This is a great behind-the-scenes video for Erth‘s The Dream of the Thylacine which will run at Carriageworks in Sydney 25 Sept to 5 October. In particular it shows super talented puppet maker Bryony Anderson talking in some detail about how she thought about the project, and her process in building the thylacine puppet, down to how and why she came to make the fur from potato sacks!
Also take a look at this amazing spider made by Bryony and friends, using only stuff from the dump.
Check out these fabulous magpie geese puppets! They were made by Erth, for the production Goose Lagoon, a new contemporary dance work by Gary Lang NT Dance Company which premiered recently at the Darwin Festival. Here are the pick of the links I could find:
(Photo credit: anthonyung. Thanks for the CC licence. Click to enlarge)
This magnificent tiger puppet was one of the highlights of the recent Chinese New Year Twilight Parade celebrations in Sydney. Videos at the ABC, and on YouTube show it in action, and e_yew at Flickr has a close-up of the tiger’s head.
According to Street Corner:
The 3.5 metre tall City of Sydney float is operated by nine puppeteers and has an audio system in its belly to make it roar and purr.
Constructed from found and recycled materials, the float celebrates the Year of the Metal Tiger and is a symbol of City of Sydney’s commitment to sustainability.
The Metal Tiger was built by renowned prop maker Erth and its parts include vacuum cleaners, take-away food containers, aluminium cans, bicycle parts, grid iron and hockey guards, pool noodles, old speaker boxes, kitchenware, hub caps and motorbike components.
The float will be adorned with 100m of LED bud lighting, 90 metres of rope light, and tips the scales at approximately 300kg.
Coffee-cat, Kathleen Azali, has a cool run down on the Melbourne International Puppet Carnival, with photos, and links to a few reviews and video clips. In taking a look at her portfolio, I was interested to see Kathleen had done some making for eRTH. She made Eve, pictured here with barb barnett, in all-mother. And I love the zombie dragon made for the Magic Flute.
I meant to post something about all-mother. It was intense and challenging theatre, and the story was somewhat complex to unravel, especially since it was told backwards. It had some wonderful puppetry. In particular I remember the scene where Lilith is surrounded by small devils, creatures made from sticks and other found objects, all with their own idiosyncratic ways of moving; and the scene where one is drawn in to share her exquisite tenderness for her babies, only then to have to watch as she tears them apart, part of her punishment for saying no to Adam.
Updated links 2015
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.
(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
There 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
Due to popular demand the National Museum of Australia has scheduled some extra performances of Gondwana by the Sydney company erth Visual and Physical Inc. You’ll have to be quick to book, as the last performances are this coming weekend.
The puppets are fantastic, as you might expect from erth, and with Bryony Anderson on the making team (I don’t know who else was on the team) . Some are wonderfully satisfyingly HUGE. Others have delightful characteristics, such as the Leptictidium’s twitchy nose. With one exception – the crocodile-y animal – the creatures moved beautifully. I loved the fine movements of the Meganeura, a gigantic primative dragonfly, and the Ammonites. One of the smaller dinosaurs shared a similar and effective design to some of the puppets in ‘The Lion King’, such as the warthog: the puppeteer visible in the middle, with the neck and head built out the front, and tail out the back. The baby Dryosaurs were just plain cute. And the inflatable lanscape and original soundscape were cool, too.
At the performance I saw the accoustics were dreadful. It was hard to hear any of the narration.
Its an interesting task to seek to satisfy both traditional theatre audiences as well as museum audiences. For the theatre goer, there was drama in seeing the creatures brought to life so well, but little story development aside from evolution. For museum audiences, which I assume are those whose interests are mainly historical and scientific – and there has been great attention paid to scientific accuracy in developing the show – there might be some unease about the artistic licence that allows the Liptictidium, a relative late-comer and ‘visitor from the Northern Hemisphere’, to appear through each era as a link throughout the performance.
The program leaflet gave lots of scientific detail. It would have been good if it had also credited the directors, performers, makers and production team, and given us some detail about the puppets.
Gondwana is the first of three shows which will be developed over the next three years. The second will cover time after the dinosaurs, and the third the present time and future of Australia. I’m looking forward to the next installment.
Update: Here are a few links:
Dinosaurs given new life
Interview with Phil Downing, Musical Director of Erth
Update 2015: broken links. Some photos of the puppets are at Erth > gallery > museums > scroll down. They are inaccessible for linking.
Floriade has been on for the last month in Canberra, and tomorrow is the last day. I went in last weekend hoping to see the Old Parliament House Big Heads. These are much-larger-than-life-sized body-suit puppets of parliamentarians from days gone by. Their usual home is Old Parliament House, which is now a parliamentary museum, where they stroll around bringing the past to life.
Last year I got photos of the original three Big Heads in the Scarecrow Drive at Floriade, having an encounter with The Fool Factory‘s alien, Solar Flare:
An altercation between Solar Flare and Andrew Fisher and Alfred Deakin.
Solar Flare and Andrew Fisher shake hands.
Sir Edmund Barton takes liberties with my John Howard Scarecrow
This year there are two new Big Heads, Doc Evatt and Bob Menzies. While they have been made by the same company, eRTH, these ones have a less stylised look about them, and are more realistically modelled on the historical figures they represent. I think they are really cool. I love the demeanor of Doc Evatt, and his brown suit is just right.
eRTH is a Sydney company that does innovative large-scale theatrical performances which include ‘giant puppets, huge inflatables, acrobatics, aerial and flying creatures, stilt-walking costumes and pyrotechnics’. I would have loved to see their Gargoyles clambering over the outside of buildings, or The Neds ranging through city streets. At Floriade this year, they were also present as the Waterheads, four people with their heads in tanks of coloured water, strolling through the beds of flowers.
