Box Tale Soup’s theatrical performance at the Clark Library of its original adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels included a week of workshops at the library to share their creative process with visiting classes. As part of these workshops, Erin Severson, Ikumi Crocoll, and Anna Chen collaborated with Box Tale Soup and with instructors Helen Deutsch, and Leigh-Michil George to introduce UCLA graduate students and high school students from UCLA’s Geffen Academy to the library’s rich Gulliver-related holdings. Students explored the material and documentary history embedded in early editions of Gulliver’s Travels, whose title pages name Gulliver rather than Swift as the author; William Cowper’s Anatomy of Humane Bodies, a 17th-century anatomy book with startling and sometimes unsettling up-close illustrations of the human body; a book from Swift’s own library that he inscribed with disparaging remarks about its author; and many other primary sources. Students also worked with Box Tale Soup on their own adaptation exercise and got puppetry lessons on the library lawn.
–Anna Chen and Ikumi Crocoll
