theatre

Light-up emu egg prop

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This is the finished emu egg prop made for BiamiThe story recounts how Biami ‘created the emu Dinnawhan, the female emu, whose spirit he used to create the Wiradjuri people; who now believe they are of the egg of Biami and the female spirit’. This is symbolised by the shadow of a baby in the coolamon within.

The egg is made from Plastimake, small pellets of plastic which soften when heated and can then by modeled. I this kind of plastic at Philip Millar’s puppet doctor session at the puppetry conference in Melbourne last year, and have been itching to have a good reason to use it! Peter, who I contacted at Plastimake, was very helpful, and it turned out to be a great material for this project.

I found it quite tricky to think through the various steps in how to make this, as it had to light up from inside but be self-contained, and you have to be able to access the batteries so they can be changed.

I started by making a polystyrene egg about 20 cm long as a former. Here it is with Special Tool A, a bit of plywood with some blunt sandpaper gaffered onto it, which happens to be ideal for smoothing  polystyrene once you have carved to roughly the right shape. Then I cut the egg in half lengthwise and put a bit of polypropylene in between so that I could later split the egg in half easily, and also cut away a small section at each end so that the ends would end up thick enough to hold screws to keep the two halves together.

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I used small quantities of Plastimake, heated in boiling water. The pellets turn transparent when they are hot enough to fuse, and then you can fish them out with a spoon and mold them to shape. I found that squishing them together a bit with the spoon while they were still in the water was a good idea too. (The little bag of black pellets are colouring pellets of Plastimake which I didn’t end up needing).

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This photo shows the egg completely covered with plastic, in various stages of setting. The opaque areas of white at the large end are set, but in other places where it is still warm you can see right through to the gladwrapped polystyrene inside. Once the egg was covered roughly, I spent quite a bit of time heating it with a hairdryer and then smoothing it out. One of the great things about Plastimake is that it can be reheated and reused, as well as added to, drilled and cut.

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The egg has a flattened part for it to rest on so it doesn’t roll around, and into that I set some polypropylene sheeting with the black contact cut-out of the the baby in a coolamon. In the other half is an led light unit from the dollar shop, with it’s switch button rewired to fit into the right position poking through to the outside of the egg. I also replaced the batteries that came with the light with button batteries instead as it seemed neater, hacking a tealight battery holder so that it held two batteries rather than one. (Thanks Zaiga!)

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Once the egg itself was made and joined up I paper mached the outside with white tissue paper because although paint takes well to Plastimake it can rub off fairly easily with wear. The speckled finish is spray paint and a little green acrylic paint.

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Erth’s The Dream of the Thylacine

This is a great behind-the-scenes video for Erth‘s The Dream of the Thylacine which will run at Carriageworks in Sydney 25 Sept to 5 October. In particular it shows super talented puppet maker Bryony Anderson talking in some detail about how she thought about the project, and her process in building the thylacine puppet, down to how and why she came to make the fur from potato sacks!

Also take a look at this amazing spider made by Bryony and friends, using only stuff from the dump.

Handspring Theatre Company’s Crow

Handspring Theatre Company's Crow puppet

 

Handspring Puppet Company UK, the sister company to Handspring Puppet Company South Africa, has a major new dance theatre production called Crow premiering in mid-June as part of the Greenwich+Docklands International Festival in London. It is inspired by Ted Hughes’ 1970 poetic work Crow.

Crow witnesses God’s creation in the Garden of Eden and adds his own dry trickery to the events. Droll, lonely, adaptable, laughing, watching, instinctive and curious, Crow is in all of us, and in these poems Hughes presents the songs he would sing. – London 2012 Festival

The prototype puppet looks cool! (via the Telegraph.co.uk)

Handspring Theatre Company's Crow puppet

As does the illustration for the promotional material:

Illustration for Handspring Theatre Company's Crow

A Bird, A Tree, The Moon

A Bird, A Tree, The Moon is the most recent production by Melbourne visual theatre company Peepshow Inc. The pesky skeleton bird puppet is a lovely! Directed by Melinda Hetzel and performed by Nick Barlow and Angela Orrego, the show played to passers-by outdoors at night in City Square.  Alison Croggon has a great review.

It sounds as if the inaugural Tarrengower Puppetfest was very succesful. The Tarrengower Times has a gallery of photos from the weekend taken by Andrew Hobbs.

The National Theatre and Global Creatures are seeking performers /puppeteers  for its upcoming production of War Horse, which will open at the Arts Centre in Melbourne, January 2013.  Their casting brief (pdf) gives details and who to contact if you are interested.

War Horse

 

After hearing Adrian Kohler talking about Handspring Puppet Company‘s War Horse at UNIMA 2008 in Perth, I made a special point of seeing it in London later that year when I was travelling. It was remarkable and wonderful.

Since then War Horse has been much celebrated, and has played to increasing audiences, moving from the National Theatre to the West End, and then to Broadway. Most recently it has been staged in Toronto, and, excitingly, it will be in Melbourne’s Arts Centre in December this year.

I think the TED talk above is the best demonstration of the puppets I’ve seen outside the theatre. Despite their impressionistic construction with movement, breath and emotional gestures they become breathtakingly alive. (Eric Hart linked to this great infographic by Trish McAlaster on how the puppets work.)

 

Horsepower: the War Horse puppets and puppeteers infographic by Trish Mcalaster / The Globe and Mail

 

The horse puppets get most of the interest, which is natural, but there’s also a lovely puppet goose, and an enormous tank that comes on stage, rolling up over a barricade, and rearing over the audience. I really don’t know how they did that! And I also enjoyed the music and loved the minimalist set, essentially a suggested torn piece of paper above the back of the stage, on which simple animations were projected from time to time.

The attitude towards war in the play is unusual, slipping past taking sides, who is in the right or wrong and strategy, and emphasising rather how the horses’ fates are completely subject to the capricious needs and circumstances of humans.

By now War Horse has been made into the inevitable Spielberg movie, which I somehow don’t feel any particular need to see. (For fun take a look at Lisa Hanawalt’s illustrated review). I’m inclined to think that I would agree with Emily Landau’s article Why war Horse’s puppets win by flaunting their artificiality. Apparently an animatronic horse was used for a few seconds for humane reasons in one scene in the movie. I caught a glimpse of this on YouTube a few weeks ago but the video has since been withdrawn.

Lastly, I love the illustration of the Handspring puppets by Byron Eggenschwiler accompanying Landau’s article.

Amit Drori’s miniature mechanical elephants

I’ve been entranced by Royal de Luxe‘s and La Machine‘s huge mechanical elephants, but this evening I came across Israeli Amit Drori‘s enchanting small mechanical elephants, made for his show Savanna. The elephants are computerised robots with complex mechanisms and live motion control. As well as the birds and turtle in this video, in another is a beautiful buck.

Screaming Object (Objeto Gritante)

This is a sample of DudaPaiva Company’s production Screaming Object,  ‘an absolutely unusual work of abstract dance and puppetry’ by Maurício Oliveira and Duda Paiva. I find it mesmerising, disturbing, and rather wonderful.

Folded Feather’s chickens

I love this excerpt from Folded Feather Theatre‘s production Life Still, which has been playing at the Edinburgh Fringe recently.

How to Train Your Dragon Live

Melbourne’s Creature Technology Company, which had worldwide success with their live arena show Walking with Dinosaurs Live, have just launched their new venture How to Train Your Dragon Live at a Dreamworks and Global Creatures media event showing off an awesome 4 metre tall fire-breathing animatronic dragon, the Deadly Nadder. Apparently it’s one of 24 dragons!

I’m happy to see that this new production has an emphasis on story and emotional engagement in addition to the sheer spectacle, since my one reservation about Walking with Dinosaurs Live was the lack of emotional content.

This video from The Age has some footage of the making process, as does this one:

Some additional links:

The Creature Technology Company’s videos at their website
Daily Telegraph: gallery of 15 images
The Age: Here be Dragons
The Australian: Monster epic producer’s dragons fly high
774 ABC Melbourne: How to Train your Dragon hits Melbourne: radio interview with Dreamworks’ Tim Johnson, who co-produced the movie and directs the new exhibition.
Sky News: Melbourne to host Dragon arena show

(via Philip Millar, Kari Klein and PuppetVision)