The Fool Factory’s Sunflower gives a unusually taciturn glance at the Walk against Warming a couple of weekends ago. I also love this one of the Rat Patrol at Cutflat.
I’m missing blogging! Heaps of things to blog about and no time to do it, is the story. I figure as far as making work goes, I have to make hay while the sun shines. Hoping to get back to it more often in December when the play I am working on has made its run.
Making these fun hats was another of my Floriade projects. I enjoyed making them and was really happy with how they turned out. They were made for the performance group The Bunch of Posers, who in this guise are called Acappellacino.
To make them I started out by making the cup shape upside down, with a mixture of a garden pot and a garden hanging basket and clay. I started paper mache-ing it, but realised that the edges were going to curl when they dried, so instead I made a pattern from the shape (you put alfoil over it, masking tape it so it stays in the shape, then cut it into sections so
it becomes a 2D flat pattern). I could have made a small model and done the same and scaled it up if I hadn’t started down the paper mache track to begin with. Once I had the pattern, I cut it out of a particular thin dense type of foam sheeting and glued it up into the cup shape.
The top cup rim and the foam is made from a circle of polystyrene, so it gives the foam rigidity at the top. The saucer is slightly thicker foam, and the rim of the saucer is a ring of a kind of tubular insulation foam that the building trade uses (its called PEF backing rod, and its like those lengths of foam kids play with in swimming pools – pool noodles they are called here. But you can buy it in different diameters if you know where to go for building supplies.) The ring gave the saucer a nice rigidity. You can see the cups in the raw making phase in this picture.
Then it has muslin spray-glued on to the foam to give it a protective surface and kind of bring it all together. Then paint, with a bit of latex added to make it stick well.
The coffee pot was made in much the same way, just from foam. I made a pattern straight from my neighbour’s espresso pot and scaled it up (what I should have done with the cup, too!). However it does have a ring of light aluminium flat bar in the top rim and a couple of aluminium bars from the ring up into the lid to make the open lid possible and strong. The steam is dacron, the wadding stuff they put in quilts, with a wire through it.
The coffee cups just sit on your head like sombreros, but the coffee pot needed a chin stap which I filched from a bike helmet.
Here’s a video of the group in action, singing “You’re the Cream in my Coffee’. On my computer the sound only streams smoothly once its played through once.
(Click on the photo)
Over the last few months most of my time has been taken up with a number of projects to do with Floriade, Canberra’s month-long annual spring flower festival, which finished last weekend. My biggest scale project was taking workshops with a group of kids from the Warehouse Circus, collaboratively designing and helping them to make some big puppets for a carnivale puppet parade during Floriade.
Robin Davidson was the artistic director, bringing together the eight characters the kids had proposed (The Dude (from the circus logo), the Evil Gardener, two tulips, The Pie, Mirrorman, Mini Me, and a pirate) into a kazoo band.
We used quite a broad range of building techniques and materials, many of which the kids hadn’t had experience with before. Six of the characters were on stilts, some on extension stilts, and I was really impressed with how well the kids took on the physical and mental challenges of performing the characters, and the level of confidence they developed.
Video clip: Click picture to see the Warehouse Circus Carnivale Puppet Parade.
(photo credit: irlLordy, used with permission – thanks!)
irlLordy took a great sequence (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) of photos of a cool puppet entertaining the queue on the steps of the Reichstag in Berlin recently. I really like the aethetic, and it’s interesting to see a bunraku-style puppet being operated on such long rods. The puppeteers – are there five? – must have a really good understanding between them. Apparently the puppet did matrix-like leaps off someone’s shoulders in slow motion at one point. Please do let me know if you happen to know which puppet troupe this is – I’d love to know!
I’ve been keeping a list of Royal de Luxe links since I first became aware of them last June. This weekend I believe The Sultan’s Elephant is in Calais, and then in La Havre at the end of October (26 – 29th).
The producers who brought The Sultan’s Elephant to London in June this year are bringing out a book of photos, reminiscences and articles about the event which will be published in November.
Meanwhile, some lovely Royal de Luxe photos at Flickr:
Le Grand Géant in the water at Pont Du Gard in August (by krisyid)
The Giraffes in Le Harve earlier in September (by jeffreyhill)
Machines of Spectacle at Le Grand Repertoire in Paris (by Tekrotzen)
Most recent Royal de Luxe photos
(photo by Dream Puppets: Lady MacBeth)
This next Sunday the ABC TV Sunday Arts program will be presenting a segment on the work of Julia
Davis’s Macbeth, and her involvement with Dream Puppets. The programme is aired nationally and starts at 4.00PM this Sunday, 6th of August.
As I hoped out loud, Andrew at PuppetVision took some great photos of Sau’rus when they were in Toronto.There are some cool preparation shots there, as well as ones of the performance. Thanks, Andrew. I particularly like this one as a picture, because the letters on the shop suggest “Sau’rus”. Its a bit like that meme about being able to read jumbled letters as long as the first and last letters are right. Although they say that was a hoax, it makes sense to me.
Royal de Luxe’s four-day street spectacle, The Sultan’s Elephant, is in Antwerp, Belgium, this weekend. Here is a link back to my collected of links about them, to which I will be adding the following:
Official Anterp site (via)
Flickr photo pool for the Sultan’s Elephant in Antwerp. Ongoing Royal de Luxe delicious links (edited Oct 2014 to remove defunct del.icio.us link), as I find them.
Incidentally, here is a gorgeous little movie of edited sequences put to music, from the appearence in London.
(photo by digitaldust)
A few weeks ago I was impressed by a number of photos at Flickr showing some fabulous big dinousaur walkabout puppets at the Paradise Gardens festival in London. This was Sau’rus, an act by the Dutch theatre group, Close-Act Street Theatre. Close-Act was formed in 1991 and ‘has since grown to a professional community of actors, musicians, stilt-walkers, dancers,
fire-throwers and acrobats’. Along with technical details and the story, they also have a cool video of the dinoaurs, which shows them as quite agile and menacing, especially with the noises they make and tails whipping around as they stalk along. Looks like they have some other cool acts in their repertoire, too.
The festival also had the pod puppet Flying Buttresses, a tiny elderly couple called Hodman Dodmanott and Sally Forth who ‘venture out in search of fame, fortune and friendship with all their possesions strapped to their backs. After living alone for hundreds of years they have lost touch with the realities of modern life.’ They look fun.
Update: Andrew at PuppetVision reports that Sau’rus is performing in Toronto in the The Celebrate Toronto Street Festival, July 8th and 9th. Maybe he will take some photos :-)? Yes, here they are! Thanks, Andrew.
