Cheese Dream
I coined the term ‘Folk Clown’ to describe this surreal, irreverent performance,
aimed to encourage wellbeing through communitas.
Commissioned by the Hereford Museums Trust and supported by the HLF Redevelopment fund, Cheese Dream was first performed by the artist with Lucy Hopkins, Morgan George, Bob Slayer and Sarah Woolfenden at Hereford’s Old House Museum in January 2026.
The interactive promenade piece weaves together ancient farming practices, folk magic, ritual, and the patriarchy, taking inspiration from Hereford museum’s legendary two-headed calf exhibit.
Guided by the anarchic, simple foraging girl, audiences encounter the Cheese Nun (a cheese-divining tyromancer), Janus (a two-headed milkmaid who facilitates mouse divination and attempts to milk a bull), and an exhausted human loom, who dispenses multicoloured yarn and other produce, from her six-breasts.
Audiences are invited to spin sigils from yarn and sing together rousing, contemporary folk songs, composed especially for the performance, whilst navigating visions of past and future.
Polycephaly (two heads) is relatively common in animal husbandry, forced through limited gene pools, resulting in genetic abnormalities or nervous system damage during development and splitting of embryos. However, in many folk traditions such deformities were considered a premonition of major change, or warning of impending disaster. In ancient Rome, Janus- God of beginnings, transitions, and endings, had one face looking to the future, and one to the past.
Photographs by Wilfy George.
The Cheese Dream Song.
Let’s sing al-together,
A cheese song, whatever!
A song about cheeses,
By crikey, By Jesus,
What does the cheese say about us?
(Chorus, everybody)
We can live good lives,
by singing together,
by laughing whatever,
we’ll heal each other,
Let’s take back our power forever!
A tisket, a tasket,
my neurons are plastic.
My heart is elastic,
Its bloody fantastic!
I really can be who I want to.
(Chorus)
Because pat-ri-archy’s,
a meat trauma fac-try,
I’m sausage meat riff raff,
we’re made of the same stuff.
We’re sep-rate but linked by a membrane.
(Chorus)
How can we feed folk?
And how do we clothe folk?
And how can we build trust?
And how to connect us?
Creating our world as we want it.
(Chorus)
A dibble, a dabble,
A butterfly rabble,
Seek good company,
or a digital bubble?
Living our fellowship dream.
(Chorus x 2)
Cheese Dream Musings.
A 2005 study conducted by the now-defunct British Cheese Board, concluded that Stilton creates the most bizarre and vivid dreams, Cheddar makes people dream about celebrities, Red Leicester dreams are nostalgic, and Lancashire produces dreams about career. Men on Brie experience odd, obscure dreams, whereas Brie women have relaxing dreams, and Cheshire dreams are non-existent, because the participants slept so well.
‘You may fascinate a woman by giving her a piece of cheese’ says Kathryn Paulsen in The Complete Book of Magic and Witchcraft, 1971. First mentioned in 2nd Century Greece by the diviner Artemidorus, Tyromancy is an ancient practice whereby curds, melted shapes, numbers of holes, pattern of the mould, and other characteristics may be examined to prognosticate love, money, and death. Another method, related to Myomancy, involved writing possible answers to questions on separate pieces of cheese and placing them in a cage with a hungry rodent.
Spoiling milk was one of the most common curses associated with witches in early modern Europe. Around 1650, dairy maid Isabel Maine was advised to protect the milk from “evil eyes” by carrying a stick of rowan wood whilst milking. Witches were also thought to magically steal milk directly from cows’ udders. A 14th century morality manual tells of a woman with an enchanted leather bag. On her command, the bag would leap up and run to her neighbours’ cattle herd, where it would secretly steal milk and bring it back to her. William of Malmsbury explained that female Italian innkeepers were especially prone to using enchanted cheese to turn their customers into beasts of burden and in The Odyssey, sorceress Circe turns Odysseus’ companions into animals by feeding them a magic drink of cheese, barley meal, honey, and wine. Cheese was also used to identify thieves and murderers. The cheese was first blessed with a prayer: ‘If he is guilty, he will eat in the name of the devil. If he is not guilty, he will eat in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ’. Then a small piece was fed to each suspect- a culprit unable to swallow was an admission of guilt.
In the early modern period (1450-1750) the creation of the universe was compared to cheese making: “All was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed, just as cheese is made out of milk, and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.” 12th-century mystic, Hildegard von Bingen, compared cheese making to the miracle of life in that it forms curds (or solid matter) from something insubstantial. Milk is a liquid dripping with symbolism, from spiritual salvation to maternal devotion. Celebrated as a magical substance over centuries, human breast milk has long been known as a medical remedy, as well as infant food. More recently it was discovered that the body significantly tailors’ it’s milk to the complex physiological needs of the individual infant.
Exported worldwide, Hereford cattle have been the sire of choice for generations. Fertility and longevity produce value from the bull. With a shorter gestation period, cows are back in the parlour faster, creating an additional week’s lactation, earning around £56 extra milk, per head. The famous Hereford Museum taxidermized two headed calf is over 70 years old. It once belonged to Mr Lewis - a blacksmith in Yarkhill, who displayed it in his shop for many years. According to folklore such deformities emerge when farmers forget to leave a saucer of milk for the fairies. In many folk traditions these deformities were considered a premonition of future events - a sign of major change or warning of impending disaster. Two heads also represented contradictory aspects such as good and evil, life and death, or the past and the future. In ancient Rome, Janus was the god of beginnings, transitions, and endings, with one face looking to the future and one to the past. Two headed animals are relatively common in animal husbandry, forced through a limited gene pool. Known as polycephaly, it’s a result of genetic abnormalities or nervous system damage during the development and splitting of embryos.
In his 2025 BBC Reith lectures, Dutch historian Rutgar Bregman explains that evolutionary psychologists claim we humans today are the product of ‘The Survival of the friendliest’, as ancestors of thousands of years of cooperative hunter/ gatherers. American Historian Jared Diamond claimed that: ‘Farming was… the worst mistake in the history of the human race’. With fields and fences came hierarchy, Kings, wars, and slavery. Bregman posits the AI revolution as another potential ‘worst mistake of the human race”. With American teenagers in 2025 hosting and attending 70% less parties than their 2003 counterparts, solitude is becoming a hallmark of our age. Social media promised connection and community, yet a recent Nature study concluded that platforms reward the angriest, loudest, and most extreme, with those most actively involved in online political engagement having the highest psychopathy and lowest cognition characteristics. ‘The Survival of the Shameless’ as Bregman puts it. Yet, we can choose connection over compulsion, taking inspiration from the highly successful 19th Century Temperance movement, which advocated a fully present, addiction-free human state, to nurture genuine freedom and autonomy.
‘Laughter is the shortest distance between two people”. Victor Borge.
Lexi Strauss 2026.