puppets

Terrapin Theatre Company: The Garden of Paradise

Posted by hil

The Ten Days on the Island Festival in Tasmania, which started on April 1st, is drawing to a close. Terrapin Theatre Company, which is one of Australia’s oldest puppetry companies, presented a stage adaptation of The Garden of Paradise, a little known tale by Hans Christian Andersen. It was commissioned by the festival to mark the bicentennial of the
birth of Hans Christian Andersen, and included dancers from TasDance, choreographed by Graeme Murphy.

The bicentennial is being celebrated all over the world this year, and Terrapin has been invited to take their production to Denmark in August.

In January there was a preview in The Age, and a few days ago The Australian has a short review within a general article on the festival. Gentle Curiosity has a more personal and detailed response.

March’s Month of Softies

Posted by hil

Scrambling under the wire again… this is my entry for Loobylu’s Month of Softies for March. The theme was self-portrait of the artist as a young child.

sd2

I can’t say it looks very like me, but the essentials are there – round face, blonde hair, button nose, tom-boy. The Fair-isle vest is made from an an unfinished jumper that I rediscovered when I was rummaging for fabric. I knitted it years ago in Scotland and I had completely forgotten about it. The vest is a kind of present to myself, because when I was young one of my aunts made stripy vests out of odds and ends of wool for my brother, and I always fancied one for myself.

Update: I took some better daytime photos yesterday, much better than the midnight one.

Tree climbing

 

Happy World Puppetry Day

Posted by hil

Though its not widely known, March 21st is World Puppetry Day! Dario Fo, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, released a WPD message through Union Internationale de la Marionnette, (UNIMA), which you can read on the Unima Australia website.

It was rumoured that this wonderful six metre tall Mexican skeleton puppet (made by Karen Hethey and Bryan Woltjen), which was part of the Joondalup Festival parade in WA last Saturday, was likely to make surprise appearances today in celebration of World Puppetry Day.

Muckheap

Posted by hil

‘Muckheap’ by Melbourne’s Polyglot Puppet Theatre was another favourite of mine at One Van in January. Described as ‘a galloping tale of two people who try to clean out their shed for hard rubbish day but find everything too interesting or full of memories to throw out’, it also weaves in a different version of Jack(y) and the Beanstalk, ideas about recycling, play, and memory, and an inventive mix of puppetry and scale. The puppets were designed by Paul Newcombe, and adapted and made by Graeme Davis. Here is one of them:

Muck2

The relationship between the two main characters was pleasing in the way it ranged from tension and teasing to fun and fondness. I also liked the way it showed imaginative play and puppets as being able to be made out of anything. (The only thing that the actors deemed unable to be worth keeping at the particular performance I saw was a John Howard poster). Its good news that ‘Muckheap’ will be coming to Canberra in May as a Jigsaw Theatre Company ACT Schools Tour, and later in the year it travels to Queensland.

Hooray for two-dollar shops!

Posted by hil

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.

Spider3

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.

Jonathon Oxlade

Posted by hil

For me Jonathon Oxlade was the stand-out performance of the One Van puppetry festival in late January. His short performance during the Saturday night cabaret was exciting, bizarre, gross, and hilarious. Jonathon works as a freelance theatre designer, illustrator and puppeteer.

According to his bio, among many other things, he created The Red Tree installation — ‘an interactive experience full of little surprises for the eyes, ears,heart and mind’ — that accompanied the QPAC’s Out of the Box production of ShaunTan’s beautiful picture book ‘The Red Tree’ in 2004.

Redtree

This year he is designing ‘Creche and Burn’ (on stage in April) and ‘The Dance of Jeramiah’ (in Oct-Nov) for LaBoite Theatre, and a production of the Dicken’s classic ‘A Christmas Carol’ for the Queensland Theatre Company late in the year. He is currently working on a picture book, too.

Interior grip design for foam puppet mouths

Posted by hil

At Transformed Puppet, puppeteer and artist Ronald Binion has an excellent page about issues to do with making the interior of a foam puppet mouth both comfortable and effective in manipulation. He illustrates the kind of hand grips that he prefers.

Grip

As he notes, the interior is just as important as the exterior aesthetics in terms of using the puppet expressively; and as there is a propensity for puppeteers to suffer from repetitive strain injuries in the long run, it is also an occupational health issue that puppet makers have to keep in mind. Binion is also right in suggesting that there are many solutions to the problem. One of the joys of puppet making is that it is about problem solving, and individual approaches are valuable and part of the art. I particularly like the look of the thumb tube that is ‘connected to the mouth plate at only one point, allowing the thumb tube to act as a lever, and not force the thumb to conform to the angle of the mouth plate’. It’s also vital that the hinge of the mouth fits snugly into the hinge of your hand, between your thumb and fingers.

Take a tour around the Transformed Puppet (updated link 2015); there are some interesting puppet pictures and productions there. (Via PuppetVision Blog)

 

My White Rabbit for February’s Month of Softies

Posted by hil

What a scramble – I forgot February was so short! But here is my White Rabbit for Loobylu’s Month of Softies, which this month was on the theme of Alice in Wonderland. He stands about 40 cm (15 in) tall, and is covered in a very soft kind of fluffy material, (I’m not sure what – its not fleece or
terry towelling). He was going to have a blue jacket and be holding a
pocket watch, but I ran out of time to make those today.

rabbitc

The rabbit is actually a very simple glove puppet, as he fits on your hand and you can turn his head with a rod inside his body. He is very cuddly, and its fun to cradle him your arms (without it being obvious that one arm is inside) and make him come alive.

rabbitd

Update: Here are some pictures of him now he is finished:

White Rabbit puppet

A tentacle mechanism

Posted by hil

When I was making puppets for ‘The Lost Thing’ a few months ago we had to come up with a simply-made tentacle that could start out straight, and then reach about a metre or more, and curl around to some extent at the tip. Here is the drawing I made of the mechanism I invented, in case its useful to other makers:

Tentacle
(click to enlarge)
The tentacle shape is made of a very soft foam, and has two tracks of heavy duty fishing line running up each side, though small sections of plastic tubing. The kind of tubing I found good was antenna housing that model-car hobbyists use, because it is strong and rigid.When the fishing line is pulled the tentacle curls, and when it is released the foam itself acts as a kind of spring, returning the tentacle to an at-rest straight position. I did have to put some additional spring and rigidity in the core of the foam, though. It was an experimental mixture of different lengths of spring wire, boning and strip plastic, with the idea being to incrementally decrease the rigidity towards the tip. You have to balance aspects like having the foam soft enough to compress easily, and the core springy enough to return but not too rigid to bend easily, and so on.The tentacle was covered: a very thin layer of dacron batting to make it all smooth, and then lycra.

The curls in simple tentacles usually only work in two directions. They are mechanically similar to those intriguing flexible wooden snakes and fish whose bodies are sliced into lots of cross-sections, and then constructed again with a leather or canvass strip running up the middle of the body:

Snakecurl
A tentacle made like this moves from side to side, not up and down, or with any twisting. The thing that excited me about the foam tentacle was that by pulling on both lines with varying pressures, it would twist around in a very sinuous way. It was not a feature that could be used much in the play, as the puppeteer only had one hand free to operate the tentacle, but it was an interesting discovery. It would also be worth experimenting with trying three or four operating strings, if the base of the tentacle was in a firm housing rather than being hand-held.