Category Archives: British Puppet & Model Theatre Guild

Skipton International Puppetry Symposium

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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  • “Jabberwocky!” Suitcase show
  • Halloween Shadow Puppet Workshop Pics

I attended the first ever Skipton International Puppetry Symposium this last weekend.

It was hosted by Skipton Town Hall who did an excellent job. The talks and networking opportunities were great. It was really lovely to see old friends and people who I’ve only encountered online before plus making new contacts.

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In the first panel discussion at the Symposium was posing the question “Where are we Now” in terms of the puppetry community. The panelists were Mike Dixon from the British Puppet Guild, Cariad Astles from BrUNIMA, Malcolm Knight from PuppeteersUK, Hugh Purves from The Puppet Centre (which is just getting back up and running again after a gap) and Clive Chandler from the PJF. Malcolm also brought his experiences from The Scottish Mask & Puppet Centre to the discussion as well.

David Micklem introduced the discussion and talked about how he felt that in the 90s puppetry was on the fringes but with productions such as “War Horse” and giant puppets by Royale de Luxe arriving on the scene puppetry arrived, (in terms of recognition of the artform).

It was acknowledged that things were difficult now in terms of getting work and funding and that we are in fact down to just one puppetry National Portfolio Organisation getting regularly funded by the Arts Council (Theatre-Rites). Clive also mentioned the lack of support for the arts from local councils now (Birmingham’s arts budget has completely gone and the Cannock Chase museum that Clive has been performing in regularly for years has also gone).

John Parkinson of Upfront Puppet Theatre in Cumbria had a more positive report that their theatre is now receiving a share of the arts funding from their local council for the first time after many years of running their business without any outside support. You can find my other posts about Upfront here: (Snow Queen, Stanelli’s Super Circus, Pied Piper, Commedia dell’Arte masks, Jack & the Beanstalk).

The speakers talked a bit about the organisations they were representing and then questions were taken from the floor including the discussion of the fact that there is not a tick box for puppetry as an art form on the Arts Council England grant forms when even relatively niche art forms like mime are represented. There was a lot of discussion about how we can start working together as a cohesive group to advocate for puppetry as an art form. PuppeteersUK was originally set up to do this job of bringing the puppetry community together in the modest form of a listings directory on a website and sending out a weekly newsletter. Nowadays anyone can make their own website very easily so the monetary support for PUK has been dwindling.

On the second day of the Symposium I attended the Devoted & Disgruntled session (CLICK HERE for my previous D&D at Leeds Playhouse post, CLICK HERE for D&D at The Little Angel Theatre post) at which one of the breakout sessions was discussing how PUK needed to change to address the new issues affecting the puppetry community and what new form it needed to take. This session segwayed into a different session that was thinking in a very freeform creative sort of way about an app for puppeteers that would be more like a game so that people (and younger people in particular) would want to engage with it something like Club Penguin. This was described as Puppet Utopia and was structured as a village with various areas to do different things e.g. a bank to talk about/access funding, a school for accessing puppetry training, a garden where new ideas can grow etc. etc.

I also formed my own session about how puppeteers can get paid a fair wage when the funding climate is so difficult and looked in on a session about the UK puppet festivals working together and maybe forming some sort of network and perhaps co-commissioning new work (something like WithoutWalls does).

You can also read about the discussion of Other Sectors & Wider Networks by clicking the link HERE

You can access the reports from all the Open Space discussions that have ever been held on the Devoted & Disgruntled website and search for whatever topics are relevant to you (including puppetry) in the drop down menus. I notice that not all the break out sessions have uploaded a report, so if this is you, please take a moment to upload a report of your group to the site, as this is a great resource for the puppetry community to be able to access.

You can see at the top some photos from the Halloween Shadow Puppetry Drop-In Workshop that I ran on the Sunday and below is a little video snippit from one of my audience members at my “Edward Lear’s Nonsense” show.

Do please leave a comment if you have anything to add about the Symposium and don’t forget, you can subscribe to this blog, if you would like to receive regular updates.

If you would like to book one of my suitcase shows or a workshop, you can Contact Me Here 😊.

Beverley Puppet Festival and Upfront Puppet Theatre’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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We optimistically purchased tickets to see Drew Colby’s “My Shadow & Me” (Shadowgraphy) some time prior to the Beverley Puppet festival and checked whether we would be ok to bring a 1 year old child with us.  We thought that with a showing of 2pm we stood a good chance of being able to get Anthony ready and travel over 100 miles east across Yorkshire in time.

Then we found out that there would be a Puppeteers UK meeting there as well at 10am and I thought to myself if we do REALLY well we might even get there for the meeting too!

We did NOT get there for the meeting too.  We didn’t even get there for 2pm.  We only managed to leave the house by around 10.30am and of course we had to stop for lunch and in the end only just got to the festival in time to see anything at all!

We caught most of the “Tiniest Cellist” act by Ettenoiram (of Hungary).  Clive Chandler’s Punch & Judy was nearly over when arrived so we just had a little chat with him after his show.  We also saw Lady Lucinda Harrington-Carrington by Noisy Oyster (of Frome) heading by (whom we had encountered at Beverley when we performed there previously) and also saw Professor Ambrose Merryweather & His Fabulous Fossils by
Vivify (of Scarborough) in the distance.

We had been thinking disappointingly that in order to be back in reasonable time to put Anthony to bed we would have to set off home again but when Mark Whitaker appeared for a 4pm performance of A Bird in the Hand Theatre’s “Special Delivery”, we thought we couldn’t really pass up an opportunity to actually see a full show.

Ironically, the main two acts I had caught at Skipton Puppet Festival the previous year (when Anthony was a very tiny fellow all wrapped up in his pram from the rain) had been Mark Whitaker’s “Special Delivery” and Clive’s Punch & Judy.  We had unfortunately not been able to watch all of Clive’s show as at that age he had found it too loud and started crying.  Anthony was able to watch and appreciate properly Mark’s show this time and my husband and Rough Magic Theatre co-performer had not seen it before, either.

It is a lovely little street theatre show – very adaptable (somewhat like my shadow puppet suitcase shows) in that the whole staging is mounted on a bicycle which is wheeled into the space by Mark and then remains there, freestanding, (using the kick-stand).  This leaves Mark free to perform around it and use more of the space (coming close up to the audience for various bits of action etc.

The show includes a whole range of different types of puppetry and story-telling techniques including a “crankie” and Kamishibai style “storyboards” and various small “table-top” type puppets.  These show the interior of various people’s houses who are receiving parcels, which are themselves in little puppet theatre boxes designed to look like paper packages on the bicycle.  This is in addition to some lovely wordless slapstick character work by Mark, (in the character of hapless postman) involving sandwiches and self-raining umbrellas (a joke that worked much better in Beverley in the sunshine than in Skipton, where mother nature was already providing plenty of rain!).  Altogether a very charming and magical show (the finale with the hot air balloon is particularly lovely).  It is, however, definitely a show for an intimately sized audience as the puppets are very small scale.

 

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As I explained in my previous post, John & Elaine Parkinson of Upfront Puppet Theatre were kind enough to invite us to see their new improved version of their production of the Pied Piper of Hamelin based on the Michael Morpurgo version of the story.

We were not sure how well Anthony would cope with an indoor marionette show of this length but he seemed to stay pretty happy for a good long stretch before needing a bit of a break for a drink.  When we tried him again after the interval he once again seemed to get frustrated that he could not get close and play with the puppets, (making distressed noises when characters disappeared from view).  This unfortunately meant Tim did not get to see all of the show as he took Anthony out when he was getting too noisy.

The Michael Morpurgo version of the story has (as you would probably expect) a bit of a moral and political agenda compared to the traditional tale.  The town of Hamelin has a sharp divide between rich and poor – with the poor street children at the bottom of the heap and kept outside the town walls scavenging on the rubbish tip.  Because of their unwillingness to share with or even encounter the street children (who are forced to steal to survive) the townspeople begin to foul the streets with rubbish to avoid having to take it to the tip.

The rats migrate from the rubbish tip into the town (and so do the children in their search for something to eat).

The Mayor of the town is the villain of the piece being greedy and not using the people’s taxes to benefit the townspeople (by dealing with the rubbish properly for example).  He of course refuses to pay the Piper properly and in this version of the story the Piper promises to return the children of the town when the town is made a fit and proper place for all the children with food and housing and education etc. catered for.

I particularly liked the Mayor puppet who has a good strong caricatured shape to his body and clothes.  I thought the movements of the puppet fitted his character and the meaning of the words and action he was expressing in various different scenes very well.

There were also various very ingenious and quite effective techniques for moving large amounts of puppet rats about the stage.  UV lighting was used to good effect to light up the eyes of the rats and give them the sinister and evil appearance required by the story.  The most impressive effect involved a large number of rats moving across the stage on a gauze curtain and then somehow diving off the curtain rail into the “river”.  Though there were also some cartwheeling rats diving into the river that were very effective too.  I think the fact that a variety of different techniques were used to control the rats made it a lot more interesting dramatically.  I think some of the rats being pulled on strings across the stage snagged at one point, but as there were other rats still being moved with various other techniques it did not detract from the action and I doubt if the majority of the audience realised anything had gone wrong.

There was a very nice effect for the magical opening of the cave which I won’t describe so as not to spoil the surprise and the turntable stage and various other set changes were slick and effective.

To meet the the technical challenge of the large number of children heading in and out of the cave large numbers of children were grouped on 4 multiple controllers that in turn were slid across the stage on an overhead rail/pulley system.

The music was particularly good, (I hear via John’s article in the BPMTG newsletter that it was composed by a folk duo and roped in children from the local school for chorus songs).  It really helped to set the scene and keep the story moving along during set changes as well as providing necessary sound effects for the action.

I think it is a very ambitious production for the number of puppeteers (4) and uses a lot of complicated mechanisms to portray the action, (but I guess that is probably the nature of marionette productions and I cannot claim to have seen a great many traditional marionette shows).  In my experience, the more complicated the mechanisms in a production the greater the chance of something going wrong and as we were fairly early in the run I think things were not quite as slick as they doubtless will be towards the middle and end of the run.

Overall the show was very entertaining and told the story well and the puppets and sets are all beautifully made.

It was very interesting to hear from John at the end in the Q&A time about the lengths they had gone to to ensure that the production was a good match for the original book.  For example, specially printing up fabric patterns for the puppet costumes directly from the illustrations and having the puppets inspected by the illustrator to ensure they were a good match.  I think John did a good job translating the 2D images into 3D puppet heads, which cannot have been easy.

It was also wonderful for the children (and indeed the adults) to be allowed to come up close at the end and take photos and ask the puppeteers questions about the puppets.  This is also a great idea because it discourages people from taking surreptitious photos during the show and distracting the performers and other audience members.