Excuse me, this is the yellow queue…

Posted by hil

Four of us in turn in the queue at the supermarket last night had multiples of bright yellow things: a bottle of detergent and a stack of sponges, a bunch of soup packets, bottles of lemon juice, and my hand of bananas. I felt very colour co-ordinated! Wouldn’t it be funny if you had to queue by item colour?

To introduce the system you could have people swanning around in appropriately brightly-coloured body suits helping shoppers sort their shopping and find the right checkout lane. Banana Man, for instance, would show yellow. Should the aisles be stocked by item colour? And the checkouts and lanes be demarcated by item colour? I think so.

Banana Man

This Banana Man is by Hilda Boswell, taken from Enid Blyton’s Marigold Story, from the 50’s. In the story the golly decides to go to a fancy dress party in a real banana skin. He asks the baby doll to sew up the skin around him but after much giggling in a corner of the toy cupboard… she can’t do it because the cotton slips through the skin. So they call on the elf who puts zips in with a bit of magic. Golly wins the fancy dress prize, but then can’t undo the zip magic to get out. I always felt sorry for him.

I could do with a bit of zip magic making the big body suit I’m working on at present.

all-mother

Posted by hil

AllmotherThere are only 3 days left to catch all-mother, a play presented by barb barnett‘s serious theatre and eRTH Visual and Physical at the Street Theatre in Canberra. I’m seeing the last performance, and looking forward to it.

“all-mother combines rigging and harness technology with puppetry, movement and music to re-imagine and re-tell the Lilith myth. Though hundreds of years old, the story provides unexpected insights into modern issues of human rights, gender, sexuality and the abuse of power.”

In an article in The Canberra Review barb talks about some of the issues she is exploring in the piece.

‘Springing from the question who is the puppeteer and who is the puppet, Barnett says she wanted to examine issues surrounding control. “Lilith stood up for herself – she was a powerful, strong woman,” Barnett said. “I really wanted to examine what happens when you say no and what does it mean to say no? What punishment is there for standing up for yourself?”’

Barb gave a wonderful performance as Lute in ‘scuse me while I kiss the sky (by Adam Hadley) in Catherine Langman’s production Six Pack last year. The evening featured six short works commissioned by The Street Theatre and based around the theme of love, and was the most enjoyable night’s theatre. The other performance that really struck me was that of Aiden Emanuel, the young mechanic in Carburettor (by Christos Tsiolkas).

Updated links 2015

Shaun Tan’s website and Aquasapiens

Posted by hil

aqua51

Shaun Tan now has his own website. It looks relatively new. It’s great to see a number of illustrations under each picture book listing, and read his thoughtful and friendly commentary. I was also delighted to see some images from the puppetry-based theatre production of The Red Tree, which was produced as part of the Queensland Performing Arts Centre’s ‘Out of the Box’ festival for children in 2004. I had heard about this wonderful fish puppet on the grapevine. There are also some in-theatre pictures of some of our puppets for Jigsaw Theatre’s production of The Lost Thing.

One project that was unknown to me before, is Aquasapiens. Tan was commissioned by Spare Parts Puppet Theatre in Fremantle, WA, to design large-scale puppets for a street theatre event as part of the 2005 Perth International Arts Festival. The director was Philip Mitchell, the puppet maker Jiri Zmitko and sound designer/composer Lee Buddle. These creatures are fabulous! Here are drawings of the Yellow Naut‘ and ‘Shrimpy’. I also love this.

Aquasapiens is going to be part of the Adelaide Fringe in February and March, and is available to perform at schools from February 27 to March 10.

Apparently Spare Parts will also be adapting another of Tan’s books, The Arrival, which is about migration and is due to be published in April.

updated links 2015

The Magic of Marionettes by Anne Masson

Posted by hil

I remembered yesterday that the tip about storing marionettes by twirling them so the strings twist up together (in the comments under my last post) came from a lovely book called The Magic of Marionettes by Anne Masson. It was given to one of my kids, but I got a great deal out of it too, not so much because it was about puppets, but because it is written with a real understanding of the delight and empowerment that creating and making something can give you.

The book covers how to make the puppets, how to put on a performance, write a simple play, and it discusses props, scenery, sound effects and scripts that might be used, while keeping lots of room for individual creativity, and emphasizing that the process is as important as the result.

Simple rods puppets from recycled materials

Posted by hil

RodThese are two simple rod puppets which were made by my son when he was about 8, at a workshop that I was involved with.

The materials were recycled bits and pieces. The basic pattern was a plastic bottle for a body; a stuffed sock for the head; cardboard tubes running through the bottle neck for the neck, and for holding the puppet from below; strips of foam for the arms; wire rods for manipulating arms and hands; and odds and ends of fabric and other things (glitter, eyes, bobbles, straws, paper, offcuts of leather, ribbons and cord, and so on) for features and decoration.

The main preparation for the workshop, apart from collecting all the materials, was making the rods, though they were simple enough. They were a strong wire (it must not bend too readily), cut to size, straightened, anchored in a length of dowel at one end, and bent or hooked (so that could be poked into the foam at the wrist) at the other end. To fix the wire in the dowel, drill a hole down the centre of the dowel that the wire will fit in tightly, and then make a tiny bend in the wire a centimetre or so from the end before pushing it it. For this purpose the bend is enough of a barb to keep the wire in.

Craft glue was used to attach fabrics and foam, but we had a nifty way (I still think it’s nifty!) for the kids to attach the arms to the body: cut a X about 3 cm across into the plastic and just push the foam through. Again, the tension and points of plastic are enough to secure the foam. The elbows and wrists are made just with string tied tightly around the foam, but they are surprisingly effective.

I think the most important aspect when doing this kind of workshop (after providing basic ideas, materials, and help) is to leave the rest to the imagination of the makers, so that other ideas in construction, features, characters and the stories that inevitably emerge with them, are welcome and valued.

Simple rod puppets

Starting and finishing

Posted by hil

I was thinking today about how we go about starting and finishing things. It’s kind of curious and fascinating, don’t you think? How do we decide exactly what to do first, and how do we know when to stop?

This was prompted because I’ve started a new project in the last few days. I’m making a large body suit, and it has some mechanisms that have already been made, which I have to integrate into it. It’s a one-off, no prototype, so nothing to really draw on, and I anticipate quite a lot of problem solving.

Although this character has been discussed and planned on paper for a while now, making a physical start feels like a challenge, and I’ve been circling it at a distance, and doing ‘busy work’ around it. It’s rather like when you see someone swirling their pen in the air a few times before actually being able to sign their name, or like a dog going round and round before being able to settle down to sleep. So today I have been to the fabric shop to see what is available, and I’ve measured things and had lots of cups of tea. And I fiddled with some parts of the mechanism which needed bulking out, because that was a fairly straightforward thing to do. Tomorrow I will make a small plasticine model to make a pattern from, and then after all this nibbling around the edges I can probably make a more convincing start.

In the past I’ve regarded this phase as procrastination, or just something silly I inevitably do, but today I have shifted and decided that instead it must be a necessary and positive part of the process.

Finishing is equally as interesting. In this case, though, the exact finish will likely be dictated by a deadline!

Taking the plunge

Posted by hil

There ought to be a word for the reticence I feel about jumping back into the online world after some time away. It’s so strange, because I mostly love the online life, and I am brimful of things I want to blog about. So to break the ice, here is an early morning photo from the beach house bedroom at Encounter Bay, looking out to Wright Island, and Seal Rock in the distance to the left. The best thing about staying at Encounter Bay is rowing out to the island when no-one else is there. The one time I was able to do that these holidays, there were a few dolphins around the boat at one point: magic.

View to the island

(Click to enlarge)

Mimi Kirchner’s Big Men Dolls

Posted by hil

Bigman2Mimi Kirchner’s big men dolls are fun. It’s interesting how different the wool patterns and texture makes them, and I really like the spoof heroic shape! This one is my favourite. As someone remarks these guys are reminiscent of David Byrne in his Big White Suit in Stop Making Sense.

Mimi also makes the best bugs, too. (And you might know by now how I like a good insect!)