AVALON Blog Post 5: Dispatch from Nellieville

A guest post from sculptor and AVALON co-creator Peter Beerits, whose Nellieville installation will be the stage for the August 2019 world premiere of the play.

Avalon Blog--Sunday, March 10

I am working to make Nellieville a fitting site for the OHA production of Avalon, which means sprucing up the woods around the Grail Castle and increasing the population of knights. In a recent reshuffle of sculptures, I came back from a client’s home with a truckload of tattered and worn-out sculptures of gardeners and landscapers. I’ve decided to rebuild them and repurpose them as knights.  I am ever a found object man, so why shouldn’t my old sculptures be found objects?

The question is, what do Avalon knights look like? The origin of the story lies in the Dark Ages when the people of ancient Britain struggled to deal with the power vacuum left by the slow collapse of the Roman Empire. The Saxons also had ideas about how to respond to this vacuum: they invaded the British coasts.

The original Arthur was a dux bellorum (duke of war) who gathered his followers in a wooden hillfort and won a series of strategically important battles, unifying Britain and driving out the Saxons. This story has evolved over the centuries, captivating listeners, and will again this August when Avalon is performed at Nervous Nellie’s.

Today, we visualize Arthur and his knights in the extravagant armor of the high Middle Ages but, really, they would have been lucky to have helmets. Many generations of story tellers have pictured these warriors in the gear they found plausible. I could dress my knights in camo and Kevlar, but I settled on aluminum, which I can find as scrap (I always want found objects) and which evokes the knights who fought in Saturday matinee movies. That’s my version of the myth.

But what about the women?  My found object gardeners are all men. In traditional Camelot tales, the women mostly need to be rescued or cause trouble—really big trouble. Melody has found a different way to tell it in her play.  The vitality of myth arises from its ability to evolve, to give each generation the clues they need to make sense of life. So, I think I’ll make some lady knights!

(Images: Stained glass, including the Grail Window, both in the Wizard's Tower, and new knight sculptures. Photos by Peter Beerits)

NEXT POST in Seeking Avalon:  DRIVING THE SNAKES OUT OF IRELAND

AVALON, by Melody Bates, will have its world premiere in August 2019, produced by Opera House Arts and staged in a site specific production at Nervous Nellie’s Jams and Jellies on Deer Isle. All text and photos ©2019 Peter Beerits. More about Melody's work here. More about Peter's work here.