Category Archives: Adult Puppetry

Progress on New Scratch Show and a new Website

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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CLICK TO VISIT www.roughmagictheatre.co.uk

We have been very busy organising lots of things for our scratch performance piece “7 Songs of Love” for the Scratch Space at Beverley Puppet Festival.

We visited Promenade Music Shop (in Morecambe) to ask for advice about P.A. systems that could do everything that we need them to do. They recommended the Yamaha Stagepas 600BT Portable Blue tooth P.A. system and mentioned that More Music already had a couple and had ordered 2 more. They also told us that there was a very long wait on these kinds of products at the moment and that we might struggle to get hold of one in time for our gig.

We mentioned that we would like to be able to use radio-mics with the P.A. but they said that they are very expensive. I mentioned that I already had a portable Megamouth Pulse mini P.A. system which came with radio mics and they suggested we could use these existing mics by connecting the two P.A. systems together (something that had not occurred to me before).

So I had a word with Ben McCabe from More Music to ask if we could try out the ones that they had and maybe borrow them for the performances. We also asked if they were able to spare us some space for R&D/rehearsal.

Ben very kindly agreed to all of the above in exchange for a free performance and workshop from us further down the line (Ben was thinking that the workshop would be good for October when they are doing a Fun Palace event). We suggested that we would do the performance for them after we had got feedback from the Beverley Puppet Festival event and rejigged the show based on this feedback.

I have also had help offered to me from my long time Shadow Puppetry mentor Ali Clough, (who also lives in Bentham). We had a look at her portable shadow screen to see if it would be useful for our show. It would require tweaking to get it to work for what we want and would be a fairly complicated thing to set up for something that is not actually quite right for what we want, (it would require re-covering as the screen fabric is very old and a little discoloured and damaged). At present we are thinking we might use a variation on the system we use for shadow puppetry workshops (involving extendable clothes props, a table and a clothes line). We want to try and build a show that will fit into just one car so we need something that can pack small but unpack to a relatively large size. We ideally want a size of screen that is bigger than the one on our old RMT booth that we used for “The Tempest” and “Alice in Wonderland” as the new show is going to be a solely shadow puppetry show rather than a combination of puppet types like these older shows.

Ali Clough’s Portable shadow screen with shadow puppets from her project with Leo Nolan-Evans.

We could still do with finding some rehearsal space more locally in Bentham but have not come up with any workable ideas on that yet. We need to find somewhere that can let us work during school-time hours which is when we will have time free from looking after the children. Our daughter is starting at the school nursery after the Easter holidays so I will have much more time to devote to my theatre work from then onwards as I had previously been looking after her on 3 weekdays.

I had been thinking of asking to look at the costumes at the Grand Theatre in Lancaster with a view to renting something out only to discover that they do not hire out costumes any more. I am currently looking into “Northern Costume Hire” in Barnoldswick instead.

I have also been working on our main Rough Magic Theatre website (www.roughmagictheatre.co.uk). I finished making a new website on WordPress.com some time ago but was unsure about how to transfer this new site to our existing domain name and how to get rid of the old site (or whether we needed to).

I got help from a local Bentham business “A White Knight I.T.” and worked out a way to do do it by transferring to their web hosting service and copying the new website across. This has avoided me having to pay 1&1 IONOS and WordPress as well in order to forward the site from IONOS to WordPress. However, it has not been a completely smooth process and not everything on the site was working as it should straight away.

I would appreciate it if as many people as possible could visit the site (CLICK HERE to visit) and tell me if all the links are working properly, if you can see the pictures and slideshows and generally let me know what you think. You can leave any feedback as a reply/comment on this post please.

New Show to Premiere at Scratch Space at Beverley Puppet Festival 2022!

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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We have been toying with the idea of producing a new live show for some time but have been struggling to decide what form it would take. A strong contender was the idea of creating a show based around a set of old English folk songs that I learned about 20 years ago, (the origins are a bit blurry and there are lots of different versions of the songs, some of which come from Scotland and Ireland as well). The songs come from an oral tradition so have been taken from place to place by travellers and wandering minstrels etc. and no-one knows exactly how old they are but the versions I know are mostly dating from the 18th Century, I think.

I love singing these songs and it struck me that I’d like to concentrate on making work that I really enjoy doing and am passionate about. As I already know the songs extremely well it will (in theory) mean that the show will be easier as there is less for me to learn. Having said that, we decided to add in an extra song for audience participation.

I have also been thinking about creating a crankie box or boxes which can be used in combination with shadow puppetry and have been working on a fairly small scale papier mache one to try out the techniques. Crankies are often performed in combination with a folk song which tells a story so this seemed like a good fit.

When I heard about the Moving Parts Arts Scratch Space opportunity at Beverley Puppet Festival it seemed like the perfect opportunity to put together and try out this new show. Tim Austin (my co-performer) will write the show and string the songs together with a linking story. The song “Jolly Jack Tar” is going to be the key story and Jack will be the key character who is narrating the piece. So we put together a short example video and I made shadow puppets of the two key characters from that song, (“Jack” and “the Lady”).

I was not looking forward to making characters in period costume as I would like to be historically accurate and that is not as easy as making something up out of your head, but in the end I think I’ve done a good job of coming up with 18th Century costumes for the two and am very pleased with the results.

Now that we have been accepted for the Scratch Space (a big thank-you to Moving Parts Arts for that) we have to try and nail down the format a bit more so that we know what to make. Tim thinks that we need a larger shadow screen than the trial cranky screen that I have been making and we should use this as an opportunity to build a bigger shadow screen for larger scale shadow shows. Then there is the question of how much of the music should be performed live and what recorded, as, if I am playing instruments live then I can’t perform the puppetry at the same time and if so whether we need to invest in some better P.A. equipment. I could, of course, sing and crank/puppeteer at the same time.

I am thinking that we might do a variety of things (some with me singing and playing and Tim cranking/puppeteering, some recorded etc.).

I would like in an ideal world something that is capable of amplifying two instruments and two headset/lapel mics at the same time and is also capable of playing recorded music from a phone or mp3 player for example. I’d also like it to be good sound quality with decent volume, fairly lightweight/portable (with the option for battery power perhaps) and not too expensive. So if anyone has any suggestions where that is concerned please get in touch!

I shall keep you updated with our progress on here so watch this space!

CLICK HERE for more info. on my “Where You Can See Me” page.