my favourite thing to do is talk about myself.

The main reason I have decided to start a blog is to report on each day of The Majestic at the National Folk Festival. I figured I'd make it my own blog, because it seems like a good thing to keep up with.

I am Hadley. I do a lot of things, in Canberra. I work for Canberra Youth Theatre in all sorts of capacities. I started with them as a playwright and have kept writing shows for them as well as working in the office, painting and sweeping, and probably my biggest joy: as a drama tutor to 7 to 12 year olds, where I devise high speed, ridiculous comic scripts on topics including time machines, snake oil, trashy tabloid TV, evil French Nannas, politics, Daniel Radcliffe, and clowns that are also vampires. Some of the titles include:

Completely Normal Street
The Princess Pirates
In Hadley's Hair
Discombobulated
Freakshow Murder Mystery
GoGo McGoo's Ghoulash
Clown Town
The Least Suspicious Granny In France
Too Many Nannas
Stuff: The Musical!
Water: The Reckoning
Phineas T. Lilypad, Water Swindler
Zero Calory Water

One day I am sure I will publish them all to great and moderately confused acclaim. I have also worked with Erindale College to create BAD!JOY!HAPPY!PANIC! in 2008 which was great fun. I worked for the Messengers program working with teenragers for two years, and have also worked with people with intellectual disabilites, the visually impaired and young carers. I have run workshops at Gorman House, Tuggeranong Arts Centre, Lieder Youth Theatre, Belconnen Arts Centre, Belconnen Community Centre, National Museum of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Corinbank Festival, and the National Folk Festival. While that is all well and good, my focus always remains on devising work with 7 - 12 year olds, because it is always the best fun.

When I am a performance poet I call myself JACINTA! and become a beautiful woman, who is beautiful. I have twice represented The Canberra at the National Poetry Slam at the Sydney Opera House, and was the co-Slam Champion of Woodford Folk Festival in 2008. Last year Jacinta made her first appearance as a booked artist at Woodford Folk Festival and she had a great time, isn't that nice! I also co-host BAD!SLAM!NO!BISCUIT! on the third Tuesday of every month at The Phoenix Bar which may occasionally involve more verbal abuse and lettuce fights than poetry.

I am a story teller for a band called Mr. Fibby which I am in with my idiot friends (who I love) Sam, Emma & Grahame (not Spike). We have lots of fun bouncing all over the countryside screeching verbal abuse at each other in front of rapt audiences which are invariably 70% adorable dancing children.

I work for The Fool Factory, which is Canberra's premiere roving entertainment company. In my time with The Fool Factory I have been a very tall papparazzi, a normal sized butterfly catcher, a very tall French Chef, a very tall gardener, an Emu, Santa Claus, the White Rabbit, a very tall Canberra Raider's fan and the doomed, fictional explorer, Johann Ulrich Voss. This work is very fun and very exhausting, and who doesn't want to get paid to play dress ups and harrass the public?

My other job I am undertaking at the moment, which is why I decided to set this up, is that I am the artistic advisor to The Majestic, at the National Folk Festival. This job is fucking insane, and I am completely out of my depth, so obviously I am loving it.

The Majestic is a 'fringe' venue at the NFF, taking place in a circus bigtop in the middle of the oval. I have been frantically booking acts that range from Melbourne gypsy face smashers Rapskallion, to bloke folkers The Ellis Collective, to Mr. Fibby (booking my own band, how fucking awesome am I?), as well as bringing in Bad Slam, putting together a roving theatre troupe, MCing events, and performing every day at the Festival. I will most likely die, but I will die as I have lived: on fire and riding a motorcycle painted to look like a leopard.

This is all a lot of things to do, for someone who spends most of their time sitting on the couch, reading WHO Magazine, drinking heavily, abusing facebook, youtubing Beverly Hills 902010 and watching trashy awful VHS tapes from the tip. When the bedsores becomes too much and I drag myself out of my chaotic, claptrap filled swamp of a house, I can be found at The Phoenix, Essen, or The Front, doing pretty much exactly what I do on my couch.

I almost exclusively read comic books, old detective novels and fairy tales. I like to talk about myself a lot. I don't write as often as I should. I prefer Buster Keaton to Charlie Chaplin, Edith Piaf to Marlene Dietrich, Prince to Michael Jackson, old Andrew Bird to new Andrew Bird, Anna Nicole Smith to Pamela Anderson.

It's completely feasible that I will be frantically obsessed with this blog for a few days and then forget that I have it.