Who’s drinking your tea Sir? You Sir!
Edwina Ashton
Edwina Ashton’s offbeat humour and inventiveness spawned the idea of creating an alternative town population of surly, poorly behaved insects for her commission for Independent State in 2009. Would the insects run shops, or stage protests, or run the tourist information office?
In preparation for her commission Ashton visited other Somerset carnivals and the idea of setting her eccentric vision firmly within the context and approach of other carnival groups led to the ambitious idea of Ashton creating a full scale carnival float with local people for entry into Frome’s annual carnival.
Ashton’s eccentric vision departed firmly from the west end theatre and mainstream cinema references that dominate current carnival culture however, with her float began transforming it into a elaborate cartoon Victorian naturalist’s study complete with giant books, huge revolving top-hatted gentleman’s head, giant teacups and oozing slices of cake inhabited by a gaggle of unruly insects.
Featuring over twenty performers and requiring over a month’s solid construction by a team of seamstresses, prop-makers, technicians and engineers, Ashton’s project mixed school children, housewives, psychiatrists, builders, local artists, amateur dramatic performers, art students, tractor drivers to create a new temporary community to be formed mixing people from all walks of life who spent hundreds of hours to bring Who’s drinking your tea sir? You sir! to life.
Ashton’s float was a centrepiece of Frome’s 2009 carnival procession. Unlike the strictly choreographed routines and familiar musical standards of conventional carnival club floats, Ashton’s costume clad bugs ran amok without choreography or restriction as the float blared out a throbbing musical patchwork of punk, garage and electronica. The insects shook their candlewick-clad backsides and smoked in louche fashion in the faces of small children and harassed the gathered crowd of over twenty thousand people for money, taking Frome Carnival’s normal charity fundraising activity to surreal and hilarious extremes.
