Mimi has added three new robots to her robot family. Some are more like pillows, while others, like this guy, are fully articulated, but they are all really cool.
puppets
Xperimental Puppet Theater, 2006
Also at Flickr today is swestdahl’s photoset of images taken at XPT 2006, Xperimental Puppet Theater, which is on this weekend at the Centre for Performing Arts in Atlanta. There is a brief description of the 8 pieces here, and the XPT blog is giving a nice look at the whole process behind the scenes. I’ve been enjoying putting the two sets of images together, for instance, seeing a puppet behind the scenes, and then in performance.
Pickled Image: The Chatterbox
Skip the Budgie at Flickr has a cool photoset of action images taken during a performance of the Pickled Image show, The Chatterbox. There is more information, pictures and storyboard illustrations here on their site. They make and use various styles of puppetry and puppets. One of the styles I like is where the puppet has one hand that is actually the puppeteer’s, and one not.
(The image above is from Pickled Image, and shows Billy with Sherlock Holmes, and Billy unaware of Jabberwocky behind him.)
Classic Sesame Street: Telephone Rock
The irreverence and exhuberence in this classic Sesame Street video clip is such fun. I love it! (via Project Puppet)
Its no longer available :(
Emmanuel Bourgeau: sculpting the Sultan’s Elephant
The find of my week was the discovery that Emmanuel Bourgeau, a sculptor in Plogonnec, has a small gallery of photos (> la gasette de l’atelier>Septembre 2004 – mai 2005: un elepahant et une petite geante) of the construction and carving of the huge elephant and girl in Royal de Luxe’s spectacle, The Sultan’s Elephant, which paraded the streets of London last week. Isn’t the net wonderful? I’ve added this link to my collected Royal de Luxe links.
(Via Royal de Luxe).
Updated links 2015
Tyger
Tyger from Guilherme Marcondes on Vimeo.
Tyger is a terrific short film directed by Guilherme Marcondes. While William Blake’s poem, The Tyger, was the starting point, it ‘doesn’t attempt to illustrate or pay homage to the original text’. Marcondes interprets the tiger as symbolizing ‘a hint of wonder along with a fear of progress. The tiger is as much dangerous as it is marvellous, and this ambiguity makes us avoid the pure romantic vision of society’.
The story is about relating city to jungle and people to animals, and it is achieved with a wonderful mixture of imagery – a great bunraku-style puppet tiger, used with black light technique; Sao Paulo’s urban landscape as a photographic setting; drawings with a lino-cut quality that morph people into animals, and order into chaos; and animated glowing lines that sprout and twine like jungle vegetation. The music is cool, too.
Joao Grembecki and Cia.Stomboli in Sao Paulo, Brazil, made the tiger, and the puppeteers are Joao Grembecki, Cassiano Reis and Fabio Oliveiro. The full credits are here.
Updated links 2015
Spitting Image puppets of Genesis
Speaking of the Man of Steel, here is a video of Land of Confusion, by Phil Collins and Genesis, from 1986.
Oh Superman where are you now
When everything’s gone wrong somehow
The Man of Steel, these men of power
Are losing control by the hour
As well as the music and the political nature of the song, it’s also interesting because it features puppets of the guys in the band, and a host of others – Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Thatcher, Gadafi, the Pope, Michael Jackson (still black!) and so on. The puppets are instantly recognizable as being made by Roger Law and Peter Fluck from Spitting Image, the renowned British satirical puppet TV show from 1984 to 1996’s, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the puppets in the video had been made firstly for Spitting Image episodes. Wikipedia has information about the song and the video.
Men of Steel
I was delighted to find Liz Christie’s cool Flickr photoset sequence of Men of Steel in full flight at the recent Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
Men of Steel made its debut at Art for Puppet’s Sake, the production that showcased the work of the Victorian College of the Arts inaugural class of postgraduate puppetry students in 2004. It’s wildly raucous and messy: a funny, high energy piece of object theatre, by Hamish Fletcher, Tamara Rewse and Sam Routledge.
Men of Steel refers to the little cookie-cutter puppets whose only language is of cries and grunts and shrieks. They perform a miniature circus act of their own with eggs and various kitchen implements, out of which comes dough, out of which come little dough puppets.
— review in The Age
And there is also the giant cookie cutter and the broccoli forest! I saw Men of Steel at the One Van Puppetry Festival in Blackheath in 2005, and it was also on the bill at the Big West Festival last year.
Liz has some other fine photos. I love her backyard set as well – lorikeets, a beautiful grub, and other stunning macros.
Links updated 2015
Photos of the Sultan’s Elephant starting to come in
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)
