The last few working days I’ve been making a couple of giant butterfly body suits. These are to go with the masks and wings I made some years ago for The Fool Factory. You may run across the new butterflies at the National Folk Festival at Easter time in Canberra.
This is cool – for The Lionheart Project, Shauna Richardson has made three giant hand-crocheted lions that will be displayed in a custom-built, mobile, glass case like a taxidermy case, and will travel around the East Midlands as part of the London Cultural Olympiad. I like the studio photos showing the process, and the way the patterns in the crochet are used to emphasis the muscle shapes.
This animation introduces the two mascots for the London Olympics, Wenlock and Mandeville, and the story of how they originated from the Bolton steelworks where the girders for the Olympic stadium were made. It was written by Michael Morpurgo, the author of War Horse and many other children’s books. There are follow up adventures which also serve to meet the desire expressed by children that they have stories associated with them.
The mascot design and maybe in particular the bodysuit puppet versions have been mercilessly derided for obvious reasons. I’m not very fond of mascots generally; with these I’m disconcerted by their saggy bottom halves, but quite like their faces.
OverWorlds & UnderWorlds is Yorkshire’s flagship arts project for the London Cultural 2012 Olympiad. Leeds Canvas, the first collaboration between eight of the city’s key arts organisations offered their city of Leeds – its people, landscape, buildings, artists, and cultural institutions – as a canvas to The Brothers Quay, and asked them to respond in memorable and surprising ways.
They have proposed a large scale work, taking place this May, which will explore the flow of people and water through the city. They are interested in how, from out of the anonymous and everyday, myth suddenly erupts and transforms space into another dimension and then subsides, leaving the everyday altered and somehow different.
The Brothers Quay are renowned for stop motion animations which often involve surreal puppetry, (the video above is an excerpt from Street of Crocodiles) and although we don’t know yet what will unfold, this sounds exciting to me. As a lead up, the brothers’ exhibition Dormitorium, miniature scenes and decor from their animations, was shown in Leeds last October.
(Photo credit: Festive Road, who I think made the puppets – please let me know if I’m wrong)
Another puppetry project that will culminate in the London Olympics celebrations later this year is Imagination Our Nation (ION). It’s a five year national participatory art project undertaken by Kinetika, an international outdoor performance company, under the artistic direction of the company’s founder, Ali Pretty.
The project is based on an idea of Derek Walcott’s: ‘The only nation I have now is my imagination’.
I wanted to create a project that engaged with the youth of today who are citizens of the future, using the performing arts as a tool to facilitate conversations about inclusivity and diversity within communities…. which aims to leave a legacy of youth based participatory art in communities through out the UK. – Ali Pretty
It is geographically spread across Great Britain and divided into 5 ‘hubs’ specialising in Community, Environment, Diversity, Creativity and Activity. And the backstory that has taken place over the last 5 years – GermiNation, FasciNation, DetermiNation, IllumiNation and ImagiNation – is another version of the familiar: puppets as representatives of another world come here to get to know us and help us re-imagine the future to save the planet.
I like the puppets. There are at least 10 small Champion brothers and sisters, who are 3 feet high – a nice kid height, made from aluminium, and have small decorations to differentiate between them. They are operated by long rods, requiring 4 puppeteers. Here are a few glimpses of the making, and some nice footage of how they move.
There are also 5 larger Eternal puppets, including Atom, Magma and DNA (I couldn’t find the other names), big brothers to the smaller ones, that stand 3 metres tall, and need 5 puppeteers. They have a cool design lines, and are again made of aluminium. The operation of the ION puppets remind me very much of the puppet belonging to Stabfugurencompany that often performs in Berlin.
The puppets can be lit up so they take on different colours, as seen here in From DetermiNation to IllumiNation. It will be interesting to see how they all come together later in the year.
Godiva Awakes is one of several events involving puppetry that are planned as part of the Cultural Olympiad accompanying the London Olympics later this year. It is a project of Imagineer Productions, and will take place in Coventry on 28 -29 July, and then journey to London arriving 5 August to join in the Olympic celebrations.
The project abandons how most people remember the old legend of Lady Godiva: that she rode naked on horseback through town wearing nothing but her long hair, in a deal to stop harsh taxes on villagers. Instead, this contemporary interpretation features a 10-metre high puppet of Godiva with short hair and fine robes, riding on a futuristic-looking horse which is powered along through the streets by 100 cyclists riding together in a Cyclopedia:
Godiva is re-imagined as “a new superhero for the 21st Century” (BBC), and as ‘a contemporary icon for the region, a symbol of courage, fairness, social justice, self sacrifice and sustainability who will create a unique spectacle as she walks to London to take part in the London 2012 celebrations’. She is the centrepiece of a processional extravaganza involving performers of all sorts: musicians, puppeteers, acrobats, dancers and choristers. As many of these giant puppets do (since Royal de Luxe), she awakes from another time – her previous life 1000 years ago – observes the new world, and performs a ceremonial mission.
A larger purpose of the event is drawing in community and young people in lots of ways. It also celebrates the rich heritage in engineering and innovation the West Midlands; showcases the artists and craftsmen that carry on those and other traditions (particularly textile arts): and it is hoped it will support and develop the skills of a new generation of makers, performers and event producers.
The @GodivaAwakes twitter feed is releasing photos everyday of the developing project and although they are not giving too much away, there are nice making photos in their gallery, such as the ones above.
Boston Dynamics and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have developed this amazing robotic cheetah that can run at 18 mph. Testing of a free-running prototype is planned for later this year. Aside from the nasty military implications this may have , the thing that interests me about the movement is that although DARPA says that
The robot increases its stride and running speed by flexing and un-flexing its back on each step, much as an actual cheetah does
at the moment the body elongation and the range of flexibility isn’t nearly as great as videos of cheetahs actually show (compare the superimposed skeleton in the video below). I’m going to guess that those will be the next steps in making the robot faster. Also, real cheetahs seem to get an extra spring and propulsion from their feet flexing, whereas the robot doesn’t really have feet, so that might be another direction of improvement.
Previously: Big Dog
I still take an interest in giant marionettes that operate roughly along the same lines as the Royal de Luxe ones. Tonight I happened across this giant boy puppet called Junior, New Zealand’s Biggest Fan, which took part in the festivities during last years Rugby World Cup in New Zealand. There’s always an invented backstory , however sketchy, for these puppets. Junior was made by Bomb Props who have released this making of video:
Local Canberra band The London Circuit released this cool video clip for their single Walk last week, featuring cute sock puppets by Hannah McCann. She has some great photos of the making and filming. The band’s EP is expected to be released in early April.
