puppets

New adaptation of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival coming to the Sydney Festival

Red Leap Theatre from New Zealand will be bringing a new theatre adaptation of Shaun Tan‘s book The Arrival to the Sydney Festival in January. I love the look of what I can see in this video of highlights, in particular the aesthetic feel and muted colours, the puppets and the imagery.

Arrival redleap

(photo credit: Robin Kerr)

arrivalship

(photo credit: John McDermott)

I saw the adaptation of The Arrival by Spare Parts Pupppet Theatre at the Unima 2008 Puppetry Festival in Fremantle. It has gone on to win a number of awards, and recently had a season at the World Puppetry Festival in Charleville Mezieres, France.  I felt the strength of that production was in the projected animations and digital imagery, and that the story line and emotional content had been simplified for a very young audience.  I hope Red Leap’s production will be able to tap further into the richness and drama that the book holds.

Previously:  Shaun Tan

Stories from the Ground

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

deepseadiver

(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:

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.

Peter and the Wolf stopmotion animation

peter

Suzie Templeton’s animated short of Peter and the Wolf has, among other things, the most gorgeous and engaging Indian Runner duck. My pet ducks are Runners, and I just love them. Be warned, though, Peter’s one doesn’t make it…

The other three parts follow at YouTube. The film won an Academy Award in 2008 for Best Animated Short Film and is based on the 1936 composition of Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev. I found a little bit info about the puppets at Pollystaffle.

(Via Espaço das Marionet@s)

Wow! King Kong for stage!

kingkong

Photo credit: Simon Schluter, The Age

This spectacular 7-metre-tall animatronic puppet of King Kong is being built by the Creature Technology Company in Melbourne, the company that produced the amazing arena show Walking with Dinosaurs Live, which is currently touring the UK after extensive performances in the US.

The puppet is being built for King Kong on Stage, a stage adaptation for New York’s Radio City Music Hall in 2011.

According to an article in The Age,

The partially built King Kong is now a high-tech assemblage of steel, fibreglass, airbags and Lycra-encased polystyrene. When modelling is finished by late next year, he will be controlled by 70 cigarette pack-sized motors. His face alone will conceal 40 of the motors to communicate his emotions as he is transported from Skull Island to Manhattan, where he finds love with a young blonde and a precarious position on top of the Empire State Building.

King Kong Live on Stage will use up to five models of King Kong with each operated by three puppeteers using remote technology called a ”voodoo rig” from backstage.

Interestingly, in the light of the suspension of the puppetry course at the Victorian College of the Arts, Creative Technology has 32 full-time staff and 14 VCA graduates working in its puppet fabrication department, and expects to employ 60 people on the King Kong project by next year. They see the VCA puppetry course as a vital in training the type of skilled people they will be looking to employ in the future.

‘Melbourne is in the running to become the world centre for animatronic design and puppetry but it won’t happen if they remove the puppetry course,” said Mr Barcham (CTC general manager). ”Those people [making the decision] wouldn’t even know there’s a new genre of entertainment coming out of Melbourne.”

Previously:

Puppets for Canberra Youth Theatre’s TANK

I had a really enjoyable build recently, making a swag of zany puppets and props for Canberra Youth Theatre‘s production TANK, which is playing now at Canberra’s spring flower extravagaza, FloriadeTANK is a rather Pythonesque look at our relationship to water, written by Adam Hadley, directed by Pip Buining, and designed by Imogen Keen. It’s told in six 6-minute stories, played to an audience of six per story. Performances are free and run at Floriade on 12,13, 19, 20, 26 and 27 September 2009. Later, on 23 – 28 November, it will play in Garema Place in Canberra CBD, at 11am and 12noon.

Here are some of the puppets and props; check my Flickr portfolio set for others.

The meercat and the meercat hat:

Meercat puppet

Meercat puppet and hat

Yiying Lu in the meercat hat!

Yiying Lu in the meer cat hat :)

I got rather fond of the hat…

Meercat hat

The pirate captain (finger puppet):

Pirate captain

The rat (rod puppet):

Rat puppet

Kevin, the polar bear (worn on shoulders):

Polar bear

Hans and Donaldine, or the other way around… (glove puppets):

Hans and Donaldine

The shark (worn on shoulders):

Shark puppet

The amoebas (glove puppets):

Amoeba puppets

The eggbeater time machine! Love this great design idea!

Time machine

Two rockets:

Rockets

The multiple eyes of Veruna, the water goddess. In motion.

Veruna's eyes