The story of the commercial tie-ins to the movie adaptation of Dr. Suess’s book The Lorax is completely dispiriting. Boycot it all.
Adjustable mould boxes
These Barnes Products‘ adjustable mould boxes that allow one to easily size the walls around a sculpt are pretty nifty. I always like looking through their sculpting, moulding and casting supplies, although I don’t have much call for them. The times I have, they’ve been very helpful. I also like their online tutorials, and they are now running courses. There have been a few in nearby Queanbeyan, but only in resin jewellery. Now if it was in casting silicon or something like that I’d be right there!
One Plastic Beach
One Plastic Beach documents how artists Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang find joy in collecting and making beautiful arrangements from pieces of plastic that they collect from Kehoe Beach, California. It piqued my interest because I’m still somewhat haunted by my own discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and have tried to come to terms with it through art myself.
(via Laughing Squid)
A beautiful little wing mechanism
This beautiful little wing mechanism making a playful kinetic ring is made by Dukno Yoon, a jeweller and metalsmith. There are other equally lovely ones operated by various small hand and wrist movements in his gallery. (via Colossal)
War Horse
After hearing Adrian Kohler talking about Handspring Puppet Company‘s War Horse at UNIMA 2008 in Perth, I made a special point of seeing it in London later that year when I was travelling. It was remarkable and wonderful.
Since then War Horse has been much celebrated, and has played to increasing audiences, moving from the National Theatre to the West End, and then to Broadway. Most recently it has been staged in Toronto, and, excitingly, it will be in Melbourne’s Arts Centre in December this year.
I think the TED talk above is the best demonstration of the puppets I’ve seen outside the theatre. Despite their impressionistic construction with movement, breath and emotional gestures they become breathtakingly alive. (Eric Hart linked to this great infographic by Trish McAlaster on how the puppets work.)
The horse puppets get most of the interest, which is natural, but there’s also a lovely puppet goose, and an enormous tank that comes on stage, rolling up over a barricade, and rearing over the audience. I really don’t know how they did that! And I also enjoyed the music and loved the minimalist set, essentially a suggested torn piece of paper above the back of the stage, on which simple animations were projected from time to time.
The attitude towards war in the play is unusual, slipping past taking sides, who is in the right or wrong and strategy, and emphasising rather how the horses’ fates are completely subject to the capricious needs and circumstances of humans.
By now War Horse has been made into the inevitable Spielberg movie, which I somehow don’t feel any particular need to see. (For fun take a look at Lisa Hanawalt’s illustrated review). I’m inclined to think that I would agree with Emily Landau’s article Why war Horse’s puppets win by flaunting their artificiality. Apparently an animatronic horse was used for a few seconds for humane reasons in one scene in the movie. I caught a glimpse of this on YouTube a few weeks ago but the video has since been withdrawn.
Lastly, I love the illustration of the Handspring puppets by Byron Eggenschwiler accompanying Landau’s article.
Latest Australian Puppeteer Mag is out
I received my copy of the latest Australian Puppeteer Magazine a couple of days ago. It’s a good looking production at the moment under the new editorship of Robert Reid. In this edition there are features on Terrapin Theatre Company‘s and Sydney Puppet Theatre‘s history and plans, and Tim Denton‘s reflections on his Bread and Puppet experience two years on. Also, interviews with Duda Paiva, Heath McIvor, and Richard Hart (the last being about the upcoming Tarrengower Puppetfest, a dialogue via Kay Yasugi about marionette puppetry in the classroom, and various reviews.
The magazine is available twice a year to members of UNIMA Australia. Don’t forget that you can also get news of the puppetry arts in Australia via the free monthly Oz Puppetry Email Newsletter.
Falling man street art
I was up in Sydney for a couple of days this week, and went out to Cockatoo Island for the first time. It’s a former convict prison and shipyard, now used as a contemporary visual arts venue. This image was one of many painted on the old buildings there.
Testing an elephant trunk
The elephants in yesterday’s post reminded me of this big elephant trunk I made for The Flying Fruit Fly production, The Promise, in 2008. It was meant to wave out from behind some set element, implying the whole elephant was just behind. The mechanism was based on a tentacle mechanism I had worked out previously, but was more complicated because the control lines were too long for the see-saw lever and instead required spools to wind the lines onto alternately to take up the slack. In turn there was a lot of tension exerted on the spools, and the trunk weight added to that problem. So, not a perfect solution, but an interesting make.
I also thought this was nifty – wrinkly elephant skin made by painting latex on stretched lycra! This idea was suggested to me by Tim Denton, from AboutFace Productions, who did the major build for the show, and it worked brilliantly.
Amit Drori’s miniature mechanical elephants
I’ve been entranced by Royal de Luxe‘s and La Machine‘s huge mechanical elephants, but this evening I came across Israeli Amit Drori‘s enchanting small mechanical elephants, made for his show Savanna. The elephants are computerised robots with complex mechanisms and live motion control. As well as the birds and turtle in this video, in another is a beautiful buck.
