big heads

The Big Heads

bheadsHere are some wonderful walkabout puppets: The Big Heads, made by Bim Mason. There are a few thumbnail pictures of The Big Heads if you scroll down in the ‘Companies’ section of Fool’s Paradise, and check the publicity images links. But on JaneandRichard I was excited to find two great close-ups among photos taken of the street performers at the Brighton Festival Big Weekend, part of the Brighton Festival in 2002: Big Head and Another Big Head. No wonder kids find them scarey!

Here is Fool’s Paradise’s description of the heads:

Three giant sized latex heads (one metre high) with protruding/retractable tongues and emerging arms made by renowned mask maker and street theatre author Bim Mason. The heads can lower down to conceal the actor’s legs within, enabling intimate contact with smaller people.

The actors are linked by walkie-talkie to a minder enabling synchronised response to opportunities for interaction. It also enables sudden synchronised dancing without apparent cues. The heads are truly carnivalesque in the sense that they induce two conflicting simultaneous reactions – attraction and recoil allowing the actors to strike the right balance according to the situation. Can perform in any weather.

The University of Exeter School of Perfromance Art has some images of cool carnival masks made by second year students working with Bim Mason in 2002. He is also the author of ‘Street theatre and other outdoor performance’ (Routledge Publisher, New York, 1992). In a paper on Wearable Performance, examining how ‘wearable computers offer the street performer powerful tools with which to create innovative experiences for the audience’, the writers (Flavia Sparacino, Alex Pentland and Glorianna Davenport) refer to five catagories of street performance that Mason identifies in his book:

“Bim Mason has carried out an extensive study of street performers. He has defined five categories that group performers according to their motivation and artistic intent. There are: Entertainers, Animators, Provocateurs, Communicators and Performing Artists. (snip…)

Entertainers are defined as those performers with the simple aim of pleasing the audience, either by making them laugh or by impressing them with skills such as juggling, acrobatics or magic. In contrast, Animators play games with the audience. They use audience interaction not just for part of the show but as the main act itself. Provocateurs are more concerned with loosening-up society as a whole. They ask questions of society by going to the limits of conventionally acceptable behavior. Communicators see themselves as educators who feel they have something to teach to the rest of society or a message to pass on. Finally, Performing Artists are mainly interested in showing an artistic work, and their own personal view of art, focusing more on form rather than content.”

Unfortunately the book seems to be hard to come by now. Maybe the library has it.

Old Parliament House’s ‘Big Heads’ Puppets at Floriade

Floriade has been on for the last month in Canberra, and tomorrow is the last day. I went in last weekend hoping to see the Old Parliament House Big Heads. These are much-larger-than-life-sized body-suit puppets of parliamentarians from days gone by. Their usual home is Old Parliament House, which is now a parliamentary museum, where they stroll around bringing the past to life.

Last year I got photos of the original three Big Heads in the Scarecrow Drive at Floriade, having an encounter with The Fool Factory‘s alien, Solar Flare:

An altercation between Solar Flare and Andrew Fisher and Alfred Deakin.
Solar Flare and Andrew Fisher shake hands.
Sir Edmund Barton takes liberties with my John Howard Scarecrow

This year there are two new Big Heads, Doc Evatt and Bob Menzies. While they have been made by the same company, eRTH, these ones have a less stylised look about them, and are more realistically modelled on the historical figures they represent. I think they are really cool. I love the demeanor of Doc Evatt, and his brown suit is just right.

eRTH is a Sydney company that does innovative large-scale theatrical performances which include ‘giant puppets, huge inflatables, acrobatics, aerial and flying creatures, stilt-walking costumes and pyrotechnics’. I would have loved to see their Gargoyles clambering over the outside of buildings, or The Neds ranging through city streets. At Floriade this year, they were also present as the Waterheads, four people with their heads in tanks of coloured water, strolling through the beds of flowers.