Puppetsfeed

Posted by hil

Jose at Titereblog has followed up his puppetry search engine with Puppetsfeed, a site where feeds about puppets and puppetry are being collected and listed. It’s a great idea, and it looks attractive, too. I’m enjoying the feeling that another person on the other side of the world is thinking in similar ways about using new technologies to share these things. I’m beginning to think I will have to learn Spanish, Jose! – it’s wonderful that you do so much in English.

I’ve also recently come across Jose’s Directorio de compañías y espectáculos de marionetas. Am I right that this is a directory of puppetry theatre companies in the Spanish-speaking world, Jose? I’m not sure if I should list it in Spanish or English in my OPML directory that’s running in the sidebar. Which would you like?

Updated links 2015

Mimi Kirchner’s Robots

Posted by hil

RobotsYou know, if I was a scriptwriter, or puppetry director or TV producer, I would seriously be thinking about a production based around Mimi Kirchner‘s wool dolls. Mimi’s latest are these fabulous robots. Can’t you imagine them as the main characters in a show? Could they be some strange new manifestation of the couple in American Gothic? ;-)

Alternatively, put them together with Mimi’s big men, grandmas, fat fairies and others, and I can see them all becoming part of a whole imaginary world that has its own original style and aesthetic.

Mia Dyson: Thredbo Blues Festival

Posted by hil

Mia Dyson

I’ve just got around to making a Flickr set of photos of the Thredbo Blues Festival in January. Thredbo is one of the skiing resorts in the Snowy Mountains up near Mt Kosciusko, but in summer the blues festival takes over the village, casual and cool, for a weekend. The highlight for us was seeing Mia Dyson. She is a young, fabulously talented blues singer, guitarist and slide player. But we also saw the Foreday Riders, Ray Beadle, and others, and took a ride up the Kosciusko chair lift.

The Sultan’s Elephant coming to London in May

Posted by hil

Royal de Luxe’s wonderful spectacle, The Sultan’s Elephant, is coming to London from 4th – 7th May, brought to you by Artichoke. It will take place in the streets and public spaces of Westminster, in thearea around Horse Guards Parade in St James’s Park, St James’s, Piccadilly, Haymarket and Trafalgar Square. There is a new promotional website for London, The Sultan’s Elephant. Thanks to Elfie for letting me know.

Update: I’ve added this to my previous links, and started updating there. Might as well keep it all in one place. I’ll keep tracking links there as the London spectacle develops.

Updated links 2015

Puppetry Worldview directory

Posted by hil

I’ve been fiddling around making an OPML directory of online puppet links. I’m just feeling my way, and at the moment I don’t know how selective I want to be or how far I want to take it. It may turn out to be not very far, though it does have the capacity to include other people’s lists through distributed data entry. You can see it in my sidebar over there on the right. Try clicking all the way through on the blogs and Aussie websites; those are the ones I have been concentrating on.

Thanks to Dave Winer (OPML, OPML Editor) and Mike Kowalchik (Grazr).

Updated 2015.


Swazzle puppet building tutorials and blogs

Posted by hil

 

swazzle

Swazzle, a San Francisco puppetry company doing live theatre, has started up a great online presence over the last six months or so. Their puppeteers and builders are blogging individually, but also as a team:

  • Swazzle News: up-to-date information on the company news, show dates and tours

They also have an interesting behind the scenes section, where you can follow the whole process of making some of their puppets. At the moment on his blog, Sean is showing how to make some pea puppets. They are pretty cute: look here and here at Puppet Greetings. Sean also has a valuable puppet building tutorial outlining how he made Ratchet,a cat in Swazzle’s show B.A.R.K. the Robot Dog.

Updated links 2015. Swazzle has a new website now.

Advertizing

Posted by hil

rejoice2
This is a cool idea: the Rejoice Giant Comb! According to How advertising spoiled me it was devised by Somak Chaudhury, an art director from Leo Burnett in Bangkok.

It makes me think of Rohinson Mistry’s novel, A Fine Balance, because the story starts with a vivid image of one of the protagonists buying a comb from a combseller on a train in India, and because hair is a recurrent theme. The book totally
mesmerized me when I read it in January – it’s the finest book I’ve read in a long time – and when I picked it up and paged through the first pages again the other day I realized that inaddition to everything else, it’s a perfect circle. I knew it ended
where it began, but everything at the begining resonates once you have read the whole.

I also recently came across an interesting Adidas advertizing campaign that was run in Berlin. The gist of it was to put up big more-or-less blank billboards, wait till they were covered in graffiti, and then paste over the top an outline of sneakers with cut-outs that showcased parts of the graffiti as the design on the shoe. If you want to trace the whole campaign, start here.

But both ads remind me of the ‘witchcraft’ of advertising in Peter Carey‘s Bliss.

Updated links 2015

Mechanized animal structures

Posted by hil

Fish3Vladimir Gvozdariki is a Russian artist who makes whimsical figures, animations and images. Some are pleasing in their simplicity, but I particularly like his complicated drawings of mechanized animal structures. They are in numerous places in his galleries, like here, here and here and here. I also like how some, like this fish, have made the transition from drawing to sculpture. I could imagine them being used theatrically, and some aspects -the whimsy and the technical details – remind me of some of Shaun Tan‘s creatures in The Lost Thing.

I also like Gvozdariki’s interest in snails and miniature worlds. How would you like to live here?

(via the wonderful BibliOdessy)

The Dollmaker

Posted by hil

Here is a slightly spooky thing to listen to when you are making a doll or puppet, as happened to me yesterday: The Dollmaker, a radio play by John Aiken. The doll becomes an alter-ego of its maker. I’m not sure how long the audio remains available, but give it a listen, its well done.

Another radio program I heard that caught my attention recently was about a puppet production, Operation, showing in Melbourne for the Next Wave Festival which was running at the same time as the Commonwealth Games. It was an interview with Sam Routledge, the co-director and puppeteer, and one of the graduates from the VCA post-graduate puppetry course, from which a new company, Blood Policy, has emerged. But I can’t find a trace of the interview on ABC Online.

I also heard an interview with puppetmaker Andrew McDougall a while ago, and was interested to hear that he is currently doing his Masters in Puppetry at the VCA, too.

I was wondering today — do we say puppetmaker in Australia, whereas in the US and other places they say puppet builder?

Update: I just happened across a website for Blood Policy’s Operation. It has a gallery with photos from the production.

Updated links 2015