Snuff Puppets recently entertained crowds at Federation Square in Melbourne with their amazing Human Body Parts puppets.
snuff puppets
The bravest man amongst them durst not touch her tail
Four-and-twenty tailors went to kill a snail,
The bravest man amongst them durst not touch her tail;
She put out her horns like a little Kyloe cow;
Run, tailors, run, or she’ll kill you all e’en now.
One of my upcoming projects is to build a remote control snail, so I’ve been gathering some information about snails. I’ve always rather liked snails, an attitude that is easy to keep when our ducks keep our garden virtually snail free. I always assumed that snails only ate plant matter, and had no distinguishable mouth on their faces, so to speak. How wrong I was!
Now looking at Snuff Puppets fabulous giant puppet snail, Mirabel, I see the mouth and tongue are quite a feature. At one point in this video it swipes just about all of someone’s fairy floss!
Photos of Nyet Nyet’s Picnic
I mentioned performances of Nyet Nyet’s Picnic, by the Snuff Puppets, at the Big West Festival recently. At Flickr, Peter Stuckings has some great photographs of some of the puppets, starting here. Thanks to Jose at titereblog for finding them.
Big West Festival
If 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.
Snuff Puppets: Nyet Nyet’s Picnic
I wish I could be in Melbourne this weekend for Snuff Puppets‘ latest production, Nyet Nyet’s Picnic, which starts on Friday at Birrarung Marr on the banks of the Yarra.
In a collaboration between indigenous and non-indigenous artists, Nyet Nyet’s Picnic is a contemporary work that revives ancient stories from the dreamtime, and uses giant puppets, dance, and music in an exploration of local monsters, bunyips and spirit creatures. Described as a ‘genuinely scary, culturally enlightening and engaging night of theatre’, the performance is the cultural highlight of Reconciliation Week and is free to the public.
The photo above was taken by Ponch Hawkes, and there are three others here:
The Nyet Nyet Women
One of the Nyet Nyet Woman
The Nyet Nyet Men
Snuff Puppets
Here’s another election campaign protest involving large puppetry: Snuff Puppets took the form of one of their large Skull characters holding a jumbo jet to confront Howard and accuse him of creating terrorism.
The Skull originated as a character in the highly acclaimed Snuff Puppets production ‘Scarey’, ‘the story of a travelling troupe of giant puppets, their technical crew of skeletons and a group of exploited and neurotic humans who are a novelty act in the show’… which ‘ examines the fragility of human existence when the customary relationship between puppet and puppeteer is reversed.’
Snuff Puppets was established in the early 1990’s, having developed out of Splinters Inc, a company that produced large-scale outdoor visual works in Canberra in the late 80’s. Their reputation is for challenging, often grotesque, highly unusual and inventive works on a large scale. They also run Peoples Puppets Projects where they workshop with specific groups or communities to enable the making of ‘glorious puppet spectacles that express the joys, concerns and spirit of unique communities’.
Their web site is up-to-date and has lots of inspiring images of their puppets and productions for those of us unfortunately too far away to see their shows. Snuff Puppets and Polyglot Puppets both recently received some funding from the Melbourne City Council. Snuff Puppets will use theirs ‘to create an outdoor work for Reconciliation Week at Birrarung Marr in May 2005. It will be a collaborative work with playwright John Harding and choreographer Bernadette Walong, based on Victorian indigenous bunyip stories.’
