puppetry puppets

Puppetry Daemons in ‘His Dark Materials’

Posted by hil

By all accounts the two-part 6 hour stage adaptation of Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials is absolutely stunning. I think it has had two seasons at the National Theatre in London: one in 2003, and a second that finished earlier this month.

The daemons, physical manifestations of the human soul in the shape of animals that reflect a person’s character, are puppets. They were designed by Michael Curry, who is perhaps best known for the puppets in The Lion King. Stagework has an extensive website on the adaptation, and its possible to see a few of the initial designs there, and glimpses of the puppetry in some of the video clips:

Operating the golden monkey
Lyra meets Mrs Coulter
Cittagazee performance
Captured by bears
Lyra and Iorek (scene in rehearsal)

In both these and the puppets in ‘The Lion King’, I think the magic lies in how the overall shape and actions of the creatures are suggested. Often the puppeteers are built into the shape in unexpected ways, and they use their whole bodies to make the animal move. In ‘The Lion King’, for instance, the puppeteers playing the hyenas held the hyena heads low down and at arms length, while their own heads provided the high shoulder line that is so distinctive in a hyena’s overall shape. Likewise, the polar bears in ‘His Dark Materials’, are defined by a puppeteer holding a head mask in one hand and a great clawed paw in the other, with just the suggestion of great shoulders in what looks like a flexible curved line between the two, and a powerful lumbering gait.

Bridge to the stars, which looks as if its the natural online home for ‘His Dark Materials’ fans, has a section on the stage adaptation, including a guide to the Stagework site, images and reviews.

Woe: Cookie Monster learns about ‘sometimes foods’

Posted by hil

CookiemonsterSesame Street’s Cookie Monster is adopting a healthier diet, according to an article on CNN:

“Even Cookie Monster is learning to control his cookie cravings…. His sage advice opened our eyes to the simple joys of a tasty cookie and now reminds us that moderation is the key to healthy living.”

Sesame Street has always had an educational impetus, but there is surely more fun and value in Cookie Monster being the antitheses to other characters doing the right thing.

That Camel Costume

Posted by hil

Given my interest in big mascots, kitsch and otherwise, of course my attention was grabbed by the camel costume story a few days ago. A man travelling from Sydney to Melbourne on a Qantas flight checked in luggage which included both a camel and a crocodile costume. Twenty minutes later he saw a baggage handler wearing the head of his camel suit, driving to and fro on the tarmac. Apart from the usual concerns one might have about interference with one’s private belongs and security, the story has wider implications at the moment because of suspicions that Schapelle Corby is an innocent victim of domestic drug running, where baggage handlers might be involved.

Here are a few other links to pictures:

Camel and crocodile picture (via The Sydney Morning Herald, photo Northern Territory Tourist Commission)
Camel head face-on close-up (via The Courier Mail)
Report and picture of the characters in action at the gig they were on the way to, promoting (for the Northern Territory Tourist Commission) the Bulldogs-Carlton AFL game at Marrara Oval, Darwin, to be played onJune 18.

Qantas has launched a full inquiry, the baggage handler has been sacked and the airline has reimbursed the owner for dry-cleaning the camel’s head. And the Northern Territory Tourist Commission can’t be too unhappy. The unforseen advantages kind of remind me of those in Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant – “I didn’t get nothin’. I had to pay fifty dollars and
pick up the garbage”.

Terrapin Theatre Company: The Garden of Paradise

Posted by hil

The Ten Days on the Island Festival in Tasmania, which started on April 1st, is drawing to a close. Terrapin Theatre Company, which is one of Australia’s oldest puppetry companies, presented a stage adaptation of The Garden of Paradise, a little known tale by Hans Christian Andersen. It was commissioned by the festival to mark the bicentennial of the
birth of Hans Christian Andersen, and included dancers from TasDance, choreographed by Graeme Murphy.

The bicentennial is being celebrated all over the world this year, and Terrapin has been invited to take their production to Denmark in August.

In January there was a preview in The Age, and a few days ago The Australian has a short review within a general article on the festival. Gentle Curiosity has a more personal and detailed response.

March’s Month of Softies

Posted by hil

Scrambling under the wire again… this is my entry for Loobylu’s Month of Softies for March. The theme was self-portrait of the artist as a young child.

sd2

I can’t say it looks very like me, but the essentials are there – round face, blonde hair, button nose, tom-boy. The Fair-isle vest is made from an an unfinished jumper that I rediscovered when I was rummaging for fabric. I knitted it years ago in Scotland and I had completely forgotten about it. The vest is a kind of present to myself, because when I was young one of my aunts made stripy vests out of odds and ends of wool for my brother, and I always fancied one for myself.

Update: I took some better daytime photos yesterday, much better than the midnight one.

Tree climbing

 

Happy World Puppetry Day

Posted by hil

Though its not widely known, March 21st is World Puppetry Day! Dario Fo, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, released a WPD message through Union Internationale de la Marionnette, (UNIMA), which you can read on the Unima Australia website.

It was rumoured that this wonderful six metre tall Mexican skeleton puppet (made by Karen Hethey and Bryan Woltjen), which was part of the Joondalup Festival parade in WA last Saturday, was likely to make surprise appearances today in celebration of World Puppetry Day.

Muckheap

Posted by hil

‘Muckheap’ by Melbourne’s Polyglot Puppet Theatre was another favourite of mine at One Van in January. Described as ‘a galloping tale of two people who try to clean out their shed for hard rubbish day but find everything too interesting or full of memories to throw out’, it also weaves in a different version of Jack(y) and the Beanstalk, ideas about recycling, play, and memory, and an inventive mix of puppetry and scale. The puppets were designed by Paul Newcombe, and adapted and made by Graeme Davis. Here is one of them:

Muck2

The relationship between the two main characters was pleasing in the way it ranged from tension and teasing to fun and fondness. I also liked the way it showed imaginative play and puppets as being able to be made out of anything. (The only thing that the actors deemed unable to be worth keeping at the particular performance I saw was a John Howard poster). Its good news that ‘Muckheap’ will be coming to Canberra in May as a Jigsaw Theatre Company ACT Schools Tour, and later in the year it travels to Queensland.

Hooray for two-dollar shops!

Posted by hil

Tacky but interesting: this is a huge spider garden spike that I got at the $2 shop the other day. It’s a hand span across, and the connections between its legs and body are fine springs, so that when the spike is jolted the legs have an incidental movement. The best movement you can get out of it is a kind of drumming of the legs, where, on each side, legs 1 and 3 are in sync with each other, and legs 2 and 4 are doing the opposite. Then it has the right kind of action for a huntsman spider.

Spider3

I have a couple of other insect garden spikes, a bee and a dragonfly (bought out of curiosity when I was working on making giant bees and dragonflies a few years ago). They are much smaller than the spider, with bodies about 7 cm long, and the wings are on double springs. The dragonfly has much lighter springs, and a much better incidental movement than the poor bee, whose springs and wings are way too heavy.

Jonathon Oxlade

Posted by hil

For me Jonathon Oxlade was the stand-out performance of the One Van puppetry festival in late January. His short performance during the Saturday night cabaret was exciting, bizarre, gross, and hilarious. Jonathon works as a freelance theatre designer, illustrator and puppeteer.

According to his bio, among many other things, he created The Red Tree installation — ‘an interactive experience full of little surprises for the eyes, ears,heart and mind’ — that accompanied the QPAC’s Out of the Box production of ShaunTan’s beautiful picture book ‘The Red Tree’ in 2004.

Redtree

This year he is designing ‘Creche and Burn’ (on stage in April) and ‘The Dance of Jeramiah’ (in Oct-Nov) for LaBoite Theatre, and a production of the Dicken’s classic ‘A Christmas Carol’ for the Queensland Theatre Company late in the year. He is currently working on a picture book, too.