f42 Crankie Women
Old technology is getting a new lease of life to illustrate traditional ballads and beyond. Pamela Wyn Shannon introduces the scrolling picture sisterhood.
P
amela Wyn Shannon, singer- songwriter, traditional musician and visual artist is an American expat living in the UK. Here she tells the story of how she
became a crankie woman and about the others she met along the way.
…the creak of a rusty crank and the crackling of parchment, the smell of burn- ing beeswax, the flickering glow of an illu- minated scene, the hum of a fiddle, the warm chestnut tones of a human voice…
In the digital age of the click, tap and swipe, there is a small group of women who are having a love affair with the good old- fashioned crank. We are not Amish, we are not Mennonites, but the one thing we have in common is that we are American folk musicians who happen to make art. We may or may not use cranks to grind coffee or to beat eggs, but it’s not the domestic hand- cranked devices of yesteryear that have us enraptured. It’s a magical storytelling box called a crankie. A crankie is a long swath of decorated fabric or paper rolled up on both ends like a scroll and installed in a box. The crankie comes to life as the performer slow- ly cranks the scroll while singing a song or telling a story scene by scene.
From quiet and humble corners, we are cranking stories and songs using a variety of techniques such as quilting, scherenschnitte (paper cut), appliqué, drawing, collage, felt- ing, and shadow puppets, many of which are backlit by candles. Like sweet straw berries preserved in jam jars, stories are kept in their scrolls until they are cranked out and shared with folk we meet along the way.
Katherine Fahey
Where did crankies originate? The art form can be traced back to ancient India where storytelling was accompanied with painted panels or scrolls. These scrolls were often considered sacred objects. When they were no longer usable, they were deconse- crated and ritually discarded.
In the mid-19th Century, they were called ‘moving panoramas’. A popular form of entertainment before the invention of the motion picture, these sometimes-enormous painted scrolls depicted popular themes such as military adventures and romanti- cised travels to remote regions. They were constantly on tour throughout the USA, UK and the rest of Europe. Although cinema eventually replaced this kind of entertain- ment, it stayed popular until the late 1920s, and was considered a Christmas-time treat. In the 1960s. German-born Peter Schaumann, founder of Bread & Puppet Theater in Glover, Vermont, started using crankies in his political theatre performances. (For those who want to delve more into the history of this analogue, pre-cinema spectacle, get the exhaustive tome on the subject, IIllusions In Motion, by Erkki Huhtamo, MIT Press).
The crankies of today are about keep- ing traditions alive as well as experiment- ing with new forms. It’s no wonder that they are experiencing a revival and charm- ing audiences hither and yon. Despite the fact that people now have access to most of the world’s knowledge and entertain- ment at their fingertips, they are still hun- gry for something that asks them to circle round and cosy up for a story or song in real-time with dimmed lights and slow
Pamela Wyn Shannon
moving handmade folk art. This is the pri- mordial magic that the ubiquitous comput- er screen cannot deliver.
My personal crankie craze kicked in just after I completed a stop-motion animation of my song Pipkin. I was pregnant during the making of the animation. Although I loved creating the puppets, all the electro- pollution from the production equipment left me feeling out of sorts and protective of my growing baby. After giving birth, I was looking for a medium that would include both art and music, and allow me to work on projects around my son without bom- barding him with a wall of devices that had nothing to do with his natural spirit. The crankie was the right speed for both of us!
I first learned of crankies several years ago when I attended a Spaghetti Dinner event by Great Small Works in New York City. It was an unforgettable night of pup- pets, performance art, crankies and a big plate of spaghetti. I almost choked on a spaghetto watching the performance art piece of a naked woman writhing on hun- dreds of walnuts and flinging forks into the audience. Worried I was going to lose an eye, I began making a move towards the door, but sat back down in my seat trans- fixed by what came next: a crankie by Bread & Puppet artist, Clare Dolan. I immediately loved the way simple images and a crank could cast a spell. But it wasn’t until a cou- ple of years ago that I saw the crankie that would inspire me to start making my own with an obsessive appetite: Francis Whit- more’s Wife by Katherine Fahey [
youtu.be/JYrNBbVqQGE ].
Photo: Neal J Golden
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