After making a couple of recycled creatures a few months ago, I’ve become a bit obsessed with the idea, and have been haunting the local op shops and trash and treasure markets, looking for suitably interesting bags and belts. I’ve now got far more than I have had time to make up! One side effect of this obsession is eyeing-off bags that people are carrying in shops and on the street.
Update: I’ve posted a lot about Royal de Luxe and it’s influence since this post. Click here to go to search links to all those posts.
Update 2015 – removed and struck out some broken links
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I’m blown away by the French street theatre company Royal de Luxe’s amazing street parade, ‘The Visit of the Sultan of India Atop His Time-Travelling Elephant’, which took place in Nantes last week, in honour of the centenary of Jules Verne’s death. A rocket landed just outside the cathedral in place Saint Pierre, and from it a young giantess emerged. Together with the Sultan’s huge 11 metre tall elephant with a house built into its back, she explored the streets of Nantes, taking time to eat an icecream, ride a scooter, take a shower and nap, be lifted up onto the elephant’s trunk, and eventually to return to take off in her rocket again.
I’ve been collecting links! If you are short on time go to the ones with asterisks. (edited Oct 2014 to remove defunct del-icio.us link).
2007:
2006:
The Sultan’s Elephant in Antwerp (added 8 July 2006)
The Sultan’s Elephant in London (added 21 Apr 2006)
2005:
Nantes official site (in French):
Other photo galleries:
At Flickr:
Blog entries:
Amiens:
About Royal de Luxe:About Royal de Luxe (French sites):
Royal de luxe at Wikipedia (added July 2007)
Machines of Spectacle
‘Hunters of the Giraffes’ photo galleries:
‘The Giant’
Catamini Attraction
Poster
Tour dates:
2005:
2006: (only London confirmed as far as I know)
I wish I could be in Melbourne this weekend for Snuff Puppets‘ latest production, Nyet Nyet’s Picnic, which starts on Friday at Birrarung Marr on the banks of the Yarra.
In a collaboration between indigenous and non-indigenous artists, Nyet Nyet’s Picnic is a contemporary work that revives ancient stories from the dreamtime, and uses giant puppets, dance, and music in an exploration of local monsters, bunyips and spirit creatures. Described as a ‘genuinely scary, culturally enlightening and engaging night of theatre’, the performance is the cultural highlight of Reconciliation Week and is free to the public.
The photo above was taken by Ponch Hawkes, and there are three others here:
The Nyet Nyet Women
One of the Nyet Nyet Woman
The Nyet Nyet Men
I had a lot of fun with April’s Month of Softies theme, recycled monsters; thanks, Claire. Firstly, please meet Patrick, who is channelling Patrick White:
And now Esmé (‘don’t mess with me… I play bowls’):
They were made from an old bag and belt apiece, and Esmé has half an old cricket ball for a nose. There are more detailed pictures below. And thanks to Belinda for helping me see some extra dimensions to their characters!
These cool recycled monsters were made by my friend, Belinda, for April’s Month of Softies. I’ll let her introduce them to you:
Gronk: “I couldn’t think how to make him until I saw Hilary’s bag-monsters. Then I
found these things in various junk drawers around the house. His nose is
made from a rubber finger-stall pinned to a cork; his teeth are
toe-separators. His facial hair is chicken feathers sewn into a band – I
found this ‘braid’ in a local haberdashery and bought some so I’d have
feathers to add to my cat patchworks. I think he looks rather like Alan
Ginsberg, although as yet he hasn’t written any beat poetry. I posed him
with a cigar (my last home-grown tomato of the season) because I like his
raffish air.”
Doris: “This is my first recycled monster. She started life as a tea-cosy. My
daughter’s drawer of “special things” was invaluable in providing the hat
(which used to contain lavender), the bangle for her mouth, the plait and
the flowers. I used polished stones and two star anise for her eyes. Doris
is demure, fragrant and very ladylike. She represents my long-lost
daintiness.”
This green parrot is one of the many lovely animal illustrations catalogued on The Medieval Bestiary: Animals in the Middle Ages. Its a nicely organized site, with alphabetical ordering and cross-referencing, and information about the beasts from manuscripts. For each beast there is usually a gallery of different images from different sources.
Did you know, for example, that a dragon’s strength is found in its tail, not in its teeth? And that ‘it is the enemy of the elephant, and hides near paths where elephants walk so that it can catch them with its tail and kill them by suffocation’? Or that ‘it is because of the threat of the dragon that elephants give birth in the water’?
By all accounts the two-part 6 hour stage adaptation of Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials is absolutely stunning. I think it has had two seasons at the National Theatre in London: one in 2003, and a second that finished earlier this month.
The daemons, physical manifestations of the human soul in the shape of animals that reflect a person’s character, are puppets. They were designed by Michael Curry, who is perhaps best known for the puppets in The Lion King. Stagework has an extensive website on the adaptation, and its possible to see a few of the initial designs there, and glimpses of the puppetry in some of the video clips:
Operating the golden monkey
Lyra meets Mrs Coulter
Cittagazee performance
Captured by bears
Lyra and Iorek (scene in rehearsal)
In both these and the puppets in ‘The Lion King’, I think the magic lies in how the overall shape and actions of the creatures are suggested. Often the puppeteers are built into the shape in unexpected ways, and they use their whole bodies to make the animal move. In ‘The Lion King’, for instance, the puppeteers playing the hyenas held the hyena heads low down and at arms length, while their own heads provided the high shoulder line that is so distinctive in a hyena’s overall shape. Likewise, the polar bears in ‘His Dark Materials’, are defined by a puppeteer holding a head mask in one hand and a great clawed paw in the other, with just the suggestion of great shoulders in what looks like a flexible curved line between the two, and a powerful lumbering gait.
Bridge to the stars, which looks as if its the natural online home for ‘His Dark Materials’ fans, has a section on the stage adaptation, including a guide to the Stagework site, images and reviews.
Tacky but interesting: this is a huge spider garden spike that I got at the $2 shop the other day. It’s a hand span across, and the connections between its legs and body are fine springs, so that when the spike is jolted the legs have an incidental movement. The best movement you can get out of it is a kind of drumming of the legs, where, on each side, legs 1 and 3 are in sync with each other, and legs 2 and 4 are doing the opposite. Then it has the right kind of action for a huntsman spider.
I have a couple of other insect garden spikes, a bee and a dragonfly (bought out of curiosity when I was working on making giant bees and dragonflies a few years ago). They are much smaller than the spider, with bodies about 7 cm long, and the wings are on double springs. The dragonfly has much lighter springs, and a much better incidental movement than the poor bee, whose springs and wings are way too heavy.
Here are some pictures of a few other things that took my fancy at Floriade – I like the roving entertainment more than the massed European flowers.
There was a rainbow serpent swimming in Nerang Pool, designed and created by Aeon Mortimer. Its a big inflatable, and apparently it can spray a fine mist of water from its spines, creating rainbows in the air around it. Nice idea. Aeon’s puppet play The Great Big Story Book was also there. Designed as a giant pop-up book, it tells a version of the dreamtime story of Tiddalik the Frog, with puppet creatures stepping out of the pages of the book. (My favourite picture book version of Tiddalick is What Made Tiddalik Laugh by Joanna Troughton. It has lovely illustrations, and the kind of lame jokes that pre-schoolers love because they are so lame.)
I was also enjoyed catching up with Jigsaw‘s Flotsam and Jetsam, a one-woman show acted by Chrissie Shaw, and based on collected stories of children who lived on lighthouse islands in Australia. I particularly liked Mrs Ingram’s windswept dress that could be slipped into and out of in a flash.
Icarus Performance Troupe from Sydney were lots of fun, jogging about the gardens as giant muscle-bound lifesavers. They blew their whistles, bossed the crowds into swimming between the flags, and struck stong-man poses (complete with appropriate grunts and roars!) at the drop of a hat.
The flock of 100 black swans made from old rubber car tyres interested me not so much for what they were, but as a reflection on the fact that when they were common garden decorations in the 50’s and 60’s (or earlier) they were always painted white. I suppose they were part of that era’s acceptance of the idea of England as the home. As reported in the Canberra Times, the swans were made by Greg Hedger of Limestone Creek Enterprises:
‘Mr Hedger said each swan took about an hour to fashion – once he had the design sorted – plus a bit of time for painting. The tyres were heated by engine exhaust or in a glasshouse so the rubber was easier to cut and twist inside out.
The tyres were sourced from a company in Melbourne, which was believed to have held a stockpile for use as swings. While the steel belting in a modern radial tyre is good for motorists, it does not wear safely in children’s swingsets. Neither is it suitable for swan sculpting, because it’s too difficult to slice.
Sizes ranged from 12- and 13-inch car tyres to truck tyres. Mr Hedger’s offerings have been planted with a new variety of pansy, named Waterfall.
After the festival, Mr Hedger intends to take the swans under his wing. While the Floriade examples are under offer – Mr Hedger’s wife has her name on two – he’ll take up the slack afterwards. He’s already had orders from ladies in Burra and Orange and a school in Armidale. He had no idea what the swans would sell for, but would probably charge less than $100 apiece.’
There is an article about the traditional Australian art of sculpting swans from old tyres here.
Finally the Scarecrow Competition :-). I have a soft spot for the scarecrows because they come so much from the everyday community, and because such a wide interpretation of the concept of a scarecrow is acceptable. Here are some photographs of just a few of them that took my fancy:
Domestic Goddess (Woman of Steel, With Forked Tongue, Ready to Spring) by Barlin Event Hire
In Bega Everyones Dreaming of Rain, by Merimbulla Rudoplh Steiner School. The Bega Valley down on the south coast is dairy country, and must be feeling the drought as much as any of us.
French Frog by Telopea Park School. Appropriately, Telopea is a bi-lingual English/French public school.
Bunyip, by Hindmarsh Student Group (?)
Mermaid, by Braidwood Preschool Association. Their use of tin lids for scales is very effective, just as good as the CDs that many others used, for instance in the following one.
Fish, by Waniassa (?) Learning Support Unit
Refugees and Asylum Seekers don’t want a Red Carpet Welcome, by Amnesty International. I’d like to think they were prompted by my Howard last year.
Person in the Bath, by Radford College
Dragon, by the O’Connor Co-operative School. A long rhapsody in plastic!
