puppets

Big West Festival

Posted by hil

BigwestIf you are in Melbourne, The Big West Festival in Maribyrnong looks as if it will be a good time. Full program details are available here.

For puppetry fans it’s a chance to catch Snuff Puppet’s Nyets Nyet’s Picnic; Men of Steel, a high energy cookie cutter kitchen puppetry extravaganza; the disturbing crocheting that is Foxy’s House of Horror; and others.

The venue is the Village (the Village Railway Reserve behind Footscray Station, McNab Ave, Footscray). Entrance will be free during People’s Day
on Saturday from 1 – 7.30 pm.

Mapping puppeteers and makers

Posted by hil

Andrew at PuppetVision is has started a map of the locations of puppeteers and puppet builders around the world using the new Frappr! mapping service. It’s a cool idea. If you are a puppeteer or maker, check out the details, and add yourself to the map.

Lone

Especially if you are in Australasia – I’m feeling a bit lonesome out here all on my own!

The Theft of Sita

Posted by hil

Sita

(Photograph: Julian Crouch)

PuppetVision recently referred to The Modern Shadow where Michelle Zacharia is exploring combining Indonesian Wayang Golek puppetry and video and digital production techniques, and thinking about western influences in Indonesia. It reminded me of a production here called The Theft of Sita which was commissioned by the 2000 Adelaide Festival of Arts and received acclaim both here and overseas. It was a modern retelling of the Ramayana using shadow puppetry, and involved a remarkable collaboration of artists, puppeteers, makers and musicians.

The piece was written and directed by Nigel Jamieson (AU); music composed by the Australian jazz musician Paul Grabowsky (AU) and Balinese gamelon artist I Wayan Gde Yudane; designed by Julian Crouch (UK); and the puppetry directors were Peter J. Wilson (AU) and Balinese master I Made Sidia (who both performed in the show).

This Ramayana begins conventionally, but quickly explodes into a metaphor of the tumultuous events surrounding the overthrow of Suharto. Computer-generated images and photographic projections of demonstrations coexist with giant shadow puppet logging beasts. There are white water rafters and withering paddy fields in Bali. And Langka becomes a futuristic city of gleaming steel and glass towers, and of rubbish tips. Giant screens lift and disappear, perspective shifts from screens at the front to screens at the back of the stage. Shadow puppets emerge on tiny screens in the middle of the space and then shift again.

— Robin Laurie, Inside Indonesia, The Theft of Sita

Robin’s article is worth reading in full, as is Peter Wilson’s account in his book ‘The Space Between: The Art of Puppetry and Visual Theatre in Australia’, where he describes The Theft of Sita as a transformation of the ancient tale into a modern allegory of environmental politics.

Unfortunately I didn’t see The Theft of Sita, but I have seen a TV program that was made about it.

The designer, Julian Crouch, has a gallery showing some of the wonderful shadow puppets and scenes from the show, including the one above. His other galleries have some gems in them, too. Just a couple of examples: a dog, some huge figures, and some rather beautiful arresting star faces.

Update 2015: broken links; also, try a Julian Crouch google image search

Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets

Posted by hil

TwistedMichael Gagne recently released a first series of short director’s cuts animations, Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets, that he created for Nickelodeon’s 2005 Halloween. For example, Nightmare is great. There is a short production diary, too. These are done in Flash, and looking at them it’s easy to see why puppetry and animation are so closely inter-related.

(via PuppetVision)

Ping pong Matrix style

Posted by hil

MatrixHere is a fabulous game of ping pong, Matrix style. According to Puppetry Films‘, it appeared on a Japanese Game Show to help celebrate the opening of the Matrix. Isn’t puppetry amazing?

Updated links 2015

A peep into the making of The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Posted by hil

The New York Times has a short slide-show of some of the sketches and models from the latest Wallace and Gromit movie, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. I like seeing the armatures and insides:

Gromitbts

Nick Park gives the commentary. I’m not a huge fan of Aardman, but I was sorry to see the Aardman Animation studios had burnt down last week, with many of the original drawings, wooden sets, paperwork, awards and other memorabilia lost.

Gondwana

Posted by hil

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.

Gondwana

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.

Preparing boby

Posted by hil

Take a look at ‘preparing boby’, netamir’s cool photo set at Flickr, which records the making of her first puppet from wire, paper mache, foam and fabric. I love his expressions, how involved and helpful he is with making himself, and his shape!

Boby

As I’ve commented before, I really find the look of this unfinished stage of making very attractive. Thank you for letting me use one of your images, neta :-).

Muppet stamps

Posted by hil

Muppetblock

Jimhensonstamp

The US Postal Service is commemorating Jim Henson and the Muppets with these cool stamps.

Here’s Kermit and Miss Piggy checking them out. I might have to see if I can get hold of a set somehow. Seems a long time since my brother and I used to race home from uni to be in time to catch Sesame Street when it was a new program here!