The Laucke flour mills site suggests the best place for proofing and rising dough is in an esky with some boiled water and the lid on, so that’s what I’m trying with my annual batch of hot cross buns. It will be a revelation if it works!
Update: They turned out so well – the best batch I’ve ever made, by far, and I’m sure it was because of the esky trick. The buns expanded quickly in a fluffy kind of way – they have never done that before, and have always previously taken such an age to rise. Might tempt me to try making bread again sometime.
You would think that little arrow on The Age this morning would give you a drop down for national news, right?
Wrong!
The papers run the whole gamit of ads from completely in your face through to sneaky idiotic things like this, and wonder why they are going down the tube.
This huge wire marionette appeared at the opening of the new Vancouver Convention Centre last weekend; I gather it was associated with Cirque du Soleil. It was a performance by the Underground Circus, and the marionette was made by Peter Boulanger (who was kind enough to let me know in a comment below). It’s made of aluminium (I guess it’s really thick round wire?) , and at about 40 feet, billed as the tallest marionette in Northern America. The puppet moves to music and is operated by 5 puppeteers working pulleys. In this photo you can see it standing fully, supporting two acrobats: the one in the ball and one on the length of material. This is a great photo of it, too.
(influence of Royal de Luxe? Peter says not directly, though he knew of their work)
I’m really excited by the exquisite aesthetic of these puppets. Take a look at the showreel slide show or the album of stills. They suggest the essence of the creatures with the simplest of lines – just beautiful!
Blind Summit Theatre was founded in 1997 by Nick Barnes and Mark Down to make new plays with puppets for adult audiences. His Dark Materials is on at Birmingham Rep: 13th March – 18th April; and then at the West Yorkshire Playhouse : 28th May – 20th June.
There is some great puppet making information on the Blind Summit site, too, though not specifically for this kind of puppet.
Paul Vincett from Stitches and Glue sent me some pictures of a couple of custom munnys that he has entered in the APW custom toy contest which is on in NYC at the moment. They are pretty cute – good luck with them, Paul.
It jogged my memory: I’ve posted about munnys once before, so I was curious how Cursters have evolved over the last couple of years. I like this red jellyfish:
Shadow Monsters by Philip Worthington is a wonderful interactive and digital form of shadow puppets, in which the programming generates fantastic and playful extensions to the shadows of participants bodies and hands, and quirky and wild sounds. (There are more YouTube videos).
The Shadow Monsters grew from a brief about technological magic tricks. I was looking at optical illusions and Victorian hand shadows particularly interested me as a starting point. The subtlety with which a character could be created was already very magical and I wondered if there was room to experiment with these techniques. Looking back to my own childhood, I remembered the feeling of casting huge shapes in the light of my father’s slide projector, creating monsters and silly animals. I enjoy working with simple intuitive things; playful feelings that touch us on a very basic level.At the same time I was experimenting with some software for vision recognition so slowly the monsters evolved. At first I made a puppet show with coloured pencils that had hair and eyes… and this slowly grew in complexity until I had a system that could go some of the way to understanding hand posture. The rest is history.
My daughter Anna’s new photographic work, Plastic Surgery, is on at the Canberra Contemporary Arts Space in Manuka until Sunday. The images are photographs of the human body form manipulated in different ways in graffiti art and fashion design in the urban environment. They are printed large on aluminium foil which gives them an industrial brash feel.
When my kids were little, lounge cleaning became cubby time. (Is it only Australians that call playhouses cubbies?) The sofas would be pushed together and blankets draped over them to make an enclosed space to play in while the vacuuming was done all around. Then, more often than not, the seemingly new spaciousness of the vacuumed room made for wilder plans and the cubby would be extended and enhanced with more blankets propped up crazily by brooms, the drying rack, and chairs. It gave birth to a new understanding of the old saying that nature abhors a vacuum. Inevitably someone’s temper would fray, or vital pegs would come adrift one too many times, and it would all collapse into a just an ordinary pile of blankets, and it would all be over until next time.
We had a favourite picture book by Shirley Hughes, Sally’s Secret, which was about a little girl who has a cubby in the garden. Sally has various inadvertent
visitors, one a ladybird, and then she and a friend dress up and play ladies with a little tea set.
Our kids and their friends played cubbies in spaces under shrubs or overhanging branches, too. Sometimes the houses were for games with soft toys, other times gang clubrooms. Later, one friend in the cul de sac used garden clippers to tunnel a cubby into a thicket of bushes in the nature reserve at the back of the houses. Nearby the kids made a treehouse, only to discover that a bunch of boys from another street (and school and religion!) regarded it as theirs. Exciting rivalry ensued with much messaging and spying, but strangely I don’t remember how it was resolved. There was also camping in the garden, which might be regarded as a kind of advanced cubby play?
For a few years on our Christmas beach holidays when my nieces came to stay, five of the six kids would share the bunk room and convert the whole room and all the beds into a maze of interconnecting blanket cubbies. So it would stay for days at a time, with the kids disappearing inside for long stretches between trips to the beach. It was guaranteed to produce tantrums from the littlest who was not always allowed in. Years later during a Christmas dinner when much wine had gone down and someone jokingly came up with the idea of a ‘family sorry day’, there was a confession of deliberate provocation, though at the time, of course, there was never proof.
The handful of children I taught at an alternative school in 1980 were seriously into cubbies, too. The school resided that year in a government house in O’Connor. The kids constructed an elaborate cubby in the pile of firewood outside, making passageways and rooms and furnishing them with odds and ends for their games. It would be outlawed at any school these days.
I’m guessing that the intimacy of a room of one’s own; the satisfaction of the process of construction; the collaboration, role play, decisions, secrets and power play of the group; and the way a cubby becomes whatever imagined world you desire must all factor into what makes cubbies such essential play.
