organisation?
Kate Norgate: Well it’s a love story really. I often say that the Crick Crack Club is a family – and I mean it on all sorts of levels. We know all our performers very well. We’ve worked with many of them for years, if not decades. Many have worked with us for their entire career. And the same goes for our audiences – for some we’re a passing interest, while others stay with us for the long haul. But also at the heart of the organisation is an actual family, which is me, my husband Ben Haggarty, and our 5 year old daughter who keeps us all in check.
It’s not very fashionable to be a family run organisation. It’s not seen as ‘professional’. It can be patronised. But the Crick Crack Club has to be family run to achieve what it does with no core funding. The whole organisation feels like one of those hallways with a jumble of shoes, bags, wellies, scooters and bikes littered all over it.
So – how did I end up here? Well, I met Ben Haggarty. I was working as an education and interpretation manager for an environmental and heritage charity at the time, and I had agreed to help Ben register Crick Crack as a charity, because I knew my way around the application process. As I was doing that I discovered that he had boxes and boxes of audio recordings of storytelling performances dating back to 1980 tucked away in cupboards, so I stuck my heritage hat on and raised the grant funding needed to create a huge audio archive. I left my job. When the archive project finished, I never went back. Then I married my boss. We’ve both been at the helm of the Crick Crack Club’s ship of fools ever since. I’m actually in charge – just don’t tell Ben Haggarty that.
RM: Did you set out to be a Programme Manager?
KN: Nope… I set out to be a glacial geomorphologist, but life never quite works out as we expect!
Crick Crack Club’s first iteration of Wild Ones at the Wellcome Collection
RM: What’s a driving force that motivates you each day in the projects Crick Crack develops and produces?
KN: I work with a bunch of genius artists who tell stories about how to be human. What better job could there be? I think of the Crick Crack Club as providing ‘inner furnishings’ for people. After all, who amongst us wouldn’t benefit from being a bit better furnished on the inside?! Ikea simply isn’t going to cut the mustard in that department.
RM: What’s something very few people understand about performance storytelling? Or something it took you a few years to realise?
KN: That the story isn’t the words. It’s the ‘what happens’. Some performers like to work with scripts, but for me, the most exciting work we programme is improvised to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the performer. As storyteller Dominic Kelly once said very brilliantly – ‘the trouble with being a storyteller is that whatever comes out of your mouth, you have to deal with it’. It makes being a producer terrifying at times!
Also, because we work with folktale, fairytale, myth and epic. These are authorless stories. If you find them written down in a folklore collection that doesn’t make that the ‘correct’ version of the story. This means the storytellers can do whatever they need or want to do with the stories. They can mash them up, fill in the gaps, combine them, pick them apart, change them…whatever. That’s fundamental to the artistic work of the storyteller. That’s the job!
Crick Crack Club’s Fabularium
RM: How do you stay inspired? Are there any artists or contemporaries whose vision has inspired you?
KN: Welfare State for their ethos of art woven into the fabric of life. Giffords Circus for their ethos of creating magic and wonder. Peter Brook for his insights into the imagination. All of the artists who I get to work with, who have myth and metaphor running through their veins. And really and truly the audiences who come to our shows. They’re the real inspiration for me to keep doing what I do.
RM: What is your favourite film?
KN: One? I can’t do one. Ghost Dog, The Guard, Calvary, Delicatessen, Black Cat White Cat, Miss Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Whale Rider, Paris Texas, Shawshank Redemption… I could go on.
Crick Crack at Rich Mix
RM: Across our Raised @ Rich Mix season, we’re celebrating our regulars and repeaters. What’s your favourite memory of a performance here?
KN: This is a tricky one. I have loved so many of the multiple voice events we’ve run at Rich Mix. These are a format that we created specifically for Artistic Director Oliver Carruthers when he first invited us into the Rich Mix programme way back on 2009 – with three storytellers working on a theme, performing in a space dressed with everything from fruit and veg, giant seagulls, to Day of the Dead shrines, pulpits and recreated charity shops. But above all, I think celebrating our 30th birthday was the boom! We have never felt the loyalty and support of our fan-club quite intensely as in that moment.
Is there more to come from Crick Crack’s Wild Ones?
RM: What’s a subject Crick Crack is yet to focus on, that you would love to hear stories from?
KN: Actually I really want to do MORE work on something – and that’s the subject of Wild Ones – the wild men, women, children and beings who populate out myth, fairytale, popular culture and human psyche in general. We ran a Late Spectacular event on the subject for the Wellcome Collection in 2017, which was one of the most amazing events I’ve produced, but it was six months work for a 4 hour event. It smashed their box office records, but it simply wasn’t long enough. I’d love to run a proper wild man festival for a proper length of time full of talks, performance, film, art, dance, exhibitions…..everything that touches on what wildness is, where we encounter it, and what happens when we do.
The Bargehouse Fairytale Festivals by Crick Crack Club
RM: It’s probably difficult to choose, but do you have a favourite project from your time at Crick Crack?
KN: It’s got to be the Bargehouse Fairytale Festivals. We ran two huge week-long winter festivals in the Bargehouse on Oxo Tower Wharf back in 2011 and 2013. They were a bonkers idea and difficult to produce because we had no funding for the first one and very little for the second, so everything was achieved by calling on favours and volunteers.
The Bargehouse is half a Victorian meat packing factory – five-storeys of really stunning, really raw building, owned by the magnificent Coin Street Community Builders. The results were amazing. We had film installations, magicians tucked away in corners, a bar fuelled by hot chocolate and rum, musicians, dancers, art and photography exhibitions, drawing salons, shrines, games and a full-on programme of storytelling performances. We installed a huge 25x8m labyrinth (painted by myself and storyteller Emily Hennessey over three nights in a village hall in Herefordshire) in the attic of the Bargehouse, set in total darkness, lit only by UV light, and bathed in a soundscape of bird song and whale song. Crazy and awesome pretty much sums it up. Writing about it still gives me the shivers.
RM: Thank you so much for your time Kate!
Make sure you book in for Crick Crack’s next immersive storytelling events: On Friday 20 March storyteller Emily Hennessey (who Kate mentions above) and sitar player extraordinaire Sheema Mukherjee present Kali. Take a white-knuckled tuc-tuc ride through sun-kissed palaces, infested forests and every cacophonous saffron-scented marketplace in-between.
Then on Wednesday 22 April join Crick Crack for The Women Who Gave No F**ks – tales to make you want to rip up the rules and riot!
And finally, look out for more interviews to come from our Raised @ Rich Mix Season.
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