I spent the New Year up on the Corromandel at the Prana Festival, storytelling. Fortunately ‘Little Red’ (the truck) and I kept our ‘wheels above water’ as large areas of the Prana campsite flooded, submerging cars, tents and caravans.

As stages were closed, workshops & performances cancelled and lakes appeared, people remained surprisingly buoyant. The gathering began to look more like a refugee camp and less like a festival as everyone crowded into the one dry, solid roofed venue, the barn. It’s not the first festival that I’ve been at that’s been flooded. One summer in Britain I was performing at an even called ‘Campus’. Through the middle of the festival site ran a rather benign looking little stream, which after just a few hours of rain turned into a raging river that spilt the festival within minutes, taking cars and tents with it. My two lasting memories from that ‘flooding episode’ were watching a remake of the film ‘Flipper the Dolphin’ on a screen that had water cascading down it, and shelves of children stacked in the barn (once again the only spot impervious to the wet) in their sleeping bags.

However the sun did finally make an appearance for the New Year and I entered 2012 tethered to a crepe tent (to stop it from blowing away!). My ‘highlights’ or should I say ‘dry lights’ were attending  capoeira and felting workshops and the dancing around in the squelch to the rather fabulous Sol Samba Circus.

Of course storytelling happens rain or shine (we managed to proceed with both our storytelling performances)  and in fact, ‘bad’ weather often makes for ‘good’ stories. I’m quite sure that the ‘great wet’ resulted in much informal storytelling as people huddled together with everyone going away with  their own special rain induced tale!