Category Archives: Christmas Shows

A Whole lot of puppet stuff!!! Pt.1of 2 – Lancashire Encounter & Skipton Puppet Festival

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Hello everyone – I have been quiet for ages for the pleasant reason that I have been super busy.  I’ve been so super busy that I can’t tell you about everything in one go so tune in next week for more puppetty adventures!

First of all “Fred Fettler’s “Pony 3000” – The Transport of the Future” show trotted off to Preston on the 26th & 27th of September for a “Lancashire Encounter”!  “Lancashire Encounter” is a festival that is new this year and hopefully could turn into an annual event to fill in the space between the Preston Guild Celebration years.

We had a fantastic time encouraging the locals and visitors to try our fabulous pedal powered vehicle from the future.  What made the event even nicer was that the organisers had thoughtfully put the puppetry people next to each other so our next door neighbour was Mark Whitaker from Horse + Bamboo with his wonderful Chinese glove puppet show “Festival”.  We had seen Mark perform this fabulous show at Skipton Puppet Festival previously.

CLICK HERE to see photo’s from the “Lancashire Encounter” Facebook page.

 

And speaking of Skipton Puppet Festival – This was on the following week (2nd-4th October) and Mark was doing “Festival” again when we visited Skipton to check out all the shows.

Having seen him perform it about 20 million times the week before we decided to concentrate on enjoying the other shows that were on offer at Skipton.  You can see some of the things we enjoyed in the photo’s above.

We also took the opportunity to go and see Indigo Moon perform their “Jungle Book” show which was absolutely fabulous and used a lot of clever, modern shadow puppetry techniques.  I was particularly interested to watch the techniques Anna Ingleby uses because she is a solo puppeteer in their shows.  Haviel Perdana does all the sound and lighting etc. but only Anna does the puppeteering.  It is tempting to think that less can be done in a show if one has less puppeteers but Anna certainly does not leave the audience short-changed in their performances.  There was enough going on to keep an audience of both young and old enthralled for a whole hour and everyone was invited to see the puppets and scenery afterwards and ask questions too.

We also visited Indigo Moon’s “Minster Monster” shadow puppet installation which was very interesting and used “monsters” from Beverley Minster as inspiration.  What was especially impressive was that the display was still in good working condition despite being left for people to play with unsupervised for extended periods of time!

I was also particularly pleased to have the opportunity to see “Kabaret de Poche” having seen their website including videos of the show and a fun origami mouth instruction video!

My next post shall tell you all about our trip to Lincolnshire to perform our “Alice in Wonderland” show at Wolds Words Festival, our visit to London to teach shadow puppetry to 1st year puppetry students at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and a visit to a primary school in Middlesbrough to make hand and string puppets!

In the meantime if you are needing some last minute Christmas entertainment please CLICK HERE to check out our Christmas Shows! 🙂

Rough Magic Theatre “Lights Up the Streets” of Lancaster

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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I had a lovely time performing my two shadow puppet suitcase shows “Jabberwocky!” and “Edward Lear’s Nonsense” at the “Light Up the Streets” event in Lancaster on Friday.

I had created light up hat decorations, (using my new top hat that I bought from a stall at Glastonbury Festival) and a light up buttonhole decoration specially for this event.  It was a bit of a challenge working out how to illuminate my costume for the event.  I couldn’t use anything that would catch on the shoulder and waist straps of the suitcase when I take them on and off and I couldn’t use anything so bright that it would interfere with the lighting for the shadow play by creating multiple shadows.  I think the overall effect, (using a combination of battery operated fibre optics and miniature fairy lights) was very attractive and worked very well.  I did get a number of compliments on my hat 🙂

I did my performances in the area between Lancaster Castle and The Storey Institute.

When it rained (a lot) I retreated inside the Storey and did a few performances in there for the wet and bedraggled audiences who swarmed inside to escape the weather.

I think people appreciated that they weren’t missing out on the entertainment by coming indoors.

Altogether it was a fantastic and friendly atmosphere and the rain did not dampen people’s spirits.

A big thank-you once again to Tim Austin for taking photographs of the show and generally helping out.  And a big thank-you to George Harris and The Duke’s for the use of their lovely dressing room, (quite a treat for a street performer).  And thank-you to all my audiences for turning out in the wet.