Conversations with an Elephant

A report by Richard Ings which the charts the emerging themes and conversations
started at Lift's How many elephants does it take..? conference held at the
South Bank Centre on Monday 8 May, 2006.

All photographs in this report were taken by Susana Paiva.

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 1

Introduction
Not so much a Conference than a New Conversation
‘What is missing from the world is a sense of direction, because we are
overwhelmed by the conflicts which surround us, as though we are marching
through a jungle which never ends. I should like some of us to start conversations
to dispel that darkness, using them to create equality, to give ourselves courage, to
open ourselves to strangers, and most practically, to remake our working world, so
that we are no longer isolated by our jargon or our professional boredom.’
- Theodore Zeldin's idea of the New Conversation, from Conversation: How Talk
Can Change Your Life (1998), p. 97

The arts world is not short of talk. Not simply the talk of the so-called chattering classes
debating the merits of this play or that exhibition, but increasingly the professional talk of
arts practitioners and policy makers at conferences and seminars. Stick a pin anywhere
in the calendar and you will find people are gathering somewhere to talk about something
to do with the arts. So, the event held by Lift, the London International Festival of
Theatre, on Monday 8 May, 2006, in a large room at the South Bank Centre was, on the
face of it, yet another arts conference, attended by 150 people drawn from the creative
industries, from funding bodies, from theatre companies and so on, and including artists
of various disciplines and persuasions. This time, however, there were some notable
differences.

The theme, for a start. Instead of focusing on, for example, arts and social inclusion or
developing new audiences, this meeting set out with a curiously challenging title: How
many elephants does it take..? The dots presumably stood in for 'to change to world' -
or perhaps ' to change a light bulb', in the spirit of an ancient elephant joke. Either way,
the purpose of this day was not to present papers or show films or otherwise educate the
delegates. It was held, in part, to celebrate and memorialise the remarkable goings on of
the past weekend, when London and much else of the country was held in thrall by the
unexpected appearance of a gigantic time-travelling elephant and a little (but twenty-foot
tall) girl from outer space, bang in the heart of the capital city.

More about this in Bringing The Sultan's Elephant to London – page 4 >>

Angharad Wynne-Jones, Director of Lift, set the agenda for the day:

“We're here to think about how the impossible becomes possible. I think the
Elephant and the Little Girl are impossible objects, yet they were moved to and
through this city by the collective will, the extraordinary imagination and the sheer
logistical virtuosity of a group of people brought together because of these
mechanical puppets. But it is really in the response of the public that the event
lives, and will continue to change and charge our perceptions of our city and of
each other.”

For conference veterans particularly, the quality of this day of talking was unusual. First,
rather than grappling with issues in the abstract or at second hand, every delegate
brought with them the material for the conversations which began almost immediately
after Angharad's welcome. We had all been there and done it and were wearing the
metaphorical tee-shirt. The only 'experts' wheeled on during the morning were members
of the small and heroic team that had made The Sultan's Elephant project happen. No
one else had privileged information, for everyone had witnessed the wonders of the
weekend and had their stories and reflections to share.

Caoimhe McAvinchy, curating the day on behalf of Lift, jettisoned the old conference
routines: keynote, plenary-with-panellists, Q&A and breakout sessions, followed by final,
weary summing up and that last interjection from the floor, from the embittered delegate

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 2

who always seems to be there at the end of such events. In place of all that, we were
given some numbers that led us to one of many tables to meet with, most likely,
strangers and were all given a set of navigating questions to talk about. Where did you
experience The Sultan's Elephant? What did you see? What did you hear? How did you
feel?

More about this in Reflections – page 6 >>

Although many of us may not have realised it, we had been presented with a version of
the famous menus for conversation that historian Theodore Zeldin hands out at his
'conversation dinners'. As his own, unscripted talk, given in plenary that afternoon, made
clear, Theodore is passionate about talking - not for the sake of passing the time or
impressing the dinner party guests but to change our lives, no less. His pocket book on
conversation contains the following memorable mini-manifesto:

‘The kind of conversation I am interested in is one which you start with a

willingness to emerge a slightly different person.’

In this instance, we had already been softened up to be slightly different people, thanks
to our wordless encounters with an Elephant. As the day progressed, we moved from
reflections on what we had seen and heard and felt to finding out just what had made this
weekend possible and what the implications might be for our future work in the city and
beyond. By now, our conversations had moved closer towards a place where, as
Theodore puts it, we were using them 'to give ourselves courage, to open ourselves to
strangers, and most practically, to remake our working world.'

The arts world, as part of the working world, is riven with conflicts, and no one is quite
sure whether there is a common direction we might be taking. Too often, as theatre critic
Michael Billington in his now notorious Guardian blog, Elephantine Infantilism, haplessly
demonstrated, we are trapped in a particular way of thinking, in particular definitions - is
this theatre, anyone? - and in particular jargon. What The Sultan's Elephant achieved by
proxy on this day of talking was the start of new conversations that might dispel that
particular kind of darkness. One delegate, who described himself as a dance scientist
and consultant from the North East, put it this way:

“We are hoping that not only will artists possibly have been inspired to create work
on a larger scale and have fantastic ideas, but that the people of London will go
away and approach their working problems and their personal lives in a different
way - and believe in the possibility that things can change.”

The last task of the day for delegates was to go back to our tables to consider aloud two
final questions: What impossible things should be possible? What needs to happen to
make them possible? Caoimhe urged us to follow in the wake of the Elephant, which had
left 'a great big footprint on the cultural landscape of London', taking whatever tangents
we liked off that path. For only when we start imagining 'baby elephants', could they have
a chance to grow and become real.

“What will you yourselves be willing to do in your own lives, and your own
company, and your own organisation? Tomorrow, what will you be willing to do
yourselves, and what will you do with it? And how? That is what one needs to find
out. And when we know that, there will be seedlings everywhere.”
- Theodore Zeldin's final words at the conference.

More about this in Can we do the impossible too? – page 21 >>

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 3

Chapter 1
Bringing The Sultan's Elephant to London

‘Never doubt that a small group of

forceful committed people can
change the world. Indeed it is the
only thing that ever has.’
- Winston Churchill, quoted by
Sarah Weir at the conference, How
many elephants does it take..?

The story of the small group of

people who brought The Sultan's
Elephant to London is a long and
inspiring one, perhaps similar to the
Sultan's own trek through time and
space.

More about this in Reflections – page 6 >>

Those that were able to attend the conference, How many elephants does it take..?
included Helen Marriage and Nicky Webb of Artichoke Productions, who dreamed it all up.
What follows is just a taste of how their adventure began.

Once upon a time, around twenty years ago, Helen first encountered the work of Royal de
Luxe.

“It's the best company I had ever seen. It is the most moving work that I've ever seen;
it breaks down every barrier. And it always struck me as very weird that they were able
to travel to China, to Mali - where they lived for six months, to South America and all
over continental Europe, yet their monumental work had never been seen here.”

Some years later, she and Nicky took their children over to France to see the company's
show, Les Chasseurs des Girafes (The Giraffe Hunters)

“With Royal de Luxe, everything has to be authentic. That means that when you are
working with an elephant it travels at, if you are lucky, perhaps one and a half
kilometres an hour. But when you are working with giraffes, they travel at the speed of
light. The audience was pounding along to try and keep up with this giraffe, which was
as high as the Elephant. I had my daughter by the hand and she was being sort of
horizontally towed by me - I don’t think her feet were on the ground - and she looked
up and said, 'Mummy, I will give you all my pocket money if you can bring this to
England.' (She is a very smart child - she knows about arts administration and the
relation of pleasure to money!)”

Five years ago, negotiations began to bring the Girafes over to England.

“The process took such a long time that, by the time they had agreed to bring an event
to London, they had done that show five times so they decided that enough was

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 4

 enough. So, we had to invest in the co-production of a new show: The Sultan's
Elephant. This was a celebration of the centenary of Jules Verne last year,
commissioned and co-produced by the cities of Nantes, where Verne was born, and
Amiens, where he died.”

As the project took shape, Artichoke began to realise just what a financial risk they were
taking.

“It is quite hard to convey how frightening this was. The costs of bringing the company
here were huge: we have just had 102 French colleagues here for nearly a month. You
have seen the scale of the performance, but the scale of what led up to it was
immense. The elephant arrived in three pieces - three 'abnormal loads' - closing roads
on its route from Dartford to Battersea. The head got lost. It took a wrong turning and
went under a bridge in Fulham and had to be retrieved. That set the schedule for
assembly back, so the crane hire bill went up and so on. Some way further down the
line, with our costs steadily rising, we agreed with the company that our contribution to
the actual creation of the work would not be needed but we remained part of the
planning process with the other partners.”

For the project to stand a chance of succeeding here, local hearts and minds needed to be
won over. Numbers of key players, including John Gardner of TfL London Buses and Lift
staff, were ferried over to Nantes to see Royal de Luxe perform and then it was all underway,
at last.

“It's taken us five years to get this show together and 90 per cent of that time has been
spent persuading people that we should be allowed to do it. Before Nantes, the plan
was essentially to go from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square. We had been offered
Piccadilly and that was a huge thing - to close Piccadilly. But, after Nantes, we all went
out to dinner, and I had the tough job of saying, 'OK guys, now you’ve seen the show,
closing Piccadilly isn't enough. They need to explore. This show is a living thing and
they need to do what people who visit London do: they need to walk about and
shuttling back and forth isn't the answer.' It was a very quiet dinner that Sunday night.“

“On the following Tuesday morning, I had a call from Trevor Jenner of the Met, who
had been at the dinner. 'You re talking to the Metropolitan Police,' he said. 'We're a
can-do force, so give me your wish-list!' It was the best moment because I realised that
people like Trevor wanted this show to happen as much as I did. There are three
things needed to make something like this happen: faith, hope and love. For me, the
most important of these is - and here I'll probably cry, as I have for most of the
weekend! - love.”

A postcript
This visit was hugely important for Royal de Luxe, not least in practical terms, as there were
delegations visiting from other cities, including Tokyo, who were here to see how it was
possible to make something like this work in a city that is as complicated as this. But what
the company really responded to was the people here. They said that, when they turned the
corner from Lower Regent Street into Pall Mall, the world was black with people. They had
never seen an audience like this. It was everything they had ever dreamed of.

“Almost everyone says, 'Why would anyone let you do that?' And of course the
answer, the only answer, is: 'Why not?' “
- Nicky Webb, Artichoke Productions

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 5

Chapter 2: Reflections

“The only choice you ever have to make is to decide to go and see it. There is
nothing else to know.”
- Helen Marriage, Artichoke Productions and lead producer of The Sultan's
Elephant

“We felt the whole piece allowed all kinds of perspectives from the people
watching. Those who wanted to get close, those who wanted to get wet, those who
didn't want to get wet, those who wanted an ending, those who didn't care if it did.
Those who watched the narratives on the balcony of the Elephant, and those who
didn't care to. We were aware that nobody could see the whole thing, and you had
to accept that this was the deal: you all saw a little bit - and we loved that feeling.”

Independent theatre-maker Sue Mayo's summary of her conference conversation seems

an unconscious echo of that old joke about the elephant in the darkened room. Each
person touches a portion of the animal and comes to a different conclusion as to its size
and nature. No one guesses the whole picture. So, too, with trying to identify the
enigmatic animal that was The Sultan's Elephant - not the mechanical mammoth itself
but the whole project, and not just the single May weekend when people witnessed it but
the aftershocks first described on the following Monday's conference and that still
continue in our thoughts.

The How many elephants does it take..? conference could be seen, therefore, as a
sharing of impressions in a darkened room - the rain had, inevitably, set in that Monday -
and perhaps as a first attempt to describe the whole enchilada. The initial navigation
questions set by Lift were: What did we see? What did we hear? What did we feel?

There were, of course, as many answers to these questions as there were people. Each
person had had a unique encounter with The Sultan's Elephant. Yet, certain themes
began to coalesce as we talked and as we remembered things seen, heard and felt over
the weekend. In going over all of this material again, I have tried to set down those
themes and ideas that have most resonance now as we begin to take up the challenge
that this remarkable project has set us.
So - what did we see, hear and feel?

We saw

an Arrival – O brave new world! on page 8

a Wonder – Falling for an Elephant on page 9

and an Act of Theatre – A sense of theatre on page 11

and we heard

the Creation of Stories – A crowd of storytellers on page 13

and Liberty trumpeted in the Streets – The streets of London on page 15

and we felt

Intimacy in the epic Crowd – The epic and the intimate on page 17

and Sanity in the Madness – The sanity cause on page 19

Each of us had had a unique encounter and each of us created our own version of The
Sultan's Elephant. If I had to choose what was the most significant aspect of the project
for me, it would be its sense of play and the way in which the Elephant and the Little Girl
awakened the child in all of us. One observer who saw a theatre critic's claim that this
project was not 'adult' enough, responded by quoting C.S. Lewis, author of The
Chronicles of Narnia, Oxford Fellow and Cambridge Professor of Medieval and
Renaissance Literature:

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 6

 “When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had
been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man
I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be
very grown up.”
- On Writing for Children

From the sewing of cars to the road where they were parked to the sight of a gigantic
Elephant peeing in full view of Buckingham Palace, this project was a child's undiluted
triumph over the adult order. It was the world turned upside down, like revolution or
carnival, but above all it was as if some amused god of the old school had granted
everyone permission to let go and - play.

Only a few pooh-poohed the fun of it all. A blogger called ideaswoman suggests that
perhaps we should listen to these critics and their warnings about the 'brain-shrinking
perils of fun'. Then, she continues, we can all get on with the serious business of not
enjoying our art, keeping the pavements free for charging crossly from A to B and
standing aside for London's smoothly-flowing traffic.

Indeed.

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 7

O brave new world!

Noah wriggles through the crowd to the wire barrier. I keep one eye on him and the other on
the crane that is about to open up the rocket that has landed, mysteriously, smack into the
tarmac of Waterloo Place. The odd jet of steam still percolates up from the impact of the
night before. Two large vehicles moved into the square a few minutes ago. One is a truck
doubling as a stage for a four-piece rock band that finally launches into a loud, stately,
looping riff as the other, less orthodox vehicle approaches the rocket. Figures in - I think -
eighteenth-century footman outfits of scarlet and gold are all over this odd-looking
contraption, a kind of baroque, Heath Robinson precursor of the modern crane that is now
finally raising the lid of the rocket. The music swells as some of the more daring and
acrobatic figures climb down inside and attach ropes to whatever is down there. Finally, all is
fixed and ready. As we hold our breath, the Little Girl slowly emerges. Once two assistants
have removed her leather flying helmet, her head swivels to take in the scene. She bats her
eyelashes and shakes her hair loose. I am, not for the last time this weekend, unaccountably
moved.

Like much else of this extraordinary project, this particular event worked on a number of
levels. At one level, I was reminded of Miranda's famous lines from Shakespeare's play, The
Tempest, when she encounters a large group of strangers for the first time in her life:

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!

In the same way, this innocent arrival in our world offered us a trusting face, seeming to gaze
in wonder at our 'goodliness'. This resonated so strongly perhaps because, in a political
culture infused with near-paranoia over illegal immigration and the threat of foreign-inspired
acts of terror, the immigrant is a particularly vulnerable figure. How do we make strangers
welcome here?

I believe that humanity is a family which has hardly met. One of the best ways it can
meet is for our traditions of family hospitality to be revived; that is where conversations
with strangers can first fully begin.
- Theodore Zeldin, Conversation: How Talk Can Change Your Life (1998), p. 44

At another level, being there was like being present at a birth - again, this is the emergence
of innocence into a fallen world. Like expectant relatives we had waited and were finally
rewarded.

And at another level, it felt like a gift.

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 8

Falling for an elephant

One Friday morning this year, a fantastic sight greeted Londoners. Hundreds gathered to
watch and cheer, clicking cameras and using mobile phones; some brought their lunch
along; others spoke excitedly to television cameras that had also been drawn down to
witness this invasion of the strange. According to the BBC, accountant Shameen Khan was
on a shopping trip on New Bond Street when she got a call from a friend.' I was heading
somewhere else', she said, 'but then I thought: you just live your life. You’ve got to go and
see that whale.'

Fanciful stories flew around the streets and into cafés and family sitting-rooms and even
drifted onto news desks until the calm voice of marine biologists silenced them with scientific
facts - explaining that, in fact, the appearance of a whale in our great, long-domesticated
river on January 20 2006, though unusual, was no portent or sign of ice-caps melting and not
an appeal for our intervention to 'save the whale' - or the world. But, still did all those stories
vanish? All those dream-like connections with what the sea washed up here, in our capital
city?
London, of course, had the chance to see another Wonder this year, on the first (long)
weekend of May. Judith Knight of ArtsAdmin reported from her conversation about an
elephant that:

“People were struck by the wonder of

it. That's why they surrendered
themselves, following the Elephant
down the streets. In Horse Guards'
Parade, it looked magnificent, but
when it was in places like Haymarket,
the sheer scale of it against those
buildings was completely
unexpected.”

The Sultan's Elephant was very

unlikely to fool any kind of biologist or
any onlooker over the age of three,
with its impossible size and the
visibility of the levers and gears and
the people who operated them to
move the great mammal along, yet there was still a sense amongst many in the crowds of
being privileged to witness a unique natural phenomenon and one which you would be a fool
to miss. That slippage was expressed by both Erica Wyman, from Northern Stage in
Newcastle, and Angela McSherry, freelance arts consultant, in reporting back their
conference conversations:

“We were very struck by the strange nostalgia and romance of the Elephant. Someone
said that it was as if it was an event that they didn't think they were going to be able to
see in their lifetimes - the sort of thing that doesn't happen anymore, where something
happens and everybody has to go and see it.”
- Erica Wyman

“We just pondered on our sense of awe, and we wondered what it would be like to be
someone in the 19th century who saw an elephant for the very, very first time. And,
hey, we know that feeling. We saw an elephant for the very first time; we had the
privilege of that feeling.”

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 9

 - Angela McSherry

A substantial part of the magic of the weekend was the curious way in which two giant
puppets, openly manipulated by teams of people, not only appeared sentient but also
seemed able to develop a personal, even tender relationship with crowds of strangers. One
delegate recalled looking behind him to check that the Elephant was ok and only when he
turned back did he then realise how daft a thought that was. This instinctive concern was
brilliantly illustrated by an anecdote retold by panellist Alan Jacobi, Production Manager for
The Sultan's Elephant:

“Jeff Long from London Ambulance on Saturday night said to me, "Oh, you’ll never
guess what happened today. An 80-year old woman came in and she was rather tired.
We started talking to her because she looked a bit distressed. When I asked her what
the problem was, she explained that she had been chasing after the Elephant because
she had brought him some buns." And it was absolutely true - she had the bag of buns
with her.”

This might seem an extreme example, but Elspeth McLaughlin, from NVA, an environmental
site-specific company based in Glasgow, reported that:

“People actually waited in the rain for two and a half hours watching a sleeping
Elephant, - as you do. And we all felt that sense of gratification when the Elephant
finally woke up. It was worth the wait.”

The same kind of thing happened with the Little Girl, whose gamine charms many of us
succumbed to. For Bill Gee, an independent producer, the fact that she was so innocently
flirtatious made her 'very real' - indeed, 'the animation just kept it all very real for all of us
over the three days.' Jocelyn Cunningham, of Creative Partnerships, was also moved to see
how even the police and security people seemed to consider the characters real, 'saying to
those that asked that - no, they didn't know where the Little Girl was'. Sue Mayo, a freelance
theatre maker, reporting back from her conversation, described how this illusion of life was
achieved partly through the attention to detail:

“We saw people looking and marvelling at the Elephant's eyelashes. We saw one of
the company just very gently pulling up one of the Girl's ankle socks. There was that
kind of detail. Set against the massiveness of the whole project, we thought that was
an incredible achievement.”

Alan had another good anecdote that illustrated the way that people had willingly suspended
their disbelief and invested their own imagination in what they were seeing, just as a child
might:

“On Thursday, when the rocket was discovered, just across the road at the bottom of
Regent Street there is a large private bank, and at lunch this chap came out who was
obviously one of the managers. Actually, the only thing that was missing was the
bowler hat. And he was standing there, chatting away to people and was overheard to
say, 'I study space and that kind of thing in my spare time - it's a hobby of mine', and
he walked around the rocket and stroked it and said, 'Yes, I can verify its authenticity!'
It's made out of French railway sleepers. 'Oh no, it isn't! It's a 1905 rocket that arrived
yesterday'.”

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 10

A sense of theatre

As we gathered near the steps

leading up into the National
Gallery, a single file of
determined older people wormed
its way through the hard press of
onlookers in the direction of St
Martin's-in-the-Field, ignoring the
grand sight of the Elephant
holding court over Trafalgar
Square’s thickening crowds.
Several seemed quite anxious at
having just been redirected away
from where the Elephant had
been cordoned off. One woman
explained, half-complainingly, to
me: "We're trying to get to the
theatre."

What relationship is there between The Sultan's Elephant, which was co-produced, after all,
by the London International Festival of Theatre, and the West End? Both claim to be theatre
but, for many people, theatre is usually thought of as a very specific kind of activity in a very
specific kind of place. As someone heavily involved in organising the Elephant project, Alan
Jacobi of (aptly named) Unusual Productions, found this problematic:

“It's interesting that one of the difficulties I had - more than any other - was trying to
explain the context for what we were doing. As far as we were concerned, it was a
theatre gig, but people didn't understand. They think that the theatre is four walls, a bit
of black paint, some lighting, a bit of sound maybe, a bunch of actors in a confined
space. They understand ceremonial events - military parades, commemorations and
all that - which happen in large spaces in central London, but this was the first time
what I would call real theatre had been done in a wide open space.”

Helen Marriage of Artichoke Productions, and lead producer in bringing The Sultan's
Elephant over to London, was scathing about the failure in this country to place a value on
work which happens outdoors rather than 'in darkened rooms sitting next to strangers you'll
never see or speak to again.'

“We have carnival, but we tolerate carnival. We don t celebrate it. We don t really
invest in it in the way it should be invested in, because it's free, because it doesn't fit
with a British sense of hierarchical values. And, for me, this is a huge tragedy, because
this is the way in which one touches the most people - it's not just about 120 people
sitting in a black-box studio. The real power of this work is about being out there on the
streets and experiencing your world.”

It was not just a handful of coach-party punters who failed to see that the Elephant and the
Little Girl were, indeed, a form of theatre. The Guardian's veteran theatre critic Michael
Billington's disenchanted view of the event, Elephantine infantilism, questioned whether 'this
kind of diversionary spectacle could really be classified as theatre'. As several of the many
people who responded to Billington's Guardian blog pointed out, the only practical use this
urge to classify and box things up achieved seemed to be a conservative and somewhat self-
serving one.

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 11

To be fair, Billington was brave enough to declare what he believes theatre is: 'a public event
that affects the mind and heart as well as the eyes, and which does something to change the
human situation'. This definition is, interestingly not far off that made by conference speaker
Theodore Zeldin of what makes significant conversation - talk that can change your life - and
few of the many critics of Billington's article took exception to it. What they did object to was
his failure, couched in the tone of a Grumpy Old Man, to recognise that this public event did
indeed affect the mind and heart and, for many, did change 'the human situation', if only
temporarily (one wonders how much theatre changes it permanently). Billington's principled
stand against a 'spectacle' looked to many more like a form of snobbery and was rather sad,
too, particularly in its denigration of the urge it inspired 'to become little children' (exactly
what Picasso had argued artists should do).

Defining theatre is, in any case, a minority sport and probably doomed to inconclusiveness.
Erica Wyman, from Northern Stage, summed up the majority opinion:

“We were very struck by the fact that it was theatre and that it wasn't - and it didn't
matter whether you thought it was or not.”

However, Jane Ripley, a freelance carnival designer, reminded delegates of the dancers and
actors that had cavorted endlessly around the Sultan's palace carried by the Elephant, and
made this further observation from her conference conversation:

“We loved the fact that the Elephant was not only a performance, with the road as a
stage, but was a stage in itself. There were performances within performances.”

So perhaps it was theatre, after all, and perhaps London's - or all the world's - a stage. As for
that coach party - perhaps not all of them remained oblivious of the Elephant in their
darkened room. Someone calling themselves 'joyelephant' wrote this in reply to Billington's
blog:

“Well, I had tickets for a matinee yesterday afternoon - for a play to which Michael
Billington gave 4/5 - and I didn't go. The Sultan's Elephant was so profoundly
wonderful that I couldn’t tear myself away. “

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 12

A crowd of storytellers

One of the more unusual aspects of

The Sultan's Elephant was that
almost no one really knew about it
until they saw it, unless they were
one of the thousands who turned up
when someone who had seen it
texted or phoned them to 'just come
and see what they were seeing'.
There was - deliberately, it turned
out - only a trickle of publicity before
the weekend, though enough to
cause a tremor of interest in the
media. When we stood watching the
Little Girl emerge from the rocket on
Friday morning, the square was
only lightly crowded and it was not
hard either to get close to the Elephant, still sleeping on Horse Guards' Parade before his
first perambulation. By Sunday, the final day of the project, there were - it is estimated - close
to a million people swarming over St James's Park and the streets around Piccadilly, trying
to get a glimpse of what had become a national phenomenon, featured in full colour
throughout the broadcast and print media.

Even then, though, there was still not much information about what was actually going on
and what these extraordinary visitors were up to in our capital city. Most gathered the gist of
the story - a time-travelling elephant owned by a Sultan searching for a mysterious little girl -
and a few picked up the Elephant & Echo, a newspaper published for the event, which gave
more details of the project along with an insert of four editions of The Jules Verne (one for
each day). These densely-printed free illustrated supplements contained a tale by Verne
(whose centenary this project celebrated) that seemed to mimic the long, rambling and exotic
journeys of the Sultan; I for one have still to reach its denouement.

In reporting back his conference conversation, composer John Webb remarked that this lack
of information forced people to create their own stories:

“People not knowing what was going on was really important. It meant that you had to
find different ways of engaging with it all - you had to discover it as you went along.
We'd heard, for example, of a policeman who wasn't going to tell a family the route of
the Elephant and give the game away. But there were other officials who really hadn't
been told what was going on, like the parking attendant who didn't quite know whether
to give the rocket a ticket or not when it appeared!”

This point was taken further in Erica Wyman's report back:

“We also talked about how the crowd were given confidence to react in whatever way
they wanted to. Every single little action and detail that was added to the experience
allowed us to decide how we wanted to react and tell our own stories.”

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 13

The interactive and participatory aspect of what, to a superficial observer might have seemed
simply a spectacle to gaze at, became increasingly clear. Jane Ripley noted how the pacing
of the event helped generate a kind of drama in the crowd:

“There was enough time to hang around and anticipate, and then something else
would happen and you wouldn't know what that was, and then you'd rush off
somewhere to see what was going on.”

News travelled fast, the crowd passing on information to each other or phoning friends who
were just arriving. As one delegate told it, a game of Chinese whispers gathered momentum
'in terms of what this elephant did, whether it walked into town, whether it didn't walk into
town, whose party it gate-crashed...'

Nobody mediated the event for us, so we became the storytellers. Lucy Neal, one of the co-
founders of Lift, remembered one such transformation:

“I heard a father yesterday in St James's Park, who had obviously spent hours getting
there, with his kids asking and asking, and he said, 'Shush, we have got to be really,
really quiet, because I think I can hear some really, really big footsteps!’ “

Now that the event is over, is it any easier to define in its entirety? And, therefore, isn't it just
possible, as one of the Lift Trackers thought, that the stories generated by The Sultan's
Elephant will one day 'become something like Greek mythology that we have to try and
figure out?'

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 14

The streets of London

One more extraordinary aspect of

this extraordinary project was the
way in which the symbolic heart
of our capital city was entirely
opened up for the Elephant and
the Little Girl, their entourage and
us. The loud trumpeting of the
Elephant on Horse Guards'
Parade must have interrupted the
conversation from time to time
over in Downing Street, where
the Prime Minister was chewing
over the latest local election
results. And the Little Girl walked
as far as the gates of
Buckingham Palace, which she
probably could have climbed over
if the spirit had taken her.

In her summing up of the morning's reflections at the conference, Sarah Weir, from Arts
Council England, pointed out that the project's location in Westminster was indeed very
significant:

“Make no mistake; this was a very political piece. It was chosen to be held in those
spaces and in those streets. Not just outside the National Gallery and such places, but
also down Pall Mall with all those gentlemen's clubs - different symbols of authority
and power, confronted by the anarchy of the Elephant coming down those streets.
Those spaces are actually quite private - I'm not sure I've actually walked down that bit
between The Mall and Friary Court, and I've lived in London all my adult life. There
was a sense of reclaiming those spaces for people, so that it became our city.”

In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), cultural theorist Michel de Certeau describes
pedestrians moving through the streets of the city as writers of a text. Although there is an
official 'syntax' that should be followed, ordinary citizens have the power to flout it by creating
their own 'indeterminate trajectories'. In this way, a 'migrational, or metaphoric, city... slips
into the clear text of the planned and readable city,’ which is one way of describing what
happened over this weekend.

Reporting back from her conference conversation, Jane Ripley, a freelance carnival
designer, talked of the liberating impact of seeing such official and over-prescribed spaces
being transformed in this way:

“We loved the sheer anarchy of closing off central London, digging a hole in the road
[for the rocket] and tying cars to the tarmac. We reckon we can do anything now.”

Being a mischievous child, the Little Girl had stitched a row of cars parked along Pall Mall but
the mischief had extended well beyond that, as Lucy Neal pointed out, ultimately resulting in
the changing of the Queen's plans and the Trooping of the Colour. Just as radical was the

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 15

impact on traffic in the centre of our capital city, diverting it from normally busy streets, as
Jocelyn Cunningham, of Creative Partnerships, remarked in her report back:

“Never mind the Elephant and the Girl, we were very moved by the reclamation of the
streets - just the way that we were able to walk along the road and turn a corner,
knowing that we had all that space without cars being there. There was a sense that
this was for us personally.”

This remark touches on a much wider feeling amongst urbanists and people who live in cities
- that we need to find a way to make our cities more intimate and manageable. In his
influential book, Cities for a Smaller Planet (1997), architect Richard Rogers argues that
'cities have grown and changed into such complex and unmanageable structures that it is
hard to remember that they exist first and foremost to satisfy the human and social needs of
communities'. Instead, most people think of city life in terms of 'alienation, isolation, fear of
crime, or congestion and pollution [rather than] community, participation, animation, beauty
or pleasure' - aspects of the experience that The Sultan's Elephant seems to have brought to
this city. It is worth noting here that among the specific changes to London's cramped and
privatised spaces he recommends is opening up the Mall onto St James's Park, to 'create a
beautiful and animated walk between Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace'. Public
space like this is safe and comfortable and conducive to a sense of creative and tolerant
citizenship.

On Friday night, having watched the Girl being helped into her nightdress and settling down
to sleep alongside the Elephant on Horse Guards' Parade, we walked slowly back up Regent
Street in the dark. A car or two edged along and the theatre and cinema lights winked and
gleamed as if settling into a well-rehearsed theatre-land routine. Then, passing us in a
whoosh of colour and speed, came the London Skate, a sinuous battalion of inline-skaters
sliding over the streets and streaming into Piccadilly Circus and on to - who knows where?
Perhaps fanning out in all directions to proclaim the streets of London open for all? After
such a day of wonders, it might be true.

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 16

The epic and the intimate

“The epic and the intimate has

been talked about quite a lot at
this conference, and it's a theme
that runs through everything - the
sense that this was something
huge, but even at such a scale, it
felt as if it was just for you.”

This theme, articulated here by

Sarah Weir, was echoed through
the day's conversations.

Elspeth McLaughlin, reported that her group had been talking mainly about big moments and
small moments, epic and intimate moments in the same breath:

“There was a huge sense of community on the bigger scale, right down to just hearing
what your neighbours were talking about.”

Temple Morris had recalled:

“an immense amount of thinking about your place in the world, of thinking a lot about
the people who weren't witnessing this - people who hadn't necessarily been thought
about for a while but were being thought about here. That sort of individual response
coming out of something so communal was incredible.”

For Sylvan Baker, a freelance theatre-maker, a key factor was the intimacy that developed
between the crowd and the Elephant, which seemed to encourage an intimacy within the
crowd itself.

“Street corners were special. It took the Elephant a while to get around a corner, so
you had a good long time with it. It was mesmerising. It was somehow intimate on a
massive scale, which seems a contradiction in terms. Then, a weird thing - strangers in
London talking to each other. You'd see someone later who didn't know where the
Elephant was and you told them or, if you'd lost track of it, they'd tell you. “

It was, another delegate concluded, impossible to be detached in this environment - there

was total engagement on every level, connecting people to emotions they don’t normally get
in touch with. The emotional impact on individuals was one of the most remarked
phenomena of The Sultan's Elephant project. That was why Angharad Wynne-Jones, current
Director of Lift, opened the conference by asking the question: how many people cried in a
public space over the weekend? A forest of hands shot up, including mine.
Sarah Weir described one of the many moving encounters conference delegates had had:

“We have said a lot about how we connected to ourselves - how we had a sense of
connecting to emotions within us that may be asleep a lot of the time. At one point

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 17

 during the weekend, there was a big burly guy in front of me and I was aware, out of
the corner of my eye, that he was lifting something up. I assumed it was a child, but it
was a huge, shaggy Labrador. Really huge. He had got it up into his arms and he was
trying to get it up onto his shoulders. The dog, as you can imagine, was all over the
place - until it saw the Elephant when it suddenly calmed down, transfixed. It was so
perfect. Then, this guy, a big bruiser, put the dog down and turned round. The tears
were just streaming down his face, tears everywhere.”

It has always been difficult, Helen Marriage told the conference, to explain the emotional
power of Royal de Luxe's work to people who haven't seen it. It's not enough simply to talk of
the size of the Elephant - 42 tonnes and the height of Admiralty Arch - because that does not
begin to convey the visceral impact it has on those who actually see it.

“Founder Jean-Luc Courcoult's fear is that people will think of Royal de Luxe as a
company of big machines, but any of you who have seen a show know that it is not
just about the machines, but about the tenderness and the relationships that can be
created out of what are essentially giant moving wooden structures.”

The crowd reflected that tenderness in the deft and good-humoured way it made way for the
Elephant's procession through London's tight streets. The police and security staff seemed
faintly startled by the lack of aggro. There were also very few injuries considering the size
and duration of the event. The emergency services reported a mere '5 and 15' - that is, five
people over the weekend went to hospital, and only 15 others had to be treated by one of the
ambulance crews on standby.

Pippa Bailey, associate director with World Famous Pyrotechnicians, noted telling evidence
of the crowd's extraordinary gentleness:

“There were a lot of daffodils in the park, some dead and others still in bloom. The
dead ones were walked and trampled over but the live ones were left standing.”

The whole event was the size of a demo, as Sue Mayo put it, but we weren't in opposition to
anything. It was more about healing. It reminded Ali Campbell, theatre maker and teacher, of
a puja - a Hindu festival - in the temporary nature of so many people gathering and in its
echo of rituals of cleansing and its essential solemnity and spirituality.
For others, its effect might have suggested a more political potential - one delegate
mentioned the sense she had had in the crowd of people power. In his book on conversation,
conference speaker and historian Theodore Zeldin sees:

“an affinity of those who are impatient with the slow pace of change in public life, and
who, while waiting for politics to increase the amount of justice - which may take
centuries - believe that ordinary people can make big changes by improving the way
they relate to each other in daily life.”

The intimate, then, may be the new massive.

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 18

The sanity cause

‘Sanity may impress us but it has never been made to seem attractive; sanity may be a
good thing, but it is somehow not desirable. The terrifying thing - and it is only the
terrifying thing that is ever glamorized - is madness; and, as ever, it is the frightening
thing that seems real. Violence in the street is more likely to stay with us, to haunt us -
to, as we now say, traumatize us - than, say, the more ordinary kindnesses of
everyday life. We may be unaccustomed to valuing things, to exploring things that are
not traumatic. Sanity may be one of these things.’
- Adam Phillips, Going Sane (pp. 47-48]

I took a break from following the crowds and the Elephant on Saturday and popped into the
ICA bookshop where I found a title by Adam Phillips that I hadn't come across before. He s a
psychoanalyst by trade and a provocative thinker; his style is highly readable and this new
book, Going Sane, looked typically unputdownable, being an exploration of why madness
seems so appealing and is so widely and interestingly written about, whilst sanity is hardly
examined at all. I recalled the passage quoted above when John Gardner, the bluff and
likeable chief of TfL London Buses, began his account of his involvement in The Sultan's
Elephant project:

“The first time I met Helen, and Nicky, I thought she was quite out of her tree, I really
did. She came to us and said, 'I want to bring a 40-foot elephant to London, and take it
through the streets of London.' Which magic mushrooms did you feed on today?”

And also when Hilary Carty from Arts Council England recalled her first encounter with Helen
Marriage, thus:

“I thought, So you're going to take a big elephant through central London, down Pall
Mall. Mmmm, right. My God, this woman likes a challenge! But when we saw the film
of the company's work, we were hooked. We felt it might just be possible - and Helen
seemed, dare I say it, sufficiently mad to make it happen! So we got on board.”

John, too, of course, got on board - literally as well as in spirit. Once he had been over to
Nantes to see Royal de Luxe in action, he drove back to France in a Routemaster bus that
was to be adapted there for touring the Little Girl around London. He then volunteered to do
that tour himself, chuckling at all the dropped jaws around town. All this from a man who had
once firmly told Helen and Nicky from Artichoke that there was absolutely no way he was
going to re-route the No. 38 bus for a mechanical elephant. It was a mad idea - but then the
whole thing was a mad idea. Another member of the team, Alan Jacobi of Unusual
Productions, had been too polite to say as much to Helen when she put the proposal to him.
Like the others, he had succumbed but he was keen to point the finger at the main culprit -
the founder of Royal de Luxe:

Jean-Luc Courcoult. Now, there is a very good example of what is fundamental to this
whole thing. He's a complete nutcase. Some of you will have seen him with his funny
glasses, and funny hat and so on. But he is a fantastic talent. All of that stuff came out
of his jumbly-jumbly head. But let us not forget, he is just a theatre director, he is just
like Trevor Nunn or Andrew Lloyd Webber - they all shout and scream when it goes
wrong, but they have immense vision. People don't understand that - it is not because
he is French, it's because he works in the theatre.

The old Romantic notion of the artist linked creativity to a kind of madness, but in this case
the apparent madness of the artists behind The Sultan's Elephant (and those otherwise

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 19

sober citizens they converted to it) made a lot of sense. It helped Londoners, who after all
had been badly traumatised by the terrorist attacks of July 2005, to value and explore
something that was the opposite of traumatic and perhaps gave those who witnessed it an
unaccustomed sense of what a public state of sanity might feel like.

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 20

Chapter 3: Can we do the impossible too?

“I don't think that events like this in the future will have any trouble getting sponsors.”
John Gardner, Transport for London, London Buses

Is London a can-do city?

As the conference panellists explained, it took a lot of negotiation to make it possible for The
Sultan's Elephant project to happen here.

More in Bringing The Sultan's Elephant to London - page 4 >>

Not the least of the challenges was London itself.

Royal de Luxe is used to a much easier ride in France, as Alan Jacobi of Unusual
Productions and Production Manager for The Sultan's Elephant explained to the conference:

“The French have a different system. Their cities are run by a mayor, so they have one
person who calls the shots. No matter what Mr Livingstone may think, it s not like that
in London. There are many, many different people who call the shots. Everything you
try and do here affects all kinds of people's lives and the way they go about their
business.”

Just how many people - and institutions - was itemised by another member of the UK team
behind the visit, Tim Owen, who is responsible to Westminster Council for event planning:

“The Royal Parks Agency; various departments of the city council, including
environmental control; street-trading; all our contractors, who you might have seen
cutting a tree down - several traffic lights came out, and the lighting poles removed,
and there was, of course, that bit of 'ground-breaking' in Waterloo Place. Then, there is
Transport for London and not just the buses - there's the London Contingency
Planning Section, London Traffic Control Centre, London Underground, British
Transport Police. And the Metropolitan Police, in various disguises and various
departments. Plenty of motorbikes around as well. Transport for London also has a
network assurance team which tries to keep traffic moving around. It has a street
management team, which deals with the complexities of how the highway works in
Westminster. London Ambulance Service co-ordinates all the first aid, backed up by
the voluntary sector at St John's Ambulance. London Fire Brigade was part of our
planning, too, because they have a statutory response time of 7 or 8 minutes to get to
a location, and there are four or five fire stations in this area.”

Hilary Carty from Arts Council England, another member of the team, hit on a perfectly apt
analogy for this complicated machine that makes London work:

“We all know that London is one of the most complex places to do anything because
there are so many layers of infrastructure, so many different bodies that you have to
negotiate with and navigate. There I was, looking at the Elephant, trying to work out
which lever was actually making the trunk move; I had managed to discover who was
moving the tail. I watched the operators sitting in their bucket seats and I wondered
exactly what each of them was doing and what their responsibilities were. I felt rather
sorry for the person who was flapping the ears, because it looked like a really hefty
job. All our government institutions are very much like that, a whole bundle of us inside
the elephant and some sitting outside, but all having to work together in harmony to
make this big elephant move.”

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 21

What this event has shown is that it can be done - the Elephant can actually be moved.

Pulling out the stops - and the traffic lights

This one story tells you everything about these fantastic people, said Helen Marriage,
describing how the impossible had been made possible - over and over again - by people
working together in London.

“Some do the things we are dealing with you can't imagine. The company had been
surveying the parade route for two years but, on the Wednesday before the show
started, they came back to Alan Jacobi very late in the evening and said that the
Elephant wouldn't go down Haymarket. We had originally assumed that it would go
down the right-hand side of the road, which, if you look at it carefully, has a camber. If
there's a 20cm camber and you are a 12 metre-high elephant, by the time you get to
the top you have a two metre lean and you weigh 42 tonnes - everybody concluded
that, however unfortunate it was, this was a safety issue we couldn't risk. We had two
days to go. So this wonderful man [Tim Owen from Westminster Council] phoned
some remarkable people. And we decided that we had to ' take out all the traffic lights
in Haymarket', in order to send the Sultan's parade down the middle of the road.

Physically taking out a traffic light is in itself a difficult thing, but it also usually requires
a six-week order - and there was the cost, too. But what were we going to do - stop the
show? David Mayo, one of Alan Jacobi s colleagues, went and met with all the
contractors and everyone else concerned. The digging started on Thursday morning
and, by that afternoon, the traffic lights and a whole wedge of central reservation had
gone.”

Is it just a French thing?

The French seem to have a particular thing about the street, from taking to the barricades of
the Revolution to taking on the State again in les évènements of 1968, and from the street
performers juggling outside the Pompidou Centre to the recent spectacular immolation of
vast numbers of cars in the Paris suburbs. The street is a theatre for the French. So, is it for
us?

Alan Jacobi told the conference about an interesting conversation about street-based theatre
and performance work he had had with the director of culture in Nantes, where Royal de
Luxe is based:

“He said, 'Of course it all started in Britain.' I asked him what on earth he was talking
about. He said, 'In 1968, I went to work for John Fox' - who is, of course, the founder of
the legendary Welfare State International. The French street theatre tradition has
flourished in the way that ours hasn't because culture minister Jacques Lang and
others since him decided that things like circus and street theatre were important and
needed to be funded as well as, say, the Opéra de Lyon. It's about all cultural values.”

Alan also suggested a more amusing way to translate this French enterprise:

“Our production team were always talking about things like le petit géant, and le
camion de musique. Aren't they romantic-sounding words? They must mean
something quite fantastic - but they are just French words! So, if we ever create
something like this in England, we have got to create a romantic set of words for all the
bits of kit - crane doesn't really cut it, does it?”

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 22

Can we learn to stop worrying, just a bit?
If The Sultan's Elephant project as a whole broke a few taboos about just how you can treat
the centre of London, there were also challenges to our perhaps overdeveloped concerns
about health and safety. Hilary Carty from Arts Council England was not the only one to spot
the risks being taken, nor was she alone in finding it liberating to be trusted to handle them:

When we went to see the cars stitched to the road, which was the funniest thing I've
seen in a long while, there was actual broken glass within easy reach of young
children. This is so un-British. It's not something we are ever allowed to do: to be within
touching distance of anything slightly, possibly, potentially dangerous. It was
wonderful!

Several people had noticed, too, that small children had somehow been allowed to ride in the
Little Girl's arms. And that some of the Elephant's entourage didn't seem to be wearing
harnesses at all times. In fact, the latter probably wasn't true and it seems that health and
safety was taken very seriously - but not in a way that impeded the impression of risk and
excitement. For example, one of the funniest aspects of the Elephant's progress was the way
it would pause now and then and lift its trunk to spray gallons of water over anyone nearby -
a safe and gentle form of water cannon to control the crowds.

The lack of barriers and heavy-handed security was much commented on, too, but again
reality told a different story, as Alan Jacobi explained:

Somebody said earlier on today that there were no barriers. Well that's fantastic,
because there were. You just didn't notice them. That means we did our job properly.

Given the way that the Notting Hill Carnival is often depicted more as a potential crime scene
by some in the media and elsewhere, one hope is that this event might show how we can
support free outdoor performances with a bit more courage and imagination.

Are we talented enough to do this?

“There are two elements within the company. Jean-Luc imagines the stories; he's a
dreamer. He explained to me in great detail what this whole show would look like four
years ago. But there is another extraordinary man who is never really given much of
the limelight, called Francois de la Rozière. You might have seen him as the chief
Elephant controller, walking in front of the Elephant. He is a very quiet man, who just
makes tiny movements with his fingers, and is constantly talking to all the
manipulateurs. Francois is not the chief elephant driver, though - he designed it and he
built it. He has a workshop in Toulouse and another in Nantes. He has a hundred
people who work for him and, when they started making the Elephant, it took 18
months to construct with 35 people working full-time. It is the combination of Francois'
technical genius and Jean-Luc's absolutely extraordinary imagination that make this
work so powerful.”

So the first question is: do we have artists like these in this country who have that kind of
imagination? Of course, we do. But the next question is: Are they let loose in this way,
supported through the years? No, they aren’t.

The truth of Helen Marriage's observation about how - and whether - we support such artists
and such ambition was widely acknowledged. Jane Ripley, as a carnival designer, amongst
others was conscious of how the sheer detail and exuberance of the craftsmanship on
display matched the ambition of the French company's artistic vision - and that this must
have meant that there had been an equally visionary long-term investment in the work.

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 23

 “We also discussed our amazement at the time and money that had been allowed, and
to work in such serious materials. We're used to having to work in things like fibreglass
and polystyrene and kite fabric. People were allowed to work in metal and wood and
serious materials. They'd taken a long time to do the research, they'd studied the
movement of the elephant - all that is an absolute luxury, to be allowed the time to do
something really well, really properly.”

How much will it cost?

There is no doubt that Helen Marriage and Nicky Webb of Artichoke took an enormous
financial risk in producing this show. Just as the decision-making process here was much
more complex than in France, the costs in London are around three times that over the
Channel, where the municipal authority takes the risk, as Helen explained:

“In London we've never had that sort of protection - the risk in both financial and
insurance terms sits with us. And I think the French think we are a bit mad to take that
on. The costs are so enormous - we were even going to be charged for every parking
meter that was suspended until we managed to agree a deal on that! Although
Westminster has been extraordinary operationally, and the Mayor's office has given us
some money, there hasn't been that sense of a civic buy-in that happens in Amiens or
Antwerp, when the company performs there.”

The total cost of The Sultan's Elephant in London was £1 million. This seems to Helen to be
good value.

“When journalists interview us, they keep saying, 'It's such a lot of public money, was it
worth it?' And you have to say, 'Well the easy answer is that a pound a person seems
cheap to me'.”

If she would say that, further support came from the delegates and from at least one
taxpayer whom Jocelyn Cunningham from Creative Partnerships met in Trafalgar Square on
Saturday morning, when the Elephant was lying down in front of the National Gallery and
people were preparing the official speeches of welcome:

“This older man came up to me, pointed his finger at me and said, 'If this is how our
taxes are spent' - I was waiting for it - 'then this is the right thing to spend it on!'”

But where will the money come from?

The Sultan's Elephant project was created out of faith, hope and love - and it looks likely that
future projects will need those same intangibles in order to persuade funding bodies to
support them. But the signs are good. For one, Arts Council England, in the shape of Hilary
Carty, was unequivocal about future support, having been an early adopter of the Elephant.

“This has been a really perfect example of what the Arts Council is striving to do. We
want to present the most innovative, the most creative, the most diverse of
contemporary arts and that includes outdoor art, street theatre and carnival. We have
prioritised more investment in this area because we must continue to support it - I
know for a fact that Grants for the Arts is going to go bust on street theatre, and no one
is going to limit it to £30,000 anymore! We're going to be challenged over and over and
over again to match the ambition of what we saw this weekend. And I think it is an
absolutely welcome challenge. We have the creativity but we don't yet have the
infrastructure or the sense of permanence. The big question is: when is the next
Sultan's Elephant? There is no question of there not being a next one.”

Conversations with an Elephant by Richard Ings 24