Ian Sharpe’s comment on the latest development in the travesty of justice that is David Hicks’ lot.
puppets
Million Puppet Project
It’s a bit crazy, even scary, to imagine a million puppets of all sorts in one place, but that’s the object of the Million Puppet Project which was launched yesterday (on World Puppetry Day) by Spare Parts Puppet Theatre in Western Australia. Under the project, people from around the world are invited to make and send a puppet to Perth, WA, to participate in a new Guinness World Record: The World’s Largest Puppet Display! This will be part of the UNIMA 2008 :: 20th UNIMA Congress and World Puppetry Festival, which is being held in the southern hemisphere for the first time.
If you need a jumpstart to make a puppet, there are various simple puppet design templates ready to dowload, or you can strike out on a design all your own. Let your imagination run free! Puppets will not be able to be returned to you, but they will be donated to charities afterwards. And when the display is being finalized in April 2008, you will be able to see the installation in progress via a web cam linked to the site.
Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience: a review
I finally caught up with Walking with Dinosaurs: the Live Experience during its season in Adelaide. The dinosaurs are absolutely fabulous; huge realistic reptiles with fluid movement, thunderous roars, grunts and lowing, and where appropriate, menace. To achieve this live on such a grand scale is impressive, and represents a great pooling of skills in the Creature Design and Build Team: design, engineering, mechanics, skin and sculptural fabrication, technical management and direction. I loved the vegetation that grew up around the arena, and flowered brilliantly; the stage elements that sprouted trees or in turn became volcanoes; and the lighting.
The show is a documentary in the round, or a live newsreel. A paleontologist provides commentary throughout the performance, taking the audience through the various ages of the dinosaurs, pointing out their features, and making the odd joke. Although I saw the need for this as a device to make the show cohesive, and as a way of giving an idea of the sheer size of the creatures, I found it annoying to be ‘educated’ constantly, especially when at times he had to almost shout to be heard over swelling music. Although the dinosaurs threaten each other and have great stand-offs, and at times are wonderfully fierce, the show lacks the emotional content that I think marks great theatre or puppetry; we are instead essentially watching a passing parade of specimens, and observing how they behave.
Perhaps, though, it’s just me, as I am dispassionate about dinosaurs, while the phenomenal popularity of the BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs documentary series suggests most people are not. The producers picked up on that popularity as the impetus for the live show. They know where their audience is – families, especially those with kids aged about 4 through 12 – and everyone coming out of the stadium seemed happy. I imagine it will continue its success overseas, and I believe there is a second round of dinosaurs now going into production.
More links:
891 ABC Adelaide: Walking with Dinosaurs: Some details and pics about how they are operated :)
SMH: walk among the giants, but hold tight!: Short interview with the puppetry director, Mat McCoy. (cool to see your move to direction, Mat)
‘Making of’ pages from the program: 1, 2
Babushka’s WwD Flickr photoset: some backstage close-up photography
Hangingpixel’s WwD Flickr photoset
YouTube WwD videos
The Age video report: behind the scenes glimpses; Angela Dufty, one of the drivers, explains how they are controlled. (try IE if it won’t play on Firefox)
Previously:
Walking with Dinosaurs: the Live Experience: new slideshow
Workshop footage,
Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience
Ten Days on Earth: a real treat
(Honeydog awaiting his pink cranberry! waistcoat. Photo credit: Attit Patel, Toronto Life)
I caught Ronnie Burkett’s 10 Days on Earth up in Sydney last week, and it is a real treat. If you get a chance to see it, go!
The story is about Darrel, who is middle-aged and simple. His life revolves around his elderly mother, with whom he lives and on whom he is dependent, and various friends he regularly meets on his way to work as a shoe-shine boy. At the beginning of the play his mother dies, and we follow his gradual realization of what has happened, interspersed with flashbacks to other times in his life.
But there is also a play within a play, as, from time to time, Burkett reveals a separate smaller stage to tell the comic story of Honeydog and Little Burb, Darrel’s all-time favourite picture book. Honeydog’s search for an understanding of family and home gives Darrel his inner reality and context in life, including, at the end, an understanding of what has happened to his mother, and how life can continue. In other words, it’s beautifully scripted, as well as being wonderfully made and performed.
We stayed for Ronnie’s talk after the show, and it was a pleasure to hear him chat about the ideas behind the show, and many aspects of his work. He covers some of the same ground in Margaret Throsby’s interview with him on Thursday 22 Feb. I don’t know how long this interview will be available, so here is a back up. John Lambert has an excellent Ronnie Burkett page, which has reviews, technical details of the staging, a photo gallery, and a visit to the studio. I especially liked Liz Nicholl’s review, because it mentions Honeydog and his companions more than others. I also enjoyed Bryce Hallet’s account in the SMH.
FantiSea: Giant sea creatures in Esperance
(Cool festival image by Haylie Michelle)
Over in Western Australia, designer and maker Bryan Woltjen and animateur Karen Hethey have been engaged for the last few months on the huge task of designing and building 8 giant puppet sea creatures for FantiSea, which will be held on 22 March as part of the Esperance Festival of the Wind. The festival was at first an art-themed celebration of the positive energy wind brings to the town, and has now evolved into a celebration of ‘community, art, culture and shared fun’.
The building of the giant marine puppets is one of those great projects in which the participation of number of community groups, schools and individuals is integral. The festival’s Workshop Gallery has photos that were taken during the first phase of the build at the end of last year, when the ‘unskinned‘ puppets were built, and some of them were used in the inaugural Christmas pageant in Esperance. You can see how the frameworks are made from a mixture of bamboo and cane, with wire and gaffa joins. I love this picture of the unskinned eel! I would really like to be involved with making puppets of this sort sometime…
More recently during the second phase, the puppets have been skinned with muslin, dipped in diluted PVA, and dyed. Also, Karen Hethy is now teaching performers how to animate the giant puppets and doing stage rehearsals in conjunction with local scriptwriter, Derek Clarke.
Lurk, the shark:
Lighting up Ziggy, the leafy sea dragon:
The gorgeous Dame Agatha, octopus:
The crab (love this one!):
The workshop shed full of finished puppets:
You can click the photos to see them enlarged, and there are more photos here. I think they are wonderful! Thanks, Bryan, for sending me the photos and telling about it all, and I hope to be adding more photos of the actual event.
Update: Photos from the event have now been added.
Now a giant boy marionette
Today I came across this photo of a giant boy marionette, taken in Sydney’s CBD in late January. It’s very much like Royal de Luxe’s little giantess (who has been visiting Santiago, Chile, in the company of a rhinoceros) but I doubt he is theirs. Does anyone know the film company, or what production they were working on?
Update: A couple of people have uploaded videos of the puppet. Apparently it is to be in a Korean clothing commercial of some sort:
Marionette
Giant Puppet in Syndey
I assume this was a practice session, since the articulation has a way to go, but it’s interesting to see how tricky it is after the seemingly faultless performances by Royal de Luxe. The hips look a bit too wobbly as if they might need to go back to the drawing board, but the untidy looseness in the legs and arms lend a bit of boyishness at times. I wonder what it is made out of? I’d guess plastic not wood. I was really surprised that Royal de Luxe uses wood.
The rally for David Hicks
Last Tuesday I went to the David Hicks rally at Parliament House. I don’t much like going to protests, but sometimes you just have to? I wasn’t sure whether to take my vigil puppet, because although I knew he would attract attention, I didn’t want to imply that I thought it was a okay to wish that fate on the prime minister, much as I despise his politics. The point to me is that no-one should be treated in the way that David Hicks has been. I thought about this aspect when putting up the vigil blog, too, but I hope the understanding is that it’s a request to imagine this happening to anyone.
In the end I took the puppet and hooded him, so he was anonymous, and when I saw the cage protest I was glad I had. It made me a bit uncomfortable for just that reason, as did the the various calls to send various ministers to Guantanamo Bay. Having Ned Kelly as the jailer was a strange choice that I didn’t understand. It just seemed bizarre! Ampersand Duck has the best photo of him!
But overall it was a good, if small, rally. Natasha Stott-Despoja gave a fiery speech, and Andrew Bartlett and Kate Lundy were also good. Mamdouh Habib was the most impassioned, with reason. Loadedog, whom I met for the first time there, gives a good rundown on what Habib said, and I agree with him that what Habib says carries weight because he alone has been there and experienced it. The rally organizers messed up by not announcing ahead of time that he would be speaking, and it was amazing to see how all the reporters and photographers who has wandered off came running back to record what he had to say.
I wandered off myself after Habib’s talk. I find my tolerance for the inevitable speakers who want to jump on the bandwagon is close to zero these days.
On the way to the rally I had noticed a cool painted car, and, while I was parking close by, it had dawned on me that it was Ampersand Duck‘s car! I’ve been enjoying her blog for quite a while now. So I scrabbled around to find a scrap of paper and left a scrawled hello under her windscreen wiper. As I was leaving, she was getting into her car, so I jumped out and had the pleasure of meeting her. It seemed to make the whole day a lot more worthwhile!
Here are my photos from the day at Flickr.
Theatre of Image’s Lulie the Iceberg
Kim Carpenter’s highly regarded Theatre of Image has a new production called Lulie the Iceberg, an international collaboration featuring the shadow puppetry of shadow puppet masters from Tokyo’s Kagebushi Theatre Company. You can see a cool behind-the-scenes video of one of their development workshops if you take the ‘teachers’ link on their site. (Sorry, it’s not possible to give a direct link.)
The show is running at the Riverside Theatre Parramatta, 22 February to 3 March, and there are early bird deals and associated exhibitions and demonstrations. More details here at Unima Australia.
Ronnie Burkett is coming to Sydney
Ronnie Burkett’s new show 10 Days on Earth is coming to Sydney in from 15 February – 3 March, and there is an early bird special of $38 for tickets bought for any performance from 15th to 20th February (a saving of $10 on a normal adult price). The offer expires at 5pm on Friday 9th Feb, so get in quick! If you get a chance to go, grab it; I saw Burketts’s show Tinka’s New Dress in Melbourne in 2002, and it was truly amazing theatre.
Bookings can be made on (02) 9250 7777, or at the Sydney Opera House website. They also now have an information page about the show. Burkett will also give a free post performance discussion, on Tuesday 20th Feb. I’ve heard him talk in person, and thats not an opportunity to be missed either.
