The International Puppet Carnival is an exciting new puppetry event happening at Federation Square, Melbourne from today through 2nd July. Take a look through the wonderful line-up on offer – The Carnival, After Dark, Special Events, and workshops.
puppets
Close-Act: Sau’rus
(photo by digitaldust)
A few weeks ago I was impressed by a number of photos at Flickr showing some fabulous big dinousaur walkabout puppets at the Paradise Gardens festival in London. This was Sau’rus, an act by the Dutch theatre group, Close-Act Street Theatre. Close-Act was formed in 1991 and ‘has since grown to a professional community of actors, musicians, stilt-walkers, dancers,
fire-throwers and acrobats’. Along with technical details and the story, they also have a cool video of the dinoaurs, which shows them as quite agile and menacing, especially with the noises they make and tails whipping around as they stalk along. Looks like they have some other cool acts in their repertoire, too.
The festival also had the pod puppet Flying Buttresses, a tiny elderly couple called Hodman Dodmanott and Sally Forth who ‘venture out in search of fame, fortune and friendship with all their possesions strapped to their backs. After living alone for hundreds of years they have lost touch with the realities of modern life.’ They look fun.
Update: Andrew at PuppetVision reports that Sau’rus is performing in Toronto in the The Celebrate Toronto Street Festival, July 8th and 9th. Maybe he will take some photos :-)? Yes, here they are! Thanks, Andrew.
National Puppetry Summit: Beginning
These were some more puppets on display at the National Puppetry Summit. They featured in Terrapin Puppet Theatre’s 1985 production, Princess With The Echo.
‘Most of Terrapin’s earlier shows were designed and built by Jennifer Davidson and Greg Menthe, however Terrapin sometimes commissioned other designers. Well known Tasmanian artist Tom Samek designed these Czeck style marionettes. The heads are carved from Huon Pine.
In her welcome to the summit, Annie Forbes used these puppets as a starting point, asking if such use of the endangered huon pine could be justified, and suggesting it could, because puppetry as an artform can evoke the spirit of the tree, and take us to magic and sacred places, an idea returned to later in the weekend when Neil Cameron talked about puppetry as celebration, and a way of transforming and illuminating our everyday experiences.
Annie also spoke of some of the questions being asked about old and new puppetry, issues around which the summit program was structured:
Does concentrating on traditional puppetry forms and skills hold back new ideas and approaches?
Does not using them, in favour of, for example, the non-verbal and experimental, make modern approaches less effective?
And what can be done about the vulnerability of traditional forms in rapidly modernizing societies?
We also welcomed international guests:
- Peter Manscher (ASSITEJ and Teatercentrum – Denmark);
- Simon Wong (UNIMA & Ming Ri Institute for
Arts Education – China); - Nyoman Sedana (HOD Balinese
Theatre & Culture, Denpasar University – Indonesia) - Dadi Pudumjee (UNIMA & Ishara Puppet Theatre – India);
- Peter L. Wilson (National Theatre for Children, NZ);
- and several other puppeteers and makers from NZ.
(BTW, I’ve made a photoset at Flickr for my summit photos. I’m adding them gradually as I get time.) See below instead:
(My attendance at the puppetry summit was supported by the ACT Government)
Links updated 2015
Back again
I’ve been back a few days now, and finding it a bit hard to get my head around where to start in relating the great experience that was the National Puppetry Summit. Firstly, perhaps, a thank you and congratulations to Annie Forbes, the Summit Director and Artistic Director of Terrapin Puppet Theatre in Hobart, and all her team that orgainised it all. I hope you are all kicking back a little now it is all over!
The Summit was held in the Salamanca Arts Centre, and there were some puppets on display in the foyer. I don’t know the makers and shows they all came from, but someone told me the ones above were made by Axel Axelrad, the maker of Ossie Ostrich, and that they were never used, because the company they were made for folded before the production went on stage. Possibly this was the demise of the Tasmanian Puppet Theatre in 1980?
(My attendence at the puppetry summit was supported by the ACT Government)
2nd National Puppetry Summit, June 9 – 12, 2006
Tomorrow I’m heading down to Hobart in Tasmania for the 2nd National Puppetry Summit. It’s hosted by Terrapin Puppet Theatre. I’m excited to be going, as I really enjoyed the first one four years ago in Melbourne, and it will be cool to catch up in person with other people in the puppetry community, and what they are doing. Sometimes it feels quite isolated in Canberra. There’s lots on offer in the program. I’m being supported by the ACT Government, through a travel grant.
I’m also going to be taking a short holiday in Tassie for a few days afterwards. I’m also excited about that, since I haven’t been there before.
Robotic, puppet and tape giraffes!
Andrew at PuppetVision (now here) kindly told me about Make’s report on this huge robotic Electric Giraffe, aka Rave Raffe, a walking vehicle built by Lindsay Lawlor. It’s design follows the mechanism of a toy Tamiya giraffe:
The front and back legs opposite each other step ahead at the same time, propelled by an electric motor. When those legs land, hydraulic brakes lock the wheeled feet, and the other two legs take a step. Canting from side to side, Raffe lumbers ahead at about a mile an hour. A propane engine runs only to recharge the batteries, so the beast is quiet and efficient. When Lawlor let Raffe shuffle off alone in the desert, it walked for eight hours.
— Popular Science
You can follow the building process through to it’s completion in time for Burning Man 2005, when it fulfilled Lawlor’s original purpose, to see Burning Man from a height. The giraffe has done various gigs since then, most recently appearing at Maker Faire. (Still going 2014) Plans are now to add ‘computer-controlled flashing giraffe spots, an electroluminescent circulatory system and a gas grill’. :-)
Some other giraffes of note:
- In 2000, Royal de Luxe (who recently put on The Sultan’s Elephant street theatre spectacle in London) had a similar spectacle, The Hunters of the Giraffes, with a huge puppet giant boy, a mother giraffe and her baby. Scroll down this page for details.
- Handspring Puppet Company‘s Tall Horse has a 5 metre giraffe manipulated by 2 puppeteer on stilts. It tells the story of Zarafa, the giraffe who was taken to France in 1827.
- France’s Compagnie Off‘s Les Girafes, Urban Operetta. PuppetVision has accounts and pictures here, here and in London.
- Mark Jenkins tape sculpture giraffe.
Beck: Live in PuppeTron
Like Jose, I’ve been interested in the puppets that formed part of Beck‘s concert at the the Sasquatch Festival in Royal Gorge, Washington on Memorial Day. Previously, they had appeared at the Fillmore in San Francisco, and in Davis (there is an itinerary there). According to the SFGate Culture Blog, Beck hired the puppeteers from Team America to travel with him and perform the real-time marionette puppet show of the band on the stage directly behind the real band, with the results shown on huge video screens. There are some cool Flickr photos.
Oh and Jose, I found another video.
Updated links 2015
Merma Never Dies
Last weekend the Tate Modern in London hosted a new production of Mori el Merma, which was first performed in 1978, and emerged out of a collaboration between the surrealist painter Joan Miró and La Claca, an experimental theatre troupe from Barcelona, headed by Joan Baixas. In the new revision,
‘… Joan Baixas evokes the critical spirit of Mori el Merma and recovers Miró’s original idea to make a street parade in the Catalonian tradition. Baixas’s work insists on the idea of the absurdity of power, the abuses of the tyrant and the impertinences of dictators, themes which are ever present and must be critised and
denounced.‘The puppets are replicas made under supervision and control of the Succesió Miró SL and range from giants with the heads of monsters, grotesque torsos and six-foot-long arms to creatures that whisper and
squeal as if Miró’s free-form shapes had to leapt to life.’
In an article in the Guardian, Baixas comments that the play has been retitled Merma Never Dies, because almost 30 years later, Merma is alive and well:
‘The name is unimportant because, unfortunately, there are many Mermas now. In recent years we have seen leaders who wage wars with lies and who play games with democracy. The least we can do is laugh at them.’
I’ve come across the following accounts and photos of the performance and parade. It looks pretty bizarre!
Cronicas desde Londres: photos and video
Yahoo News collection of photos
No-necked Monster’s photos and video
Welfare State International comes to an end
John Fox, the artistic director of the renowned celebratory street theatre company, Welfare State International – ‘eyes on stalks, not bums on seats” – explains how bureacracy kills the creative spirit, and why he is going solo.
‘The final straw? The ‘hot work’ permit for a bonfire in a field.
Had we swept the floor, and were the overhead sprinklers working?’
Welfare State came to an end on April Fools’ Day this year, after 38 years.
