tasmania

The Red Tree

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When I was at the Puppetry Summit, Richard Jeziorny was kind enough to show me a video of the puppet-based theatre production of The Red Tree, by Shaun Tan, which was part of the Queensland Performing Arts Centre’s ‘Out of the
Box’ festival for children in June 2004. It was one of the highlights of the weekend for me. Richard’s design was absolutely beautiful, and it was a real treat to experience one of Peter Wilson’s works again; these guys make such wonderful theatrical images. The puppets were made by Marion Hoad and Christopher Lane. Shaun has a description and photos on his website, to give you some idea of the magic. Thanks, Richard!

(My attendance at the puppetry summit was supported by the ACT Government)

National Puppetry Summit: Strings

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I found the film Strings, which I saw at the Puppetry Summit, very curious. You can see a trailer here, a stills gallery here, and an article about the puppetry and the making of the movie here. I was intrigued by numerous aspects about the film and the puppetry, but I didn’t enjoy it as a whole, and it didn’t move me on an emotional level at all.

In the world conjured up in Strings, everyone has strings like a marionette, that reach up to heaven. Where there are relationships between people, like family, lovers, even slaves and slave owner, there is some magical connection via their strings in heaven. A person’s head string is their life line, and if it is severed they die. People are made of wood. Babies are carved out of wood and are inanimate until the time comes to be born. During the birth, the mother is in some kind of connection of concentration with the baby. Very fine threads appear from heaven, and a birth helper catches hold of them and places them in the prepared holes, where they magically connect. As the head string connects, the baby becomes alive, opening its eyes for the first time. An injury like a hand string being severed means that body part dies, but a replacement part can be got from someone else in an operation – at that person’s cost. If a person dies naturally, their strings come
tumbling down from heaven.

The puppets have strongly carved faces suggestive of their characters. Eyes open and close, but there is no other facial movement. You get used to the lips not moving very quickly. I liked the way age is suggested by the wood aging: some characters are very weathered, with deep cracks in the grain of their faces, and the oracles seem to be almost rotting away.

The images of multitudes of strings disappearing into the heavens are conceptually interesting, as is the way the people are kept prisoner by a grid in the prison roof that keeps an individual’s strings in check, and the kids play ‘tangle’. But then it didn’t make sense how people managed moving through gateways and doors!

Strings seemed to me to be essentially a film asking for peace: two warring cultures reunited after realizing they should get along and the young ones falling in love, and although but I didn’t find the story itself engaging, the symbolism was interesting. My strong impression was that a lot of the imagery derived from the Iraq war – toppling the statue of the tyrant, beheadings, torture, the quest for liberation, and a masked enemy. Later I found this was confirmed in interviews with the director, Anders Rønnow Klarlund, in a press kit. (Check the newspaper article from The Times in particular). Another noticeable thing was how water was always used in death scenes – rain, puddles, floating the bodies away on rafts, and the battle dead were in water or snow. At the end, when the princess dies, the little dinosaur bird that was her familiar, has the courage to fly for the first time, and it is without strings. It flies off her burial raft and is free.

(My attendance at the puppetry summit was supported by the ACT Government)

Links updated 2015

National Puppetry Summit: Ward 13

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(photo by Glenn Watson)

I really laughed my way through Peter Cornwall’s Ward 13, one of a number of terrific Australian animations screened at the summit. It’s a stop-motion animation – action/horror/comedy – about a guy who has a road accident and wakes up in the hospital from hell, complete with bizarre medicines, a green tentacled blob, experimental puppy surgery, and a doctor and nurse who menace with huge dirty knives, cleavers, shears and sticks. You can download the trailer to get a taste of it, and check out how it was made.

Links updated 2015

National Puppetry Summit: John Xintavelonis

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John Xintavelonis, a Tasmanian actor who played the part of Pumbaa the warthog in the Melbourne version of The Lion King gave an entertaining address at the National Puppetry Summit. As well as relating some amusing behind the scenes experiences, he said that although some regarded Disney as the McDonalds of the theatre world because it runs the exact same show using a rigid script in numerous countries around the world, he felt it should be encouraged for several reasons:

It provides big chunks of work for actors/ puppeteers, 10 to 18 months of work or more, on a good wage.

The success of The Lion King will mean that more such work will follow, too. Tarzan is already playing on Broadway and I think The Little Mermaid was also mentioned.

Puppetry enables the story to go live on stage, and to differentiate the look from the animated film versions, so its generating live puppetry as big theatre.

Disney don’t publicly call The Lion King puppetry (they employ actors and singers rather than puppeteers) because they don’t want it labelled as a kids show, so they are actually working towards framing the artform for adults, and getting away from the common preconception that puppetry is only for children.

John also wanted to encourage people to diversify and be prepared to learn other skills. He had started as an actor and diversified into singing and now puppetry, and felt it paid returns.

(My attendance at the puppetry summit was supported by the ACT Government)

National Puppetry Summit: Beginning

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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

Puppets by Axel Axelrad

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.