The Beekeepers design games, interpret history and create unique events. We’re interested in connecting the past, present and future, and in people choosing their own adventures.

We’re a group of friends who enjoy working on projects together.

• Tim Anselm is a writer, and is also interested in the role of story-telling in society and public policy.
• Robert Stone is a designer interested in 3D modeling.
• Chris Gidlow is an historian who’s written some books, and also designs games.
• Michael Hagen is a writer, historical interpreter and landscape gardener.
• Silvan Fisher is a ceramicist who dabbles in jewellery, and writes stories of a frivolous and disturbing nature.
• Dougald Hine is a professional amateur, stumbling through other people’s specialisms… (read on)…
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  His career has included stints as a busker, a door-to-door salesman and a BBC journalist. In 2006, he accidentally started an internet startup, School of Everything, inspired by Ivan
  Illich’s ‘Deschooling Society’. He likes connecting people and ideas, starting things (and sometimes finishing them), and helping people find new ways to look at the world. He’s also one of the people behind the Dark Mountain Project which he explains below…
  
  
  

  Dougald Hine talks about the Dark Mountain Project from Anab Jain / Superflux on Vimeo.

  Quite by coincidence, Dougald is sitting in front of a poster for Chris’s work. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. The bees control the horizontal, the vertical…

Mike lives in a beautiful spot in New York State whereas the rest of us are in England, so he gets involved over email and the phone. Most of us live by the Sussex coast, where you may recall Sherlock Holmes kept bees when he retired to Bexhill-on-Sea.

At the moment we’re focusing on the idea of bringing spirits of buildings and locations back to life.

We’re exploring the links between interactive theatre, urban folklore, myths, memory and virtual worlds.

• We’re working on some shows.
• We’re intrigued by the idea of using empty shops and other dormant public buildings during the recession as temporary performance spaces and museums.
• We’re developing some walks that you can look at online, carry with you as a document or on your mp3 player, where you can become a history detective.

  On these walks you’ll uncover some of the stories that you don’t usually find in tourist guides, hidden inside street names, the stonework of buildings, and in the flow of lost rivers and ancient streets.

• We’re experimenting with virtual worlds and how they overlap with real places. We’re looking at online maps, mobile devices and geographical metadata combined with 3D modeling, as accessible tools for re-imagining public space.
• This has also taken us off on a research tangent looking at the history of role-playing and popular entertainment, Commedia dell’Arte, masques, mystery plays, pilgrimage, carnivals, burlesques and charivaris in British and world traditions.

On the last of those, if you like the sound of all that then we can heartily recommend:

• Vic Gatrell’s ‘City of Laughter’ as a starting point.
• We’re also very inspired by Stephen Orgel’s ‘The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in The English Renaissance’
• Simon During’s ‘Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic’
• Ronald Hutton’s ‘The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual year 1400 – 1700’
• Shirley Collins’ ‘America Over the Water’.

We like collaborating with our friends:

• Warhorse Theatreworks
• Mr Tim Healy and the Oxford Waits
• The treeHouse gallery
• The Institute of Collapsonomics
• Jenna Patrick (who made the beautiful images for Pirate Day and Trees, Birds & Bees).

We must make special mention of Mr Jonathan Swan, his staff and colleagues, who display near-saintly patience when Beekeeping schemes – at the moment an ingenious solar energy collector made from old florescent lighting tubes, of Mr Swan’s design – stop him from running his jewellery workshop on Lewes High Street.

Mr Peter Cole – proprietor of Replicants, purveyors of fine plastic figurines to the gentry, from the same establishment – and who has written a book – ‘Suspended Animation’, about Heralad and Britain’s plastic figures – is equally tolerant of capricious, whimsical and occult inquiries about tricorn hats. Mr Cole shares the Beekeeper’s great fondness for Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.

On which note we shall saddle up and mosey on out of this brief description of our modus operandi…