Due to popular demand the National Museum of Australia has scheduled some extra performances of Gondwana by the Sydney company erth Visual and Physical Inc. You’ll have to be quick to book, as the last performances are this coming weekend.
The puppets are fantastic, as you might expect from erth, and with Bryony Anderson on the making team (I don’t know who else was on the team) . Some are wonderfully satisfyingly HUGE. Others have delightful characteristics, such as the Leptictidium’s twitchy nose. With one exception – the crocodile-y animal – the creatures moved beautifully. I loved the fine movements of the Meganeura, a gigantic primative dragonfly, and the Ammonites. One of the smaller dinosaurs shared a similar and effective design to some of the puppets in ‘The Lion King’, such as the warthog: the puppeteer visible in the middle, with the neck and head built out the front, and tail out the back. The baby Dryosaurs were just plain cute. And the inflatable lanscape and original soundscape were cool, too.
At the performance I saw the accoustics were dreadful. It was hard to hear any of the narration.
Its an interesting task to seek to satisfy both traditional theatre audiences as well as museum audiences. For the theatre goer, there was drama in seeing the creatures brought to life so well, but little story development aside from evolution. For museum audiences, which I assume are those whose interests are mainly historical and scientific – and there has been great attention paid to scientific accuracy in developing the show – there might be some unease about the artistic licence that allows the Liptictidium, a relative late-comer and ‘visitor from the Northern Hemisphere’, to appear through each era as a link throughout the performance.
The program leaflet gave lots of scientific detail. It would have been good if it had also credited the directors, performers, makers and production team, and given us some detail about the puppets.
Gondwana is the first of three shows which will be developed over the next three years. The second will cover time after the dinosaurs, and the third the present time and future of Australia. I’m looking forward to the next installment.
Update: Here are a few links:
Dinosaurs given new life
Interview with Phil Downing, Musical Director of Erth
Update 2015: broken links. Some photos of the puppets are at Erth > gallery > museums > scroll down. They are inaccessible for linking.
You 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? ;-)
Vladimir Gvozdariki is a Russian artist who makes 
