If you have been wondering if I’ve fallen down a deep well for the last few weeks, due to the lack of fresh news on my blog, then you’d be wrong.
What I have in fact been doing, (amongst other things) is making the costumes you see in the photos above. These are for the “Feast of St. George” GLA Festival. I shall be doing my “Jabberwocky!” shadow puppet suitcase show in Trafalgar Square on Saturday the 20th of April between 1 and 6pm. Click HERE for news article.
I will wear the St. George themed costume for this event but the medieval dress costume can be used for performing the “Jabberwocky!” show at any other medieval themed events. We can also use it for one of the new children’s party ideas we are working on.
This is the first performance I am doing through the street arts agency Continental Drifts and also my first performance in London. It will be interesting to see how (if at all) the London audiences differ from audiences elsewhere in the country. I was very amused, when I was in London once, that a local was puzzled by my Northern accent and asked if I was from Scandinavia!
The “Jabberwocky!” show is, of course, perfect for St. George’s Day because it involves the slaying of a big nasty monster by a brave hero with a sword. The singing that I do in the show also has the feeling of a medieval folk ballad about it.
The journey is going to be suitably epic as we will be departing from Lancaster by Megabus at 3.20am and arriving back at 2.05am the next day. It is not as bad as it sounds, because we should be able to have a snooze on the bus. A gallant knight, (in the form of my husband, Tim) is coming too and will hopefully be able to take some photos during the day. Wish us luck on our arduous quest! I shall report back on how it went in my next blog post.
I have also finally got confirmation of what shows we will be doing at Mintfest this year in Kendal. We are very pleased to be presenting our fabulous “Fred Fettler’s “Pony 3000” – The Transport of the Future!” show. This was originally commissioned and performed in High Bentham as part of “My Last CARnival” last year. We will be doing the show on the 31st of August and the 1st of September 2013 there will be more details as and when they become available on the “Where You Can See Me” page.
We shall also be doing a new show for Child Safety Week at the end of June. We have been doing a lot of negotiations with a publisher to see if we can secure permission to do a show based on a famous modern children’s book and we hope to be able to tell you more about that very soon.
Both myself and fellow Rough Magic Theatre performer Tim Austin attended Mintfest in Kendal as X-Trax Delegates. This gave us the opportunity to tell lots of very useful people like festival bookers etc. about our work and the shows that we do. We also got to meet lots of fellow artists and performers and of course to see the shows at the festival.
Sometimes it can be quite hard to get a chance to see fellow performers work if you are always performing at the same festivals and this was a great opportunity to see what other people are doing.
We saw “Frolicked” do their new show “The Alchemist” which is apparently their first static puppetry show. Up until now they have been concentrating on strolling puppet characters, (and of course their recent foray into interactive performance/gaming “The Birds”). It was very accessible being largely without spoken words, but relied on the written word for a lot of the plot/jokes, (e.g. identical spray bottles saying respectively “No Fly” and “Grow Big”). Overall it was very light, charming and gently amusing and of course the puppets were beautifully made. It seemed quite short to me, but then that can be better for children. It would have been good to have had more audience reaction to the antics of the rats, (after the style of crocodile stealing Mr. Punch’s sausages)but I don’t know if that was more to do with the audience itself or the style of the performance.
The Fire Village Royale by Der Vurmeesters was the highlight, for me. This was in spite of the pervasive soaking drizzle on the Friday night when we went to see it. It was like a sort of medieval, magical, firey village full of various odd characters interacting with fire and fireworks in various ways. One lady liked to rest her feet in a water trough periodically before manipulating it so that the whole length of the trough burst into flames. Another fairy like person who was a guardian of a metal gate (which was set on fire)liked to do hula-hooping and (yes, you’ve guessed it) the hula hoop was also on fire! Between the sort of “set pieces” which were cordoned off, various people wandered backwards and forwards, some on marvellous bicycles and some on foot. The most spectacular was a man in a mask that sat on top of his head,( so he appeared extra tall). He was in the habit of setting his head on fire so it was just a firey skull and also had a firey sword.
After being presented with sparklers by an excitable Alchemist looking chap, we were rather alarmed when the firey headed man decided to walk straight at us. We understandably backed away, but then he presented his sword for us to light our sparklers from. I don’t think I would have enjoyed it half as much if that hadn’t happened. It made us feel really part of what was going on, rather than just being a spectator.
There was also a body puppet which was entirely on fire, which I assume was a metal structure with fire rope attached, and this figure was controlled by the walking motion of the operator who was at least a metre behind the burning figure. You can see it in the video below. The music and beautiful lanterns also contributed greatly to the magical atmosphere.
As this is meant to be a puppet-centric blog I have mentioned the two main events with puppetry that we saw, not forgetting Squashbox‘s Dinosaur puppet and a cave-man humanette for their “Stones & Bones” show. A very amusing little show which was remarkable for the amount included in a one man show. Craig Johnson, the performer coped heroically well with the incredible amount of bad-mannered people who decided that it was okay to try and get past by squeezing their way through his backstage area, (no innuendo intended). He used the old favourite joke, “It’s just a stage they’re going through”. Also ironically one elderly lady emerged from the set just as Craig had promised to produce a dinosaur from behind the scenes!
Although I saw an incredible amount of fantastic theatre and enjoyed the festival tremendously, Tim and myself found ourselves getting increasingly frustrated and angry about the behaviour of some of the audience members( both adults and children). Hardly any parents were exerting any influence on their children to keep them safe and out of the performers way during dangerous acts, or to stop them misbehaving and causing danger to the performers by throwing things into the performance area, or to stop them standing up and moving around constantly and blocking other people’s view. Then there were the adults, as aforementioned who hadn’t any problems with walking straight through people’s performance spaces while they were actually in the middle of a performance. It all seemed to indicate a lack of concern for others which was somewhat disheartening to see. Some parents, (and I have heard from other performers that this is not unusual) were actually encouraging their children to hit Artizani’s giant inflatable lobster which was perambulating about Abbot Hall Park.
One could argue that it was a sign of the success of the festival that it encouraged those not used to the conventions of theatre to experience good quality performance, and maybe this is simply a feature of any street arts festival on this scale. On the other hand that doesn’t mean that I have to condone this kind of behaviour or to like it. If you have any opinions or experiences of this kind of behaviour or anything else in the post, please leave a comment 🙂
We now have video footage of our popular Shadow Puppet Suitcase show “Jabberwocky!” on our website, click HERE to take a look! This show is available for Halloween events this year and we have a variety of other options available for Halloween as well, (please ask!)
Don’t forget you can see us at “That’s the Way to Do It” festival in Redcar, on Sunday doing our “Alice” show and introducing the strange monster that lives in the Rough Magic Theatre shed. See the WHERE YOU CAN SEE ME page for more details.
If you’ve noticed I haven’t mentioned the Kendal Mint Cake, take a look here to see more about Richard Dedomenici’s attempts at building a full sized Kendal Mint Cake igloo.
Puppet Lady 