Eyes on Stalks

'Welfare State International are brilliant at making an audience of strangers into a community.' Guardian

Eyes on Stalks is an autobiographical roller coaster through three decades of wild inventions by theatre company Welfare State International. It covers the principal and practice of site specific theatre, extensive community residencies and new rites of passage work created by the comopany, offering readers an exciting and provocative manual to their work.

Founded in 1968, Welfare State International was an inspirational theatre company based in Cumbria, England, producing innovative work work for nearly four decades, until 2006. Famed for creating and facilitating large scale celebratory art and theatre, ranging from carnivals, lantern processions and rites of passage, to flags, banners and pyrotechnics, the company's radical philosophy of art is revealed in this volume. In a mixture of personal stories, clear instructions, poems and artists' sketches, Eyes on Stalks is a detailed and practical guide to the production techniques they employed. It includes sections on caravans and street shows, community regeneration, comedy extravaganzas and alternative naming, betrothal and funeral ceremonies. The work is lavishly illustrated throughout with thirty photographs and over 100 sketches by artistic director John Fox.