I also received a note about Duck walks into a Bar, a ‘bar-hopping, Muppet-style character who likes to troll bars in search of babes, booze and free drinks’, created by Kevin Susman & James Murray. It’s not particularly my taste, but the puppetry, character and video production are slick, so take a look.
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)
This is a still from a video of a giant marionette in Reykjavik, Iceland. It’s being operated by three helicopters! There are some other videos here. I can’t find any other information about it, which is strange, but people seem to think it was being filmed as a viral ad for jeans. It makes me think of my favourite Roald Dhal book, The BFG.
(photo: Whitney Museum of American Art)
It’s funny how these things happen. Just the other day I was thinking about Alexander Calder‘s Circus, the film of which I saw a few years ago at the first national puppetry summit, and wondering if it might be on the net, and then yesterday Boing Boing linked to clips of it on YouTube, posted by sweetjuniper. There are four parts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3,Part 4), together making up the whole film made by Carlos Vilardebo in 1961.
The circus was made during the late 1920’s, a precursor to Calder’s mobiles. He made the puppets from bits and bobs: ‘wire, wood, metal, cloth, yarn, paper, cardboard, leather, string, rubber tubing, corks, buttons, rhinestones, pipe cleaners, and bottle caps’.
‘Beginning in 1927, Calder performed the Circus in Paris, New York, and elsewhere. He would issue invitations to his guests, who would sit on makeshift bleachers munching peanuts, just like the real circus. With the crash of cymbals and music from an old gramophone, the circus would begin. It wasn’t the tricks or gimmicks of the circus that appealed to Calder, but the dynamic movement of bodies in space.’
— Adam Weinburg
I love the way the characters are caught so well by just a few outlines;
the mechanics;
and Calder’s upfront presence throughout:
I also really like how the tricks such as the trapeze artists actually work, but also have a randomness of success. There is also a great sense of humour driving it all.
The circus is now kept at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, but is too fragile to tour. However, it is on display there at the moment, until early September. Vilardebo’s film is available on DVD. There is apparently a second filmed version, Cirque de Calder, made in 1953 by Jean Painlevé.
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 Glenn Watson)
I really laughed my way through Peter Cornwall’s Ward 13, one of a number of terrific Australian animations screened at the summit. It’s a stop-motion animation – action/horror/comedy – about a guy who has a road accident and wakes up in the hospital from hell, complete with bizarre medicines, a green tentacled blob, experimental puppy surgery, and a doctor and nurse who menace with huge dirty knives, cleavers, shears and sticks. You can download the trailer to get a taste of it, and check out how it was made.
Links updated 2015
Like Jose, I’ve been interested in the puppets that formed part of Beck‘s concert at the the Sasquatch Festival in Royal Gorge, Washington on Memorial Day. Previously, they had appeared at the Fillmore in San Francisco, and in Davis (there is an itinerary there). According to the SFGate Culture Blog, Beck hired the puppeteers from Team America to travel with him and perform the real-time marionette puppet show of the band on the stage directly behind the real band, with the results shown on huge video screens. There are some cool Flickr photos.
Oh and Jose, I found another video.
Updated links 2015
Last weekend the Tate Modern in London hosted a new production of Mori el Merma, which was first performed in 1978, and emerged out of a collaboration between the surrealist painter Joan Miró and La Claca, an experimental theatre troupe from Barcelona, headed by Joan Baixas. In the new revision,
‘… Joan Baixas evokes the critical spirit of Mori el Merma and recovers Miró’s original idea to make a street parade in the Catalonian tradition. Baixas’s work insists on the idea of the absurdity of power, the abuses of the tyrant and the impertinences of dictators, themes which are ever present and must be critised and
denounced.‘The puppets are replicas made under supervision and control of the Succesió Miró SL and range from giants with the heads of monsters, grotesque torsos and six-foot-long arms to creatures that whisper and
squeal as if Miró’s free-form shapes had to leapt to life.’
In an article in the Guardian, Baixas comments that the play has been retitled Merma Never Dies, because almost 30 years later, Merma is alive and well:
‘The name is unimportant because, unfortunately, there are many Mermas now. In recent years we have seen leaders who wage wars with lies and who play games with democracy. The least we can do is laugh at them.’
I’ve come across the following accounts and photos of the performance and parade. It looks pretty bizarre!
Cronicas desde Londres: photos and video
Yahoo News collection of photos
No-necked Monster’s photos and video
The irreverence and exhuberence in this classic Sesame Street video clip is such fun. I love it! (via Project Puppet)
Its no longer available :(
