Photos of the Sultan’s Elephant starting to come in

Posted by hil

There is a Flickr pool for photos of the Sultan’s Elephant, the Royal de Luxe street theatre spectacle happening in London right now and over this weekend. The official website gallery is also starting to post photos. The BBC coverage looks as if its going to be good too – I’m hoping to see it on one of the webcams!

I’ll be adding links that I find to my previous collection of links as I get time, but you can also see more immediately what I am finding by checking my del.icio.us/royaldeluxe tag (edited Oct 2014 – link now defunct).

Update: wonderful footage of the elephant, taken by Mike. (via Boing Boing)

Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride puppets

Posted by hil

Burton2Mrsasta has a photo gallery of an exhibit of the Tim Burton puppets and concept art from The Corpse Bride. I hadn’t been drawn to see the movie until I saw these, but now I think I must.

Here also is an interview with Graham G. Maiden, the head of the puppet department on the Corpse Bride. And Stop Motion Works’ Corpse Bride page has a link showing the inside of a Corpse Bride puppet, and some on-set photos.

Images of FaultyOptic’s Horsehead

Posted by hil

This is one of a cool set of images of FaultyOptic’s production, Horsehead, or The Rise & Fall of the Back & Front, taken by Chris Daniel. FaultyOptic is based in London, and is described as ‘haunting visual theatre, automated sets, strange animated figures, cronked inventions and macabre humour’ and ‘surreal adult puppetry at its best.

Erth’s roaming dinosaurs

Posted by hil

Erth‘s impressive Gondwana dinosaur puppets have been doing some roaming street theatre gigs. Here are some photographs of them at WOMAD, Adelaide’s world music festival, in March. These were taken by John King, and are used with his permission.

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(copyright: John King)

At Flickr, Georgie Sharp also has two cool photos of her encounter with them. I think they also roamed Melbourne during the recent Commonwealth Games.

Updated links 2015

Puppetsfeed

Posted by hil

Jose at Titereblog has followed up his puppetry search engine with Puppetsfeed, a site where feeds about puppets and puppetry are being collected and listed. It’s a great idea, and it looks attractive, too. I’m enjoying the feeling that another person on the other side of the world is thinking in similar ways about using new technologies to share these things. I’m beginning to think I will have to learn Spanish, Jose! – it’s wonderful that you do so much in English.

I’ve also recently come across Jose’s Directorio de compañías y espectáculos de marionetas. Am I right that this is a directory of puppetry theatre companies in the Spanish-speaking world, Jose? I’m not sure if I should list it in Spanish or English in my OPML directory that’s running in the sidebar. Which would you like?

Updated links 2015

Mimi Kirchner’s Robots

Posted by hil

RobotsYou know, if I was a scriptwriter, or puppetry director or TV producer, I would seriously be thinking about a production based around Mimi Kirchner‘s wool dolls. Mimi’s latest are these fabulous robots. Can’t you imagine them as the main characters in a show? Could they be some strange new manifestation of the couple in American Gothic? ;-)

Alternatively, put them together with Mimi’s big men, grandmas, fat fairies and others, and I can see them all becoming part of a whole imaginary world that has its own original style and aesthetic.

Mia Dyson: Thredbo Blues Festival

Posted by hil

Mia Dyson

I’ve just got around to making a Flickr set of photos of the Thredbo Blues Festival in January. Thredbo is one of the skiing resorts in the Snowy Mountains up near Mt Kosciusko, but in summer the blues festival takes over the village, casual and cool, for a weekend. The highlight for us was seeing Mia Dyson. She is a young, fabulously talented blues singer, guitarist and slide player. But we also saw the Foreday Riders, Ray Beadle, and others, and took a ride up the Kosciusko chair lift.

The Sultan’s Elephant coming to London in May

Posted by hil

Royal de Luxe’s wonderful spectacle, The Sultan’s Elephant, is coming to London from 4th – 7th May, brought to you by Artichoke. It will take place in the streets and public spaces of Westminster, in thearea around Horse Guards Parade in St James’s Park, St James’s, Piccadilly, Haymarket and Trafalgar Square. There is a new promotional website for London, The Sultan’s Elephant. Thanks to Elfie for letting me know.

Update: I’ve added this to my previous links, and started updating there. Might as well keep it all in one place. I’ll keep tracking links there as the London spectacle develops.

Updated links 2015

Puppetry Worldview directory

Posted by hil

I’ve been fiddling around making an OPML directory of online puppet links. I’m just feeling my way, and at the moment I don’t know how selective I want to be or how far I want to take it. It may turn out to be not very far, though it does have the capacity to include other people’s lists through distributed data entry. You can see it in my sidebar over there on the right. Try clicking all the way through on the blogs and Aussie websites; those are the ones I have been concentrating on.

Thanks to Dave Winer (OPML, OPML Editor) and Mike Kowalchik (Grazr).

Updated 2015.