This lovely shadow puppetry in Lior’s I’ll forget You is the work of Stephen Mushin, Anna Parry and Sarita Ryan from Stories from the Ground Puppet Collective, a micro-theatre shadow puppet troupe, and Starkraving Productions. Both are based in Melbourne. This year Stephen and the Anna have been touring with Lior’s Shadows and Light Tour, performing live. Spiltpin Limbs is an offshoot of Stories from the Ground, now ‘a major branch in its own right’. I’m not sure exactly how the two relate, except that they look closely allied. This behind-the-scenes video is really cool, too.
Large-scale hand shadow puppetry
This recent ad for US Cellular features hand shadow puppetry projected large onto tall buildings. The artist is Australian hand shadow puppeteer, Raymond Crowe, best known for his hand shadow performance of What a Wonderful World.
Apocalypse Bear
This is the first episode in a new on-line serial exploring the adventures of the enigmatic Apocalypse Bear. A stage version of Lally Katz’s Apocalypse Bear Trilogy by Stuck Pigs Squealing Theatre Company premiered recently at the Melbourne International Arts Festival.
Legacy and other things
I thoroughly enjoyed Ronnie Burkett’s show Billy Twinkle up in Sydney, as well as an unexpected Q & A session afterwards. These are some take-away musings:
Billy Twinkle is partly about legacy – the cycle of the master passing on his skills. So its funny to me that most of my thoughts about the evening have been about what seem at first to be things that go contrary to legacy. Burkett publishes his scripts but doesn’t allow his shows to be recorded, as he recordings never do justice to performance, and theatre is about the live fleeting experience. He also has a somewhat dispassionate view of his puppets, in the sense that he regards them only as fine instruments with which he tells his stories. They are beautifully made and over the years have been perfected technically, but in the long run the idea of putting the collection on a pyre has some attraction for him. Sometimes, as a maker, I hope I am making more than that, a piece of art or a spark of character that stands by itself. In truth though, I think in both cases the real art is the process, the understanding and experience that takes place while making theatre, or while making instruments for the theatre. It’s a challenging outlook, (especially when society seems to be recording more and more, and it would be a shame not to have any record of Ronnie performing), but it makes sense: art is an ephemeral process and life is finite.
Strangely, this seems to have similarities to my musings recently about Should the real time web be able to forget?
I was really interested to hear Burkett say how much exciting puppetry is happening in Australia, especially in Melbourne. That is my impression too, so it was cool to hear it expressed by a visiting master puppeteer.
A puppeteer with marionettes that operate their own teeny tiny marionettes is pretty cool and meta!
Lastly, it’s tricky for a puppeteer to have a solo eye-to-eye conversation with a glove puppet that doesn’t have a moving mouth. I’ve seen Neville Tranter demonstrate how we always instinctively follow the largest movement, and in this case the audience instinctively follows the puppeteer’s mouth when he is talking for the puppet. So there is some confusion as to who is talking, especially if the puppeteer is talking passionately and the repartee between the two characters is quick. It is possible confusion was intended; I’m not sure.
Update: By chance this morning I rediscovered the 4th episode of The Puppeteers (Mabel and Maude), which, if I am reading it right, does a great job of taking the piss out of all this puppeteering and legacy talk.
Previously
Royal de Luxe’s giants celebrate reunion in Berlin
(photo credit: Verieihnix, thank you)
Celebrations are taking place in Berlin this weekend for the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the re-unification of Germany. At the centre of the celebrations is a 4-day performance by Royal de Luxe‘s giant street theatre puppets, featuring their little giantess, and her giant uncle, the deep-sea diver.
Earlier this year in June the diver debuted in Nantes in La géante du Titanic et le scaphandrier, but in Berlin the back story, already one of separation and reunion, has been redrawn as an allegory for the divisions of Germany:
Berlin was once a swamp inhabited by giants. One day, land and sea monsters tore the city in two and the Big Giant and Little Giantess were separated. The Little Giantess fell into a long sleep. When she awakes, she finds a large old mailbag containing letters between East and West Berlin, and sets out to deliver them. After each searching the streets of the city, the two giants are reunited and symbolically return tens of thousands of letters once intercepted by former East Germany’s Stasi secret police to people watching their procession through the city.
Photos and videos are starting to appear at Flickr and YouTube, and many others will follow, but here are some links to items that have grabbed my attention so far:
- Official site: Risesen-in-Berlin: The Berlin Re-Union
- @dieriesenkommen on Twitter
- Promo with nice footage from Nantes
- Four videos of the Giantess
- Video of diver surfacing and a close up of the puppeteers
- Reuters video: Giants re-enact German Re-unification
- ABC News video: good summary in video, includes reunion between giants
- Die KlieneRiesen: photo by Gofio of the reunion, Brandenburg Gates
- Royal de Luxe Central photo pool at Flickr
- Search ‘Riesen berlin’ at Flickr, or YouTube
I’ve posted a lot about Royal de Luxe and their influence on the genre of giant puppets over the last few years and you can search here to go to those posts.
