Category Archives: Jabberwocky

…More Skipton Puppet Festival!!!!

Posted on by Collette Knowles
Reply

Do the funky chicken!

What I didn’t get chance to say in my last post is what a grand job, (once again!) Liz and Daniel Lempen did of organising and running the festival.  Not only was it as good as two years ago, it was even better!

This year a new element was added to the festival, and that was a Puppet Parade!  Annoyingly, I did not know about this till late on, so our giant Jabberwocky, (as seen on Home Page Header at Blackpool Puppet Festival) did not get an outing to Skipton.

Thingumajig from Todmorden, made a huge contribution to this parade, making lovely giant sheep in workshops with the public and a sheepdog costume as well.  A whole plethora of interesting things taken from the handmade parade at Todmorden also made an appearance.  These included giant hens and their chicks, led by a stilt walking cockerel, (Andrew Kim).  He chivvied the sheep along, as well as encouraging the large numbers of the public who lined the route to do funky chicken dancing.  And not forgetting the beautiful silk painted phoenix like firey birds as well.

Wow!

There was more community involvement from locals waving large colourful flags and many colourful cellophane birds and butterflies made in workshops with John Parkinson from Upfront Puppet Theatre.

There were also two great local bands, one at the front doing fantastic funky tunes and one towards the back that was a very high quality Samba percussion band.  I used to be in a Samba band so I should know!

And wishing not to forget anyone, i believe giant Punch, Judy and Baby from Walking Tall Theatre Co. were also there and some large but rather unusual looking constructions from London School of Puppetry.  …And of course the Town Crier!

It was amazing what huge numbers of cars got backed up around Skipton Town Centre for this, and it was a Sunday!  But, no doubt in the past a market town like Skipton would be undisturbed by sheep and chickens in the high street!  The fact that the parade was hugely appreciated by locals was shown by the huge numbers of pedestrians lining the route and following the parade.

"Does my bum look big in this?"

I believe the parade and indeed the festival would not have been possible without the help of large numbers of able local volunteers.  Not only did they steward the parade in their Hi-Vis jackets but one kind lady provided, entirely out of the goodness of her heart, home-made ginger flap-jack and chocolate cake on top of the existing refreshments provided for the artists in the “rest tent”.  What more can one ask for?

For those who have read the previous post about Urashima Taro by Rouge 28.  Aya Nakamura tells me that there was only her on the stage, and all of the shadow scenes were projected to make things easier, though they had been done live in early performances of the show.

Edward Lear Again…

Posted on by Collette Knowles
Reply
Edward Lear's "The New Vestments"

Gok Wan, eat your heart out!

Some of you may be wondering what is happening with my new shadow puppet suitcase show, “Edward Lear’s Nonsense”.

Just to confirm, this brand new show will be appearing at the Skipton Puppet Festival in September 2011.

As the Vischmarkt Papierentheater Festival is in June I shall obviously be mainly concentrating on that first. In the meantime, however for all of you shadow puppetry fans out there here’s a few things to be thinking about.

The shadow puppet in the picture is made in a different way to the majority of my previous shadow puppets. In order to show the detail of the different foods that the “Old Man”‘s costume is made of, I felt a lot of cut out detail, with pieces of coloured lighting gel would be the best way to show what the character is wearing, which is in fact the main subject of the story.

As my shadow screen is very small, I shall have to show close up detail of individual bits of the man’s clothing one at a time as they are introduced so that the audience can really see what they are made of.

Something that is much on my mind with relation to this new show is music. In my other suitcase show “Jabberwocky!” I composed a tune specially to fit in with the poem which I sing, live as an accompaniment to the puppets movement. I think that many people like this musical element of the show in particular and it is something a bit different and special in comparison to other puppet shows I have seen.

However, thanks to the Puppet Centre Trust, a few years back I did a very good voice workshop for puppetry professionals. I used a section of the Jabberwocky poem to practice story telling and different ways of using the voice and it was possible to inject a lot of drama and interest into the words through speaking rather than singing the words. It is possible that attempting to impose a repeating verse type tune on the words of Lear’s poem would remove some of the drama and meaning from the words and possibly make it less easy for the audience to pick out the words in the first place. Considering that a lot of people are not familiar with the poem, “The New Vestments” it is especially important that the audience be able to hear every word so they can follow the story.

I have now got the potential to use recorded music and sound effects for the show as I have recently purchased a very neat, very portable P.A. system suitable for use with the shadow suitcase.

So now I am going to turn the idea over to you my faithful blog readers, who thinks that I should attempt to put the poem to a tune and sing it, and who thinks I should use background music, percussion or sound effects and speak the poem in a dramatic way? Please vote now! And if you haven’t voted on my previous poll regarding the name of this new show, please vote on that one too.