Category Archives: Arts Funding

Lots of fun at Beverley Puppet Festival!

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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We had a great time performing our new show “7 Songs of Love” at the Moving Parts Arts Scratch Space at Beverley Puppet Festival this year. You can see images of the show in rehearsal on the slideshow above.

We will performing the show again at More Music in Morecambe on Saturday October 1st sometime between 12 and 4pm as part of their Fun Palaces event. So please do come and see it if you are interested in booking the show. We are interested in using the show for rural touring as well as more conventional theatre spaces. The show has a heavy emphasis on eighteenth century sailors/sailing so would be great for any maritime themed events/locations. It features a variety of eighteeth century folk songs so would also be of interest to folk festivals/music festivals. The show uses a minimum performance area of 4m square and ideally requires blackout, (does not have to be total). We are currently self-sufficient regarding tech. The version we performed at Beverley was 25 minutes long, but we intend to work on expanding the show to around 45 minutes (potentially with an interval). We can also combine showings with shadow puppetry workshops for adults or children as required. We are in the process of putting together a video trailer using the footage we got from the scratch space showings and will post this too as soon as we have it.

We are interested in partnering with venues to work with us on improving and expanding the show. We need space to rehearse and develop the show, a third eye, ideally some funding and performance opportunities as well. Please get in touch if this is you!

It was so wonderful to see so many familiar faces in person rather than on a computer screen. The atmosphere was really great and the fact that we were accommodated in the Beverley Friary YHA (which was also the festival hub) meant that there was plenty of opportunity to meet other puppeteers when we were not performing. We had just one performance on the Saturday and one on the Sunday which meant that (for a change) we had plenty of time to see other people’s shows. We were also able to attend the PuppeteersUK meeting at which the Chair (Malcolm Knight of Scottish Mask & Puppet Centre) spoke about the future plans for PUK and the current situation in the UK regarding the puppetry sector and also the impact of Brexit on touring, festivals etc.

We watched some of the other Scratch Space shows (as we wanted to support our fellow scratch space artists) including 7 Ravens by Tragic Carpet, Displaced by Prickly Pear Productions and Noughtymation by our friends at Noisy Oyster.

We also took a look at Noisy Oyster’s “The Noughty-One” installation which used the same 3-D printed puppets as the “Noughtymation” scratch piece. Nik Palmer had been experimenting with these during lockdown and I was very interested to see them in action live.

Sarah Rowland-Barker returned the favour by coming to see our scratch space show. We got lots of positive feedback from the audiences as well as some suggestions for improvements. One of the things we were unsure of was the age range the show was suitable for as the content is more adult than our usual offerings. Feedback suggested that it was suitable for Keystage 2 and up.

We also went to see “Kit and Caboodle” by Thingumajig Theatre. I have encountered Thingumajig many times at many different festivals etc. but I have mainly seen their processional work and this was our first time seeing one of their static shows, (I say static but it was of course combined with a little walkabout to gather an audience with their wonderful pack mule “Kit”).

It was very interesting seeing this show after having watched the Scratch Space show “Displaced”, (which was used the real stories of different refugees) as Kit and Caboodle dealt with many of the same issues but in a more subtle and family friendly way. It was good to see some positive/sympathetic messages about immigrants and refugees in both these shows as we need an antidote to all of the toxic messages about this subject in the press. As Kit and Caboodle is a street show there is more chance of the message reaching ordinary people in the street who might just happen to come upon it accidentally. As an indoor show, however, “Displaced” would undoubtedly be attended by people who are already sympathetic to the message of the show.

Andrew Kim very kindly let me have a closer look at the crankie theatre box that very cleverly slotted into the side of the set, (you can see it in action in the video below). I even got to have a go at cranking it! This was particularly interesting for me at the moment as I want to experiment with some crankie shows myself.

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.